Games played list upgrade

For the last 15 or so years, I've maintained a list of all video games I've played. This list goes back to 1994, which is when I remember playing Rodland, my first video game, on my aunt's Commodore 64 which she used for accounting. The data I've produced has gone through many iterations from a single file, to Google spreadsheets, to several tools of my own design, and its current form of a webpage on my server. Today I added Trespasser to the list, which made it round up to a nice four hundred games played. I also realized I've been gaming for just over 30 years now.

So I made a bit of an upgrade to my list of games and built a statistics tool. One might ask: why? Because statistics are fun. Also I wanted to visually see if there were any notable outliers and/or patterns to my gaming. One thing I'd also like to visualize is how much I liked games in each year/genre, but since my reviews are entire based on words instead of a quantifiable numbering system, I'm not sure how I would do that.

When it comes to other statistics, I used to keep track of how many words I wrote per day, but I found this detrimental to writing. I started thinking about the numbers and making sure I got nice statistics rather than focusing on the actual writing. One thing I've noticed about myself is that I'm less productive the more I talk about something. If I want to get something done, I'm best of staying quiet about what I'm doing until the thing is ready to show.

Findings

Looking at the stats, we see a few insights:

This chart shows what systems I played the games on, and when. Systems I played on changed over the years with Windows dominating most of my life, with Linux recently taking over. As with all stats, 1995 is an outlier as I put all my old games to that year. I have no idea when I played each game around that time.

This chart shows the release years of the games I've played, not when I played them. The years which pop up with highest quantity of "gold" rated games are 2000, 2017, and 2018.

• 2000: Thief 2: The Metal Age, The Longest Journey, Deus Ex
• 2017: Hollow Knight, Unavowed, Darkwood
• 2018: Subnautica, Frostpunk, Return of Obra Dinn

Yes, those were pretty banger years.

2016 is the year that produced most games I've played: 23. One after that is 1988 (20), which makes sense as I received two boxes of pirated Amiga games along with the computer itself from my neighbor in 1995.

The "2000s PC gaming slump" might also be visible as I've played fewer games from that era. That was the time period when console gaming was king, and since I've never owned a console (Gameboy does not count), this period is largely unknown to me. Honestly, the mid to late 2000s were mostly lots of big budget games going for linear gameplay, lots of handholding, and a brown visual aesthetic. I feel this is when the "risk vs wide appeal" matrix as Derek Yu put it really kicked off where big corporations started to seriously minimize risk and maximize appeal.

Because of this, I played mostly indie games in this time period, but I've forgotten the names of almost all of them, except the big ones like Aquaria and World of Goo.

This chart shows where I purchased my games (arranged by release year, not play year), and it has definitely changed over the years. Back in the old days, most of my games were either pirated (Amiga) or retail. There were a lot of shareware games, and those demo CDs that came with computer magazines. Each CD would have 50 or so shareware demos for you to try, and honestly that made most of my gaming in the early home computer era. No, none of those games are on my list as I don't count demos on this list.

When Half-Life 2 released in 2004, it forced everyone who purchased it to activate the game on Steam. This might surprise modern readers, but Steam was much despised in that era. The image here is from OG-Steam github repository, and while the UI was vomit-inducing, it was the technical problems that plagued early Steam. When I attempted to install my own copy of Half-Life 2 (which was a physical disk), it took me at least two days to get my activation to go through. This was an early version of "mandatory online" which has recently become a hot topic again with the Stop Killing Games initiative. It took a long time before Steam won the users over, but what a victory it was.

These days, as can be seen on this graph, I prefer GOG or itch when possible. Steam is a good service, but it is increasingly the only service. Monopolies are bad.

Another angle to consider is whether I would have saved money by subscribing to Humble Bundle. When I last did this sort of comparison with a friend, the results were a bit distorted with me buying the entire Total War: Warhammer trilogy for 180€, a sum I almost never spend on games. I tend to be the kind of gamer that only buys games discounted, and only when I'm going to play them. To answer the question of whether it would have been cheaper to subscribe to Humble Bundle, I would have to extract my Steam / GOG / Itch / Humble Bundle order history and do historical price comparisons, which sounds a bit much to do. Money aside, I just hate any kind of subscriptions.

This heatmap shows all the genres in my data and how much of each genre I played each year. The obvious outlier is arcade games, which I naturally played more in ye olde days. The new topdog is the Souls genre that jumps to the top around 2016.

One of the most stable genres is the poorly defined "platformer" which includes games of many types. Sometimes the line between a metroidvania and a platformer is vague.

Point & click games entered my list around 2004 and consistently remain at the top. 2004 was around the time I discovered Adventure Game Studio through a Finnish PC magazine which had an advert for 5 Days a Stranger by Yahtzee. Through the AGS community, I played an absurd amount of indie Point & clicks - and most of those aren't even on my list! If I listed all games in this genre, I'm sure Point & click would become my #1 genre.

The tragedy of this graph if the realtime strategy (RTS) genre that unfortunately largely died following Warcraft 3 transitioning RTS into MOBAs. To this day, one of the games I would most want to play is a macro focused realtime strategy without hero units where the player has to be active on the map and cannot just turtle back home.

Another genre that used to be strong but has since disappeared is the first person shooter (FPS). Frankly, I was quite into this genre in the 90s and 2000s, but eventually lost interest in it. I'm not sure if was due to the games themselves becoming lukewarm during the mid-to-late 2000s slump, or whether I realized what I'm really looking for in games is exploring world, not the combat. My first FPS was the demo of Wolfenstein 3D, but I wasn't a huge fan of it due to its spartan atmosphere. On the same engine, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold was more to my liking due to its more colorful art style and soundscape. I was never a massive fan of the original Doom, or even Quake 1, while Duke Nukem 3D with its charming, detailed levels made me play the game over and over again.

And that's all the things that I immediately noticed in the data! Looking forward to the next 30 years.

If you want more, here's a similar list from Ronan Jouchet.