Spacing Out: Getting Organized

I love video games. Love. Them. They’ve been a constant source of joy for most of my life, and we live in, what I feel, is a second golden age of PC gaming. There are just so many great games to choose from these days, and access to them has never been easier. Via sales, bundles, gifts, contests and so on, we can build a library of games that we’ll never have time to finish in our lifetimes, let alone play even a majority of the games.

That’s the pitfall I’ve fallen into. I love acquiring games, it’s like a meta game on its own. Bundles, sales and so on give me an easy way to get just about any game I’m interested, and I love having so much choice. There is a downside to too much choice, however:

On Steam, as I write this, I own 1,469 games. That doesn’t include non-DRM games, disk-based games, GOG-based games and so on that I also have installed on my hard drive. I’ve tried to organize things, but as you can see, even that has gotten a bit overwhelming. Sometimes I’d sit at my PC, ready to play a game, and have no IDEA how to go about choosing one. Again, I love having so much choice, but sometimes having all that choice is a bit much.

I therefore started to look for a way to pare this down further. Some external launcher or program that would allow me to select a portion of the games from those categories in Steam above and focus on them. Thankfully, I think I’ve found a solution in a program from Stardock called Fences. Observe:

This is what my desktop looks now now, organized into categories with a portion of each Steam category listed inside. This way, I can not only easily glance at the games I should focus on, but I can easily organize them as I need to to focus on what needs to be played first, like my top game rotation or games acquired from a recent sale that I need to play sooner rather than later, or games I really like and hope to play more of. This will allow my brain to wrap my head around what’s available to me in the short term, and I can add more games to these as I acquire them (which has slowed since I realized this was a problem) and remove them once I don’t feel they deserve to be on the desktop anymore. Therefore, my funnel is:

Acquisition -> Installation -> Organize on Steam Category -> Organize in Fence Category -> Play and promote, keep or remove

This should help me GREATLY in terms of knowing what I have to play available to me. Hell, I forgot I owned some of these games listed above, so it’s kind of a nice rediscovery of my own library as well. As I play games and either love them enough to move them up the priority chain, remove them from their fence or uninstall them entirely due to boredom or finishing the game, these fences can be updated with new games rotated in and how, so hopefully I’ll eventually hit everything in my library! Yay!

I just wanted to share this with y’all. I’m hoping that by clearing out my brain space a little bit by becoming more organized, I can work more on this blog and focus on what needs to be done. Thanks for reading, folks, and have a great day!