Midweek Musings – The “Clear My Backlog” Challenge

Midweek Musings is a series of one-off posts where we’ll be taking a look at topics that don’t merit or can’t carry a full-length post on their own. This week I’ll be discussing a neat little way to clear your backlog a bit faster by making a meta-game out of it.

As everyone who’s ever heard me talk about my backlog knows, I have an extremely bad habit of starting games, getting bored or annoyed and more or less giving up. Maybe the game in question is a slow burner (i.e. extremely slow pacing for the first few hours – looking at you Tales of Zestiria); perhaps some minor design flaw made it tedious to play through (excessive menu usage is a good – and common – example here); or even just because of not being in the mood for that particular genre (but only realized after a few minutes of playing).

No matter why, it slowly becomes a vicious cycle which ends with an overly bloated backlog of “I need to get round to playing these” games – and if (like me) you’re also interested in achievement completion, this often leads to a mountain of stuff that needs doing and no damn idea of where to even start from.

Well, I’ve been trying out a way to make a sort of meta-game out of it the last few months, and…. it seems to be working?

Method to the madness

Given my general involvement in achievement “hunting”, I am no stranger to meta-gaming (in this context, making a game out of a process, which also overlaps with the concept of gamification) – indeed, the achievement hunting community often makes a game out of keeping track of metrics, such as average percentage ratio of completed achievements or completing “sets” (for example, “All of the Batman games on Steam” or “Every game made by Wadjet Eye Studios”).

Quite often, these “meta” accomplishments are done in a competitive manner, which led me to the idea of using a sort of co-op implementation to help me out in combating my ever-growing backlog. Followers of this blog might remember that, in my very first Attack of the Backlog post, I put out a few guidelines to help me out:

  1. Complete at least three games per month – “completion” in this context being either “seeing all main story content” or “completing that platform’s achievement list” – there are certain games where the time commitment is too big for a realistic 100% achievements completion, so in those cases I’ll count completing the main story as sufficient.
  2. Only buy games at a ratio of one new game per six completed ones. This was chosen to limit my backlog growth, help me prioritize my purchases and still allow me to get any games I truly felt were must-haves.
  3. Work on as many platforms as possible. This goal was more loosely defined as, at time of writing, my backlog spreads across multiple consoles – the PS3, PS4 and Vita; XBox 360; Nintendo 3DS and Wii U; and of course, PC (which is divided between several digital retailers such as Steam, GOG etc.).

That was step one – stopping the excessive bloat in its tracks.

As for step two, actually getting me to actively reduce it…

Playing the meta-game

With the help of friend and fellow achievement hunter Rooks, I set out to make a small event out of finishing backlogged games. The initial idea was this: “If I can’t decide on which to play, I’ll just have someone else do it for me“. You see, I’d already have seen the concept of playing achievements H-O-R-S-E in action and figured that a co-operative version of that would work nicely in a non-competitive environment.

(In essence, H-O-R-S-E is a competitive challenge where one player earns a specific achievement and then all the other participants must also do the same; if any participant fails to do so in a specific time limit, they earn a letter from the word “HORSE”, starting with H and ending with E; once that is done, the second player in a pre-defined order earns another achievement and the rest of the players once again try to also earn it in the specified time limit; and so on and so forth. Any players that complete the word HORSE – and thus have failed to follow the achievement-setting player 5 times – are eliminated and this goes on until only one player remains as the winner.It’s quite fun with 4 or more participants, so try it! If you don’t have enough players, a shorter version using the word P-I-G instead of H-O-R-S-E can be used, or even any other word of the players’ choosing.)

After a bit of discussion and back-and-forth of ideas, we ended up with the following guidelines:

(Note: This is best done with just two players, as it becomes harder to track with multiple participants. For the sake of accuracy, I’ll call these imaginary participants A and B)

  1. Participant A should select 1-3 games from Participant B’s backlog.  Participant B has one month from the date of selection to complete at least one of these games at the 100% mark.
  2. Participant A can only select games (from B’s backlog) that fulfill these conditions:
    • Must be a game in which at least one achievement was already earned by B.
    • Must be a game that is under 20-25 hours in overall duration (tracker sites are useful for providing such estimates).
    • Must be a game that can be completed solo (so you don’t need to rely on other players for co-op/multiplayer achievements).
    • Must be a game that can be reasonably completed in that given month (so that seasonal achievements, such as “Play this game on Christmas day” etc. do not limit completion).
    • (Optional) Should be a game that A has at least some vague idea about and/or have played themselves.
  3. At the end of the 30-day period from day of selecting, B should have completed at least one of the three proposed games.
  4. Participant B follows the exact same guidelines to provide 1-3 games from Participant A’s backlog for them to attempt completing.

Naturally, a lot of variation can be added to make the game more interesting / challenging / competitive – adding a score for each game completed (based on time needed to complete); upping the selection to 5 games per month or lowering it to 1 but selecting one that requires at least 50 hours to complete; or even changing the time window from one month to more/less, as needed.

Results, results, results

We began this experiment on October 1st, with my selections for the month being Castle of Illusion and Toki Tori and I am very pleased to say that it worked out wonderfully as a motivating factor – one month later, Castle of Illusion sits at a cool 100% completion rate and Toki Tori is being worked on in small steps (we went for two  games per month, of which we should complete at least one, just to keep things simple). November’s selection for me includes Shank and Organ Trail which, thus far, seem to be progressing nicely. Stay tuned for November’s Backlog Cleanup for my impressions.

Overall, I found this an interesting way to stop backlog clearing from feeling like a chore – if you like this method, please use it and drop us a line in the comments, as I’d be very interested in seeing how it performs!