At the time of writing I’m sitting here at the departure gate in Landvetter airport outside of Gothenburg. For the first time in over two years, I’m going to see my mother back in Scotland. I have lost almost all of my ‘travel literacy’ and have spent my time mostly being bounced from checkpoint to checkpoint because I’m ‘too early’ to progress through the labyrinth. I had forgotten how profoundly dehumanizing the experience of flight is – one of nature’s genuine miracles made sullen and grubby as a result of procedural pantomime. My flight is delayed, my ever-so-convenient electronic boarding pass is stored on a phone which – thanks to the aforementioned checkpoints – is running worryingly low on battery power. I can’t say I have missed this experience.

But that’s not why you’re here – to listen to me whine about my first-world inconveniences. You’re here to find out about Project Unplug 2022. And here’s the thing – I think I’ve gotten everything I can out of the experience.

Before we get to that, let’s look at the stats. Last month I said I thought I could realistically drop from 25 minutes of non-work usage a day down to 20. Well, I actually managed a touch under 13 minutes and that seems like the realistic floor without losing sight of what the project was about. Of course, when I say ’13 minutes of Internet usage’ what I mean is ‘aside from the whitelisted sites and services that offer me genuine benefit’. That’s been true from the start though.

I treat my time on the Internet now like a timid mouse in the backyard of an angry cat. I dart in and out, nibbling at URLs before scampering away. I ration my time in seconds – I slip into BBC news and slip out again. I flicker over Facebook and away like a breeze. And while arithmetically it’s indisputable I only spent a very small period of time on the Internet… the truth is I probably haven’t cut down my usage since last month at all. All I’ve done is become more obsessive about tracking it and segmenting it. The result is that a minute of online time might actually represent six separate visits to a site spread out over an hour.

That doesn’t seem like a major improvement to me, if I’m honest.

But for the past month I’ve been wrestling with the stuff I spoke about in the previous newsletter– it just doesn’t feel like I’m getting all that much out of this over what I’d already set in place last year. It remains the case that this isn’t a chore for me but this is two months in a row where I’ve asked myself ‘What’s your end-goal here?’. At the end of the year, what would a win look like?

And realistically I’m not sure it looks any different to my experience in December 2021. I have found efficiencies for sure, but meaningful efficiencies? Probably not. I have a better feel I guess for what sites I resent appearing in my time-tracker and that’s something I can deal with through a more surgical intervention. For example, I think I should probably block BBC.com and GP.se at the host level because realistically they contain nothing that I can do anything about. The situation in Ukraine has been morbidly fascinating but it doesn’t translate into anything actionable. One of the smartest pieces of insight I’ve seen regarding online activity is ‘Anxiety isn’t activism’. I’m not anxious about the war in Ukraine – it’s pretty clear Russia isn’t the superpower it thought itself to be so that situation is going to resolve itself either in a begrudging peace deal; a long-drawn out insurgency against an occupying power; or a petulant nuclear apocalypse. None of those require any action on my part. And even the news from Gothenburg all feels removed from my interests. Local news doesn’t automatically translate into relevant news.

For this coming month I’ll be in Scotland with my laptop and that hasn’t been set up with my usual array of internet blocking sigils and protective charms. But also, I’m actually ‘working from home’ in Scotland. That’s not a skive or anything – I honestly have more to do than I have time to do it and most of my evenings will be spent making sure the EU grant I’m working on is submitted correctly and on time. I don’t anticipate, in other words, this technical freedom to translate into ‘time on the Internet’. We’ll see though – this is kind of a ’tested virtue’ opportunity. Let’s see if I can be trusted to spend my time wisely even when the computer isn’t forcing me.

I guess what I’m mostly saying is – next month may very well come with notice regarding the termination of Project Unplug 2022. Encouragingly it’s not because I couldn’t do it. Rather it’s because the preparation for the effort was really the most important and impactful part of the whole thing.

It all depends really on what happens in the next couple of weeks. Who knows – maybe this will be like an addict relapsing. If so, then Project Unplug is valuable and worth pursuing. If not, maybe I’ve already gotten what I’m going to get out of this whole weird experiment.

I’ll keep you posted.

Depth Year 2022

The Depth Year is, as it was last time, a more positive experience. It turns out that what I’ve been doing with all this new spare time (rescued from idle clicking between the same three sites all evening) is make a massive dent in my video game backlog. In fact, I fully expect this year to complete one hundred games if I keep up my current rate. The average length is a touch under twelve hours at the moment, so it’s not even as if I’m prioritizing (all that much) the quick and easy games that can be knocked off in an hour or so. But what’s interesting here is the legacy of the very similar game a week challenge I did a couple of years ago – there actually aren’t all that many games (in comparison to what has been the case historically) that I want to play. And so, I’ve taken an axe to this backlog to clear it into something that doesn’t feel like an obligation.

My first step here was to categorize. I took all my unplayed games and divided them into four categories:

Immediate playlist – the pool of games that I’m going to play within the next two months.
Long term playlist – the games in which I am generally interested but have no immediate plan to play.
Not currently interested – the games in which I am not generally interested but may develop an interest later. Often games move from this list to the other lists based on the feedback of other people.
Won’t Play – and this is the biggest innovation of my approach. Games on the Won’t Play list are ones I have assessed, perhaps tried out, but decided that they did not warrant any more thought. As far as I’m concerned, these games aren’t part of my backlog at all.

I’ve done this kind of thing before, but previously all I’ve done is subdivide the backlog. The Won’t Play category means I can reduce it without feeling guilty. This is almost entirely made up of games that have one or more of these traits:

They no longer work. For example, I spent a good half hour trying to get Driver San Francisco to function and just couldn’t, so it has been ‘assessed’ as unplayable on modern hardware. Or at least, unplayable within the time I’m willing to put in.
The UI conventions they use are too unpleasantly jarring. Unfortunately Tales of Monkey Island – an early Telltale game – fell into this category because the rapid and aggressive camera changes genuinely made me a little queasy.
They are primarily multiplayer. I tried a game called Absolver that seemed super cool – a kind of rich, vibrant martial arts simulator – but as soon as I got out of the training area I got kicked to death by some high-level yahoo waiting for newbies. I view games that are ‘primarily multiplayer’ the same way I view chemicals that are carcinogenic. I want them nowhere near me.
They came as part of a bundle and I have never heard of them, and I remain uninterested after I read their Steam blurb.

With this careful process of curation, I now have 15 games on the immediate playlist, a touch over 100 on the Long Term Playlist, 200 or so on the Not Currently Interested list, and another 200 or so on the Won’t Play list. And that means clearing my worthwhile backlog is very feasible within this depth year.

The idea of a backlog at all is kind of strange I guess, so maybe it’s worth talking about it. It’s a term that’s drawn from the patient gamer movement – it describes the unplayed games that weigh on a mind. Many dismiss the concept entirely, pointing out that a pressure to play games you don’t need to play is a pretty corrosive concept. But for me though, I see it differently. I’ve said this before, but in my job I need to play games the same way a literature professor needs to read books. They are the primary texts of my discipline and as such I need to be ‘well read’.

So it’s not okay for me, for example, to have never played Saints Row 4. I have now – it’s awesome – and now I can meaningfully situate it within a wider gaming landscape in relation to the Grand Theft Auto games. I can compare and contrast, and importantly offer context to students who want to explore games of this nature. I’m not just drawing from one lineage, I’m drawing from two. I had played the original Saints Row at the time of its release and largely dismissed the series as ‘inferior GTA clones’. That’s unfair in the modern frame of reference – Saints Row 4 is its own joyful, bombastic and lunatic thing. Now I know that.

I’ve been bemoaning the familiarity of chamber-based puzzle games because they all basically have one innovation and then all the same puzzles I’ve seen before. So when something like the Swapper comes along and surprises me… well, then I learn a bit more about game design than I knew before. There are puzzles in there that are fiendish and original and that was a joy to behold.

Many of you already know too that Depth Year 2019 included some broader changes in my approach to video games. Specifically the ‘Three In, One Out’ rule. Before I can buy a video game, I need to have built up credit by completing three other games. Games that I meaningfully evaluate (as in, play for a few hours before deciding they don’t merit the time to complete them) give me fractional credit. At this point in 2022 I already have 30 credits, which counts as 10 games. I started the year about 3 credits in debt, and I may end it about 100 credits in the black. I look forward to having a game library that has been mostly cleared out – it would be pretty wizard to never again feel the pressure of a backlog on my shoulders.

I think what’s likely to happen in the next few months is that Project Unplug comes to an end, and ‘Game to 100’ takes its place in these newsletters. In a certain respect you already get that – the Patron newsletters always include reviews of the games I’m playing – but they’re becoming gradually out of sync. I write reviews for every game but I don’t necessarily put them in the newsletter in the month they were written. That’s to smooth out content so that we don’t end up like – a few years ago – one newsletter being 2000 words and the next being 8000. But these updates here could actually be a little more synched up and look at broader notes and common themes. The risk is that giving up on Project Unplug 2022 will lead to me losing the time I am currently relying upon for my game backlog but I don’t think so.

Again let’s see how it goes this month.

As to changes to the wishlist – well, I completed four of the Blackwell point and click adventures games from Wadjet Eye. And they were good! Good enough for me to want to play the final one, which I don’t have. So, that’s on the list. And nothing else really has come off.

Thank you all for your support as ever, I’ll hopefully see you again next month.