Like basically everyone who has ever played a video game, I have a backlog. Technically multiple backlogs, if you count the unplayed games on consoles and various Non-Gamer Tech Devices like phones and tablets as separate from shit like Steam and Itch. But that sort of ever-present backlog exists, metaphorically at least, strapped to my back for all eternity. It very rarely grows smaller; it almost always gets bigger as I accrete more and more games that I think are neat and then just… never start up.
The Backlog stresses me out. I bought some of these games at different periods in my life, when my tastes were changing or before I even had any taste in video games. What I enjoy today isn’t even what I enjoyed playing six or seven years ago. The chances that I will actually go back and play something like Beat Hazard or Cogs are slim, no matter how good they are, because I’m just not… I’m just not into them, you know? And I hear all of the objections, from “okay but they’re actually good and you should give them a shot” to “why haven’t you gotten a refund for them then?” I need you to understand: you can’t make me do anything lmao. And at least on the question of refunds, I’m not refunding something I’ve owned for 15 years, that’s rude as hell. I wish I could resell the games, or at least even just give them away. I wish they were like physical CDs, or cassettes, or vinyls that I could haul to a record store and pass on to a future generation, make a couple hundred bucks, maybe spend an afternoon browsing the crates afterward.
The Backlog makes me feel guilty in a way that my music collection never has. And I wonder about this disconnect often. Because I haven’t listened to all the music I’ve ever owned or downloaded via a streaming platform like Apple Music or Bandcamp equally; some albums I’ve spent hundreds of hours drowning myself in, while other albums barely register on the tongue, having been things I’ve skimmed, maybe track-hopped on a few times. My music tastes have changed in similar ways to my video game tastes, but I can still go back and appreciate the musicianship or artistry of a particular band’s discography or a singular album after my tastes have “moved on.” I can dip into the nostalgia of remembering who and where I was when I listened to a song and it clicked on me for the first time. Listening to music is not a passive activity for me; it involves my body as intimately as – and maybe more than – video games do. I tap or stomp my foot to drumbeats and feel my arms and legs alight on a particularly fiery bassline. I am old and out of shape and my joints hurt and I get winded easily and so if I were at a show I’d be one of those dorks (laudatory) standing off to the side of the pit, head down and bobbing, arms crossed, feeling the music but not moving too quickly unless I want a date with IcyHot later. The music is still for me, but singing every word at the top of my lungs while the singer shoves their mic in your throat is for the youth.
I wish I could like video games the same way I like music. I like video games, don’t get me wrong. But it’s easier for me to describe what it is that I like about them than I can describe the ways music makes me feel at a cellular level. I can say I enjoyed a story or found a particular theme fascinating, or compliment a game’s aesthetic choices or mechanical ease or complexity. I can’t tell you exactly what it is about a game that compelled me to play it in the first place, what moved me to feel connected to the player-character as the finale drew to a close, what brought me to tears at pivotal parts, but it’s likely that many of those moments involved the game’s soundtrack. “Daredevil”s soaring chorus as you fatally disable the Arsenal Bird. “Apocalypsis Noctis” propelling you forward faster and faster as you move Noctis Lucis Caelum through Ifrit and Ardyn’s onslaught to bring an end to the Starscourge. Locking in and driving past your limits on a particularly difficult track against the backdrop of “Duct Tape, Take The Wheel” and finally earning the Author Medal. Fucking beating SUPER HEXAGON for the first time. Maybe the music didn’t make those moments for me by itself, but it helped.
Normally here’s where there’d be some kind of call to action, but I don’t know what to act on. In my mind and maybe my mind only, music is only ever welcoming and video games are always judgmental; I never feel bad about listening to new stuff or going back to old classics. But the moment I play a “guilty pleasure” game, I feel everything, old and new, looking at me expectantly like, “when will we finally be next?”
When I was younger and frequented more record stores, we’d used to cratedive for hours. Unless we had a specific album and artist in mind, there usually wasn’t a goal. Just find something you think you might like. Take the risk, expand your horizons, deepen your palate. I found a lot of goofy shit that way, I won’t lie, but I also found ANTISCHISM’s first LP, Still Life, that way. I found a tape of NOMEANSNO’s classic album Wrong on a cratedive. I found FUCKED UP – Hidden Worlds and NAKED RAYGUNS – All Rise that way. And maybe these weren’t all monumental albums, but they ended up meaning something to me. And I wish that my relationship with video games was similar.
Instead, it’s just me and the ever-growing Backlog.
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