So, we’re a little late with this post again this month but that’s because it was so late last month that it had ‘scheduling impact’. I’ll try to get back to the usual approximate Patreon post schedule of ‘the first week of the month, there or thereabouts’ but bear with me. Teaching starts again in a couple if weeks…
Anyway, let’s get to the meat here.
I said in the last post that I was going to shift to a new model for this, and I did. Gone is the whitelist approach, and it’s been replaced with a blacklist approach. But it’s also a bit more flexible in that I’m using Cold Turkey now as a time limiter for sites that I think I need to keep up with but not get lost within. I couldn’t work out a way to get Facebook to be usable on a mobile device, for example. So the compromise solution is ‘it’s on my computer, but with a quota’.
I have four separate categories of site that are managed via Cold Turkey now:
- The Blacklist, which has no quota and operates 24/7. These sites are just permanently blocked. This is on top of the hosts level blocking I have done since 2021. This combo approach covers Twitter, Reddit, every news site I find myself frequenting. But it also now includes ‘deals sites’ which tell me about cheap video games. I’m not buying them, so no need to tempt myself.
- Video Games, for which I have a 5 minute allowance per day. Sites in here are Kotaku (I know, but even the mad fringes of the gaming world are important for my job), Rock Paper Shotgun, Nintendo Life, PC Gamer and other sites of that nature. Five minutes is enough for me to browse the headlines and put anything meaningful into Pocket.
- Board Games, which is also a five minute allowance a day. It’s been ages since I tracked any board game media. I basically have zero faith in its ethical integrity. This category covers stuff like Boardgamegeek (for collection management rather than anything else) as well as board game shops.
- Facebook, which is a category of its own. This works seven days a week but in two twelve hour blocks, each of which has a five minute allowance. So that gives me a maximum of ten minutes per day, but broken up into a slightly more nuanced schedule.
I am now using a different time tracker, mainly because I couldn’t find the other one after I uninstalled it (before realising I still wanted a tracker). It’s prettier, but not quite so flexible in that it doesn’t retroactively remove whitelisted sites from its tracking. I only want it for tracking my usage on sites that I consider to be a problem, so perhaps during a month I’ll say (as I have) ‘Wikipedia is fine’. You’re stuck with all the historical time tracking it did though – it just doesn’t add any more – and thus it’s not quite as sophisticated as I’d like. Sites only rarely get added to that exclusion list though so it’s a problem that will resolve itself with time. For now though, my stats are skewing high.
So, what happened when I moved to this approach?
You’ll be amazed…
… a massive increase in the time I spent browsing the Internet. Doh. I went from about thirteen minutes a day in June to fifty-four in July. That’s still massively down from the three hundred minutes per day I was tracking in 2021, but still more than I would like. I’ve decided thirty minutes of ‘unproductive’ Internet time is plenty for a day, and that’s my target. So, I need to carve almost half an hour out of my usage.
But it’s not quite as bad as all that. This is the list of sites and how long I spent on them:
I only tracked from the middle of the month, but that was enough to fine tune the approach for August. Of the sites listed, several I decided to whitelist because I didn’t feel like they were a problem. Others were temporary anomalies.
- Wikipedia, which while far from a grown-up encyclopaedia, is not actively harmful. I might even say it is mildly ‘value positive’, but no more harmful than ‘value neutral’.
- Amazon and SFBok (our local game shop) was mostly linked to some games I was looking to buy for student induction at work. A temporary spike related to non-depth year related purchasing.
- SMHI is the weather, and that’s value positive.
- Bauhaus, Clas Ohlson, and Blitema are all DIY shops (to one extent or another) and their heavy presence was linked to buying things like paint and equipment for some summer DIY projects. They won’t reoccur in the same way.
- Spotify is my constant background noise, so it’s whitelisted now. Google Mail and Google Meet are ‘work related’ so they’re whitelisted. And UPS is related to a typically UPS-related incompetence so again – an anomaly.
Many of the other sites are now grouped into the quotas of Cold Turkey and so they have shared maximum contributions they will make to my online usage. This is what I wanted the time tracker for – to see where my time goes and whether I want it going there. Looking at this list and removing the sites that have been ‘dealt with’ in one way or another loses over four hours from these stats (about 270 minutes), which carves fifteen minutes off the time in terms of what is typical versus what was observed. Still more than I want to be spending in casual Internet use but lowering that to half an hour is certainly an achievable goal for August. I mean, I got down to five minutes in May. But hitting thirty minutes when the Internet is just there, man is a harder goal. I think. We’ll see!
Anyway, I am still in a much happier place than I was in 2021 with regards to how much time I spend staring into my nightmare rectangles. If I can hit a sustainable average of thirty ‘unproductive’ Internet minutes per day by the end of December 2022 I’ll consider this project successful. Less would be better, of course, but like any genuine behaviour-breaking process it’s important to ensure it doesn’t require constant, repeated application of willpower. It should feel effortless.
We’ll see how it goes next month!
Depth Year 2022
Again, I have very little to report here. I did buy a few games, but they are to make sure the money you kindly contribute to the site is spent on accessibility research and not on paying the taxman. Aside from that, nothing new in the way of media has entered my house.
I am still making excellent progress on bringing my video game ‘virtual shelf of shame’ under control. You know from previous newsletters that I’m aiming to complete one-hundred games this year and that requires a pace of just under two games per week. At the end of July I had hit seventy-five completed games and had brought the necessary remaining pace to within spitting distance of a game a week. My pace over the first seven months of 2022 has been almost two and a half games per week – completions, remember – and I’ll admit it’s been exhausting. A game a week by comparison is almost leisurely at this point.
I said a couple of months ago that I’d been kind of disappointed by the games I’d been playing because very few of them were interesting enough or good enough to really be worth talking about. That position has changed a bit since then. I’ve played some genuinely exceptional games – special mention goes out to Dead Rising 4, Sleeping Dogs (the first new 5/5 game of 2022), Sniper Elite 3, Yakuza 0 and Inside. Each of those games are new to me and also excellent. I’ve also played a number of new interesting games. 198X for example is thought-provoking in how it’s put together even if it’s not a very good game. I’ll talk more about them as we go through the Patron newsletters for the year.
For those who are interested in incredibly geeky stats:
- Average completed game length is 14.37 hours
- Median completed game length is 9 hours
- Average star rating is 3.39
- I have spent a total of 1078 hours in 2022 playing through my backlog
- That is an average of 33.68 hours a week, which makes it almost a second full-time job
- For every game I abandon, I complete 2.15 others.
- I have earned a total of 73.5 ‘credits’ according to my ‘three out, one in’ system
I spoke a while ago about how I was recategorizing my Steam games to better reflect the sense of guilt I should have about not playing them. My immediate playlist (the games that I will select the next game to play from) remains stable at fifteen entries. When I complete one, I move another in from the ‘long term playlist’. That latter list now has a svelte 47 games on it. I likely won’t get it down to zero in 2022 unless I start abandoning games more freely but it will be down to the point I don’t need to feel overwhelmed by the games that I should have played. It should, if all things go to plan, be down to maybe 15 or so by the end of the year. Natural erosion of ‘three out one in’ will then eventually bring it down to zero.
Of course, in 2023 I then need to go into Humble Choice and unlock all the games I got through 2022 but I doubt many of them will make it into the long term playlist. And of course, I will likely have about 33 games I can buy through the three-out-one-in system but I can dole them out more mindfully.
It’s about this time in the year that I start thinking about the next and what challenge I’m going to set myself. And I think at least one part of it is obvious – I am reading so little these days that I need to bring myself back into balance. I think I’m going to aim for a book a week – I’ve only actually managed to do that one year, but it’s always been a generic aspiration rather than a specific challenge. This time I want to aim for book reading as methodically as I am dealing with my game backlog.
But I’ve also been thinking – more relevant to you folks – that it might be time to complete my board game collection.
The word ‘complete’ there is important – I don’t mean that it’s time for me to buy hundreds of games for all occasion. What I mean is that it is time to lock my collection down so that it simply doesn’t change – or at most, changes on a glacial basis. We’ve reached the point in the board game industry that the video game industry had hit ten or so years ago. It’s no longer an industry where creativity thrives. Maybe it never was – maybe I over-estimated the average annual innovation simply by the fact I only really experienced it after it has been accumulating for literal decades. I’ve said this a number of times before but it feels like most of the experimentation has gone out of the hobby and we’re stuck with endless rehashes of the same safe designs and themes. Those games that do push the envelope a little rarely get rewarded with the kind of commercial success needed to sustain creativity. In terms of what’s come out in the last – say, four years – I can count the number of games that genuinely excited me on the fingers of a single hand. Games are, on average, better than they’ve ever been. But that’s come at the expense of the standard-deviation within which games used to exist. If every game is 3 stars it’s less interesting, to me at least, than if half the games are one star and the other half are five.
The state of play (lol) is bad for those of us that thirst for design genius (because it gives us interesting things to talk about in lectures, for example). It’s great though from my perspective for two reasons. One – I’m not tempted to break my depth year. The second reason is more pertinent to 2023. It means there’s never been a better time to lock down my shelves in an (almost) permanent constellation.
But there’s a problem! Of course there is, because otherwise we wouldn’t be thinking of this as a challenge.
My shelves operate on a one-in-one-out basis. In order for something to go in, it has to displace something else. And the aesthete in me wants the thing that goes in to be the same box size as the thing that went out.
That’s probably too much to ask.
But I have a ridiculous number of games I own and have never played even once. As usual, I have spoken about this in other posts on the site, but if I am going to make an attempt to complete my collection as opposed to build my collection… well, I need to solve that issue.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
- Every game in my collection should be great at a minimum.
- Those that aren’t great should be fascinating
- As a game academic, it is necessary for my collection to be a working As such, it has to include a breadth of themes, mechanics and aesthetics.
- No two games should occupy the same niche in the design ecosystem, although I can make an exception if those two games have complexities in their comparison.
- There is a limited amount of space which I can devote to board games, specifically they need to find in the two bookcases that I currently use.
- I also have a wardrobe full of them but that’s going to be my ‘scratch pad’ – games that are in limbo.
- And of course, I have shelves at work…
So, I want to play every single one of my unplayed board-games and add/remove games to my shelves on the basis of where they fit into this system. And then when I have zero games in my ‘wardrobe of shame’, I decide on which have permanently made the cut to be part of the Official Meeple Like Us Game Library.
The rest – well, I won’t actually get rid of them. They’ll go into work where they’ll become part of the circulating collection there.
Is this achievable in 2023?
Maybe not.
I’m not kidding when I say I have a ridiculous number of unplayed games. I made a list of them, and that list has seventy entries on it. If I never buy a new game, I can still play a game I own and have never played every week for more than a year.
I actually had an imaginary conversation with someone in my head this week. Yeah, I do that a fair bit. The conversation went something like this:
‘Wow, you’ve got a lot of board games. You must buy them almost constantly’
‘No, not really. I mean, yes there are 256 of them but you have to remember I built that up over about six and a half years’
‘So, you buy forty games a year?’
‘Wait, that can’t be right…’
‘More than three every single month?’
‘Oh my God.’
‘At least you’ve played them all though, yeah?’
‘I’d quite like to stop imagining this conversation now.’
(That’s not even counting the 143 that I have recorded in BGG as ‘used to own’ because that brings it to more than a game every week).
In order to be confident in a complete game collection, I need to have evaluated them all. And, of course, I should be reviewing them too. This project would also drive the content on MLU back to the level it’s being produced on an ongoing basis.
Can I do both of these projects at the same time – a book a week and a complete game collection? I don’t know. Maybe? Can I genuinely complete my game collection in a year when there’s so many other things to do and the pace at which I can get through games is group dependant? Probably not.
But as I say – if success were inevitable why would it be a challenge?
I don’t know. Maybe the whole idea of completing a collection is infeasible. Maybe it’s not even a good thing to aim for, as a games academic. It just feels ridiculous that I have games that I have owned for five or six years and never even set up for a session. I would like that to stop now, please. Thoughts welcome.
Anyway, thank you all once again for your time! I hope to see you next month!