Aaaand… scene.

It’s done, it’s over, and I think I can fairly call the year a success. I didn’t screw the pooch in December, coming in at under 20 ‘frivolous Internet Minutes’ per day. I didn’t bother recording my time on the 30th or the 31st really – nothing last minute or alarming was showing up and I won’t be using a time tracker in the same way from the 1st of January anyway. Plus I wanted to actually start getting these posts out at the start of the month rather than the end, which means writing them before the month is actually over. Today it’s the 30th of December, and this is the state of play:

It’s a little bit more generous than it should be, since it counts today as an active day and it’s genuinely not – it’s basically a touch past midnight, and so it shouldn’t be included in the divisor. But also, looking through the sites that got recorded in the month there’s maybe twenty minutes of sanctioned activity to carve out of the stats. So let’s call it even. The next step is to shift back into a ‘Non Unplug’ mindset, and that’s hopefully going to result in some real lasting changes in the way I engage with the Internet. Pretty much all the tools I outlined last month will stay in place – I’m happier than I was at the start of the year, but not at all confident that I’ve rewritten the mental pathways that lead me to spend so much time in the digital realm. I still need the training wheels – I might never be able to get rid of them.

It’s interesting to see the difference though between how I felt at the end of my first Depth Year (that I’d fixed something broken in myself) and at the end of Project Unplug (I am using external tools to route around what I suspect to be permanent psychological damage). Really Project Unplug has just highlighted to me the sheer power of the Internet and how we have wrapped it around our civilization like a slumbering python. I think we made a mistake there. I think the Internet is at its best when it’s an appliance – like your washing machine, or your dishwasher. Life changing, largely positive, provided you don’t spend every waking hour staring into its hellworthy depths.

I think what I want, over time, is to get back the Internet of my youth. An Internet that wasn’t on every device, but was on one single device in the living room. A thing you had to carve out time to interact with, and then disconnected and went on your merry way. I’m not outlining a challenge or anything here with that. I’m just saying. Anyway, I’m not outlining a ‘Internet in the Living Room Only’ challenge or anything but I think it’s what I want as the end-game of my engagement with the online world. I think maybe I want to feel boredom again. Boredom is an immensely effective spur to activity, and easy access to the Internet has killed it even if most of what we engage with it pointless and trivial. As Mark Fisher once said, ‘No-one is bored, but everything is boring’.

As an aside, I have also decided to stop saying ‘I set myself a personal challenge’ and start saying ‘I swore an oath’. It sounds way cooler. ‘I swore an oath to disconnect from the Internet’. ‘I swore an oath to slay my backlog’. Yeah, I like the way that sounds.

Having stripped all social media off of my phone, it makes public transport a bit more challenging to navigate. I can’t just start up Facebook and pass the time in idle distraction. My phone rarely leaves my pocket now, and I spend more time just looking around, or out of the window, immersed in my own thoughts. And let me tell you – when you look around at people who are ’at rest’ about 90% of them are staring into their own personal nightmare rectangles for about 90% of the time. It’s alarming really how much we’re in the grip of the online world. It feels, for me, a bit like one of those horror movies where you’re the only one who can see the alien parasites that have wormed their way into everyone you know.

I’m not saying here that I feel like I’m better than anyone else. I know if I let myself I’ll slide right back into all the things that I have worked so hard to escape. ‘I’m off Twitter’ is something you hear people saying, and they disappear for a month or two before they slink back. The Pull is exceptional. The Internet wants your attention. It needs your attention. It will whine at you to get it.

Not only did I remove most of my apps from my phone, I also switched off notifications for everything. I made that intentional choice, and yet half of my apps – when I start them up – will essentially beg for me to enable those notifications again. I can’t say ‘No, and bugger off forever’. I can just fend them off as part of a permanent battle for control of my own attention. The Internet, and its associated architecture, is user hostile. It hates anyone that doesn’t understand that their job is to be a receptacle for whatever shit is sent their way. At the end of Project Unplug I feel like I understand how much of a victim we all are in the attention economy. As of the current moment though I don’t see many support groups that aren’t mediated by our shared, omnipresent abuser.

And leaving that aside, even attempts to ‘protect’ us have been so heavy handed that they just made everything worse. Websites don’t just want your immediate attention. They want a god-damned long term relationship. To simply navigate to a page and read it now often requires dismissing three or four modal dialogs. One for the inevitable cookies, one that tries to guilt me into removing my ad-blocker, one that tries to get me to sign up for a newsletter, and perhaps one that then says ‘Sorry, you can’t read this page until your subscribe’. I remember a time when you went to a website and read its contents if they were interesting. That was it. You didn’t need to fill out a three page prenup for what was essentially a one-night stand.

The final summation of Project Unplug then is basically another oath. I swear that I will never let myself be controlled by the Internet again. This may be an oath it takes the rest of my life to fulfil.

Depth Year 2022

There’s virtually nothing new to report here – this was never really in any doubt for me. Depth Year 2022 is over, and it was successful. I did make some purchases after Christmas, but (almost) nothing that will be here until January and that was an intentional choice. Some of these are books for the next challenge, some are books for a paper I want to write in the next couple of months, some are TTRPGs for evaluation. That’s it.

I like the cleanse that comes from a Depth Year, and I will probably do another one in the future. It’s a chance to catch-up as well as to give your synapses a little bit of a rest. Depth Year 2025 – yeah, why not?

As to the gaming backlog – it remains at zero, and I only completed a single game in December. Gamedec, and it was – it was fine. I did rack up quite a lot of additional hours on Vampire Survivors though.

So, here are the final stats:

• 116 games completed, with 11 asterisks (soft and hard) for a total of between 105 and 114 completions (depending on how rigorously you interpret the chal… the oath)
• Average game length is 14.97 hours (Vampire Survivors really nudged this upwards), with a median game length of 10 hours
• I have spent 1737 hours completing games (doesn’t include time spent on games that I later abandoned), which works out to 33.49 hours a week. A total cost of 72.37 days.
• I completed 2.24 games every week.
• The average rating I gave a game was 3.35 stars, with a standard deviation of 0.97.
• For every game I abandoned, I completed 2.39 others.
• My backlog stands at zero games.

As per Steam Replay:

Suck it, rest of the Steam Community.

It feels great though to no longer have a backlog. It feels like a weight is lifted. I am going to make an effort to never have one again – and since I have my ‘three out, one in’ rule since Depth Year 2019 I think I can achieve it. I do have ‘credits’ for 32 games as part of this depth year, and I have ‘administratively’ spent 25 of them – which is to say, I added them to a spreadsheet of planned purchases. Of those, eight haven’t come out for PC yet. Provided I’m sensible and ‘drip feed’ these to myself over time, this is a budget that can sustain me for at least a couple of years (since when I complete these, it’s another ten credits). I calculated that I have completed seventy-two games a year over the past three years, with 2021 (twenty six games) being a control year without an oath to drive me. It’s at least a year and a half, in other words, before I need to think about running out of credits.

I’m freeeeeeeeeee.

The Upcoming Challenge

That just leaves the cha… oath for 2023. This is what I swore on Facebook:

So, having completed my three personal projects of 2022 (pretty much), now it’s time to outline my personal challenge of 2023. As always, this is an exercise in accountability – I post it here so that I can’t easily weasel out of it.The thing that has suffered the most over the past three years is my reading. So this year I intend to address that. My challenge to myself is to read at least a book a week – 52 books in 2023. But also, looking at my stats for reading it’s clear I read many, many more books by men than I do by women. I want to correct that imbalance. So…

In 2023 I will read at least fifty-two books by women authors.

The original plan was to read books *only* by women authors but I’m not sure that’s feasible. There are books I need to read for work and for papers and the like. But in circumstances where I need to read about a particular *topic* rather than read a specific book, I will seek out a book on the topic by a woman author. Any books I read by male authors won’t count towards the challenge but they will obviously count in the, well, count. As in, I might read 52 books in a year, two of which were by male authors. In that case, I have failed my 2023 challenge.

Looking forward to this one, because many of you (and many on Ex Libris) gave me a fantastic set of suggestions! 

But the thing is – that doesn’t really leave much to talk about here. You’ll get the reviews, as usual, in the Patron newsletter. Here I can talk about the process, selection of books, maybe the struggle to find books by women authors on topics I want to read about (currently – hauntology). That doesn’t strike me as a substantive topic for journaling.

So I’m also going to have a secondary cha… oath. One just for you folks. Except it’s not really going to be an oath, because really this is preparation for the oath in the year to follow.

I did think out loud a while ago in one of these posts about completing my board game library, which is the challenge I was thinking I might run alongside the reading oath. I decided against it because honestly I think that’s too much to do in a year, given how many unplayed games I have. But I do want to lock my collection down to the point that it is the purest, best quality version of what it can be. That will involve getting rid of a lot of games that don’t make the cut (once they’ve been played and assessed) as well as perhaps buying some to plug up ‘gaps in the literature’.

My game collection is not just for fun – it’s also a ‘reference library’ from which I draw game design insights and examples. As such, I’m not looking to find the combination of boxes that have the optimal rating. I’m not looking to make a ‘five star game library’ – which is handy, because there are only three five-star games I’ve ever reviewed for the site. But I am looking for the minimum quality to be at least four stars, and for that collection to have full coverage across the spectrum of game styles, themes and mechanisms. And when I get that, I want to essentially freeze it in carbonite, where new games enter it only on the basis of them offering something genuinely new. To be honest, I suspect that to happen perhaps… once every four years?

(As an aside, my reading around hauntology is partially about this)

The problem though is – I am nowhere near ready to being able to say how good all the games I own are. My shelf of shame is the next thing I really feel the need to tackle, but that requires the availability of other people. I can’t commit to that in a year, but I can commit to getting the problem down to the point it’ll likely be achievable within a year.

So, that’s what these entries will become in 2023:

• Commentary on the literature I am reading in 2023, and how it was selected. Reviews will remain in the newsletters.
• Updates on The Great Cardboard Culling – where I am with the todo list, the progress I’m making, and musings on what makes an ideal game collection.

On the plus side, this should also prod me to actually make some progress on resurrecting the site proper. It’s high time.

Thanks all, see you hopefully next month.