Sisyphus' Steam Library Or: How I’m Trying to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Backlog

I’m about to turn 40 at the time of writing, and I’ve come to the horrid realisation that I will most likely never complete everything in my Steam library. I’m well aware that this is a horribly privileged First World problem, but nonetheless, it still irks me somewhat. This is a very personal article, so if you’re not interested in the ramblings of a middle-aged man, then you might want to check out something else on the site. If you’re still with me, then let me tell you my epiphany and why I’m trying to come to terms with never really completing my backlog.

At present, I have 914 games in my library on Steam, and I’ve played precisely zero hours for 686 of them, with another 68 currently below one hour played. In contrast though, I’ve lost over 400 hours over 2023 to Baldur’s Gate 3, with multiple trips to the credits. Given that I’ve had a Steam account for over 15 years now, and given that my diet and lifestyle don’t really suggest an above-average lifespan is likely, I’m probably about a third of the way through the time I’ll have to play games on it, and over 75% of the games I own are nearly or entirely untouched. Even if I don’t get anything else on Steam for as long as I live, I’ve still got some catching up to do here. Realistically though, I know that I’m unlikely to do that, and when I finally reach a point where playing games becomes impossible through either physical circumstance or mortality, the numbers aren’t going to be close to completion.

The first problem that I have can be expressed quite nicely by revisiting those Baldur’s Gate 3 numbers. At the time I write this, I’ve played for about 433 hours, and whilst I’ve seen a few endings, most of those are from save-scumming the dialogue options in the epilogue. In actual fact, I’ve completed a regular run and a Dark Urge run, and seen a few slightly different endings for both. Whilst it’s definitely true that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a pretty large game, one playthrough isn’t really 200 hours. I probably spent about 20-30 hours in each playthrough getting lost because I have no sense of direction. I’ve mentioned on these pages before about the time I got lost in Sonic Mania, and my lack of any kind of sense of direction is a real issue for completing games. I actually gave up on Starfield quite early on because the lack of city maps was too much for me, and I wasn’t enjoying it as a result.

It’s not just getting lost that makes games take longer for me; I am semi-obsessed with collectibles and in-world items. I have to find all the bobbleheads in Fallout 3, I must loot every vase in Skyrim, and I can’t leave a Jiggy uncollected in Banjo-Kazooie. You know that Rick and Morty skit of the guy on alien cable stealing office supplies? That’s me in every RPG ever. I guess it’s the fear of missing a really important item right at the beginning that I can’t go back for which means I end up grabbing everything just in case. I played a lot of Infocom and Sierra games in the earlier years of gaming, and they were notorious for having things you could miss right at the start of the game. If you don’t grab your toothbrush in the first few minutes of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then you’re screwed towards the end, for example. Intentionally missable stuff is usually avoided by game designers nowadays, but it’s still pretty common to find players locking themselves out of progression until a patch rolls around because a developer hadn’t considered every permutation of player actions.

Of course, my maths earlier was based on the library at a fixed point at the end of 2023, but that’s not how it will stay. Companies like Fanatical have a lot to answer for here, as one of the bigger sources of games I’ve never played comes from those that I don’t really know anything about, but came in bundles. I’ve discovered some crackers from this, but for every great game that has come with a bundle, there are another five that haven’t grabbed me from the description, so I’ve not even gotten around to installing them. I have no doubt my new favourite game is buried in that pile somewhere, but it feels like so much effort to sift through them that I never have. Add in the fact that I have to do boring things like work, feed myself, and bathe — there’s just no time for tackling unknown entertainment.

Which neatly leads me to another problem: sporadic time availability. There will be occasions when I’m just too busy with real life to game. These are the worst times, but they do happen. As I’m getting older, my capacity to remember important things is diminishing. As a result, if I’m out of a virtual world for a month because there was a big product launch at work, there’s no guarantee that I will actually remember what I was doing when I get back to it. For a lot of titles, this isn’t too much of an issue. If you forget what you were doing in Skyrim, for example, then you can just check the quest log — assuming it’s a quest of course — if you were just slowly filling Lydia’s room with cheese throughout the game, that won’t be listed. But don’t worry Lydia; I will never forget to deposit your cheese offerings when I return home. This isn’t something that you can do in every game, however, and some games just rely on you remembering what they told you to do. For this reason, I have never completed Final Fantasy VIII, despite describing it as my favourite game in the series. I’ve started it about ten times now since 1999, but I always end up having to take a break from playing for a bit and then forgetting where I was supposed to be going on my return. You’d think I would learn and write things like this down, but to think that is to underestimate my level of ineptness.

To sum up: I play games too slowly, acquire too many of them, and then forget what I was doing too frequently. It’s worth mentioning that I have ADHD; so many of these behaviours are partially a result of that, but ultimately, it’s just a facet of who I am as a person. I am coming to accept that I will never complete (or even start) the vast majority of my Steam library. I’m trying my hardest not to be ashamed of that, because I know that when it comes down to it, it’s only entertainment.

As a people, we’re always driven to try and achieve more, and to get numbers as high as they can go. I admire this about humans, but for every great achievement born out of this, there is an example of someone who flew too close to the sun and suffered the consequences. It’s wise to temper our aspirations, and in my case, that means accepting the low numbers. Looking through some statistics whilst trying to write this article seems to have helped. Learning that I have friends with just a few minutes played in big-ticket titles I actually have managed to complete like DOOM and Hitman made me realise that it’s far more common to never reach the end credits than I assumed. So if anybody is reading this and thinking “but what if I never finish Day of the Tentacle?”, just remember that there are many of us; you are not alone.