How Backlog Culture Changed Gaming Habits

Backlog Culture has been with humankind since time immemorial; people just didn't know how to call it. They simply said, things to do that one can't seem to finish as they continue to pile up. It's when the "in" stack of documents on a desk is piled up so high, while the "out" document pile barely reaches the length of the thumb. In today's gaming world, this seems to be a growing situation with both pros and cons weighed against each other. However, the piles aren't work or documents, their games.

The Good Old Days of Gaming

For those who experienced the early decades of the video and computer gaming industry, one can safely say that gaming back then was a very long way from how gamers play games today. To provide a short description, games had to be physically purchased from computer and game shops or ordered via Mail. They came packaged in beautiful cardboard boxes (many, along with equally beautiful paraphernalia), aside from the physical floppies, cartridges, or CDs that held them.

Many gamers made lists of the games they played and completed as the objective was to buy a game, complete and win, then store the game in one's game library, packaged box and all. So when the friends come calling, one points to the stack of games with pride, and says, "See those games, all done, every one of them!" and the friends either go ohhh, ahhh, or nope! I've done more than you. If there ever was a backlog, it would be the 1-3 games bought in advance sitting next to the Apple II, Commodore 64, or the PC awaiting the next run.

Online Gaming and Sales

Then, the Internet came online for practically everyone by the late 1990s and early 2Ks. Publishers discovered they could sell to more customers and drastically cut overhead by simply letting customers download the game instead of all the packaging and physical sales, which required a whole lot more effort and cost. By the mid to late 2Ks, online game stores like EA Downloader, Steam, GOG (Good Old Games), and others that sold games via download, practically captured the global gaming market as the games could be played online, offline, with friends, with bots, by oneself, and whatever gaming option was currently under the Sun. Purchasing a game had never been as easy as it could be.

The Birth of Backlog Gaming Culture

Today, with the Internet part of everyday life, where anyone and everyone can go online even with their cellphones, the ease of acquiring and downloading massive amounts of gaming software has led to a perplexing phenomenon never even imagined by gamers of the day, massive personal digital libraries of un-played or un-finished games. Resulting from aggressive digital sales and subscription services, the trend has led to a sort of “Backlog Paralysis” brought about by gaming overconsumption, where gaming is no longer the slow and deliberate hobby it once was.

Gamers worldwide are accumulating games in their hard drives and other digital storage media at an accelerated pace that they can barely get the chance to play and commit the time to a single game. The games end up sitting in storage, some never to be played at all. This may sound crazy to a gamer of old in the 1990s or 2000s who immediately installed and got “Lara Croft” tomb-raiding right out of the game box, but today is a totally different gaming landscape and culture. Backlog Gaming is changing how games are played today and shifting current-day gamers into a different gaming mindset, showing how games and gamers are evolving with the times.

The Overall Effect on Gaming

The effect of game overconsumption or Backlog in recent times has drastically altered video gaming as it was perceived over the years. Regardless, the world continues to revolve, and life as we know it evolves. To this, here are some of the more evident effects of today’s backlog culture on gaming.

Gamers today are paralyzed by choice. Let’s go back to the old gamers like me. Back then, you chose a game to purchase by buying/subscribing to game magazines, reading reviews of current games, then either ordering it by Mail or going to the store to buy it. You can also go directly to the store and choose there, but gamers wanted reviews hence read the magazines first.

Today, gamers surf to online game stores that have gazillions of games (like Steam) and end up browsing, browsing, and browsing. What’s more, there are many free-to-play games as well, not to mention that many games occasionally and seasonally go on sale, so a gamer ends up downloading and downloading. Soon, the drive is full, and the gamer begins to choose which one to play first. By the time said gamer finally decides, the free time to play games has been exhausted, and the games never get played.

Many young gamers today have very short attention spans. Actually, the younger generation seems to have the attention focus as short as a YouTube Short (3 minutes tops), well, something like that. Older gamers commit to the game through the closing credits and are more storyline-driven. Many current-day gamers just start the game, experience the gameplay, watch the ending on YouTube, and then move to another game. It seems to be the norm nowadays.

Due to the overpopulation of available games, which end up as massive personal backlog game libraries, many gamers today are resorting to finding and playing short games. Games that have definite endings and are as short as possible, and will not require a massive amount of hours for commitment like the old classic RPGs, the Final Fantasies, the games that go from part 1 to part 10, which one has to play in sequence to get the whole picture, and all other games like them. Gaming culture is shifting toward “the quicker the better,” with more time to play and experience more.

This trend of backlog gaming culture provides a number of alternative ways that gamers can approach their gameplay in today’s reality of massive content. “Information Overload” has been changing global society in many ways for some time now (just think of YouTube), and many find the sheer availability of content a very positive thing. Many, on the other hand, find themselves in the middle of a huge content-dump site, and, unfortunately, gamers, as well as people in general, will have to adjust to the continual influx of massive content and backlog, and find ways to deal with it as best they can.