Announcing the Tildes Backlog Burner event for 2022: Shrink your unplayed games list this February!
What is this?
Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet! This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences!
How do I participate?
Choose a game (or several) from your backlog and play it/them. Then tell us about your experiences in the discussion thread for the week! If you're not sure what you might write, take a look at a previous backlog post or our previous Backlog Burner event in 2020 to get an idea. Also if you want to keep track of statistics across the whole event or anything else like that, go for it!
Do I need to finish the games I play?
Nope! Not at all. There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game. Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!
What's the timeline?
I will post an update thread weekly, each Tuesday, for the four weeks of February. At the end of the month, I think it would be neat to tally how many collective games we all removed from our backlogs, as well as what the best finds were from our collective digging into our libraries. I expect we'll turn up some good hidden gems, as well as interesting insights.
Do I need to sign up?
You don't have to do anything to officially join or participate in the event other than post in these threads! Participate in whatever way works for you. Also, because this is ongoing, it is okay to make more than one top-level post if you're updating the thread with new information.
Do I need to wait until February to get started?
Nah. I figured people might want to begin over the weekend, which is why I'm posting the announcement now! The first official discussion thread will go up on Tuesday, but feel free to kick things off here if you're wanting to pre-game the month!
I see that there are past events, when will the next one be hosted? Because I’d love to participate once my Steam Deck arrives, but that won’t be until… after Q2.
Not sure, to be honest. Nothing’s really been formalized for this.
I first ran this back in 2020 when the pandemic had shut down nearly everything, as I figured it might be a nice distraction for people stuck at home. A few users recently mentioned bringing it back so I’m doing this one now. If this is something people are interested in we could easily make it a more official/recurring thing. I think doing another one towards the end of the year, once Steam Decks are out and available, is a great idea.
Sounds fun. My backlog is here, though it's missing some things I have sitting around on steam that I'll likely check out. I really suggest using that site btw, it's like Letterboxd or RYM for games.
Worth noting that I combine my wishlist and backlog. I buy a ton of games, but I also love to torrent and at that point it feels weird separating what I do and don't own.
This is actually awesome timing, since I just built my new computer (topic for that coming Soon™), and also spent several hours setting up Playnite to manage my absurd game collection. So count me in!
Admittedly I haven’t been at it for as long, but I thought my 250-ish games was bad...
To be fair, about half of those games are from the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. Even knowing that, I still clearly have a bit of a videogame spending habit problem though. It's a good problem to have, since I never lack entertainment, only free time... but it's still undeniably a problem. :P
Yeah, sure. Let's do it. I've got a big pile of games in my "Maybe Someday" steam category. I can put some time into a few of them.
I'm so excited that this is starting! I'm definitely excited to see how much I can look at throughout all of next month.
Does anyone know of a site or program that can look at your existing collection and rank it on a combination of the game's length (probably from HowLongToBeat) and the game's review score (either Steam reviews or critic ones)? I thought I saw something like this a long time ago, but I can't find it now.
If it does actually exist, something like that would be great for finding games with the best "backlog clearing value", where it's a really good game that can be finished quickly.
Don't know of anything out of the box, but it might be possible to roll your own in a spreadsheet.
This site will let you export your Steam library in CSV format and will include the user scores, Wilson scores, and SteamDB scores for each. I actually used it earlier to pull a copy of my library to set up a random game picker for myself for the event, and it works wonderfully.
It doesn't have HLTB data, but it seems something like this might be able to gather that easily? I haven't used it (nor do I really know how), so take that with a grain of salt.
I also know that Playnite has a HLTB plugin and allows for export, so you could do something similar through that program. It's a bit more to set up, but the advantage is that it would work for games on platforms outside of Steam.
As @kfwyre mentioned, Playnite has a HowLongToBeat extension that can query it for each of your games and add tags to them based on the results, so you can filter by HLTB time. And then you can sort those filtered games by critic or community scores. That's what I do.
I'll try finishing The Outer Worlds. It's on Game Pass, so who knows when it will leave.