Announce “incomplete Bankruptcy”
Early on in my 95-hour playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I began to worry. The sheer scope of the game became apparent, and while I enjoyed my time in Hyrule, I began to worry about other video games, movies, and podcasts that I was missing. And judging by the social media posts from people feeling similarly depressed, I’m not alone.
A lot of new video games have been released this year. In the past few weeks alone, intense single-player adventures like Tears of the Kingdom and Star Wars: Jedi Survivor have come out alongside endless online games like Diablo IV and Street Fighter VI – not to mention smaller titles that also come out during this amazingly busy period. season.
And now, with other top-notch juggernauts like Final Fantasy XVI , Baldur’s Gate 3 , and Armored Core VI fast approaching, it’s no surprise that many players are feeling overwhelmed, especially when most of these games can be tens or even hundreds of hours long.
Some of the most popular games to play if you have time are:
This is not a unique video game experience. We all have lists of games, movies, bands, or other media that we would love to check out someday. But sometimes these lists of inexperienced media can seem like a debt that drags us down as new ones are added to this pile. This is exactly what my first hours in Tears of the Kingdom were like – as if every moment spent with Zelda plunged me more and more into unfulfilled obligations.
So, I filed for unfulfilled bankruptcy.
I decided to focus on enjoying what I was already doing and letting go of my expectations of the media that I was missing. I even deleted the spreadsheet of 2023 games I told myself I’d get to them someday, cleared the Up Next queue on my podcast app, and agreed that I probably wasn’t going to anytime soon. catch up with Heritage .
And I felt much better.
When should you declare bankruptcy?
To be fair, backlogs have their merits. Some people like to plan their free time and use their backlogs to do this. Others use backlogs to avoid having to buy every new game the moment it’s released. Some of us, myself included, use them to take notes about the games we’re currently playing. But they can also turn into to-do lists, or worse, become nasty reminders that we don’t have much free time to spend in a day.
Admittedly, “too many video games” is the epitome of privileged first world problems, but these growing backlogs do have a negative psychological impact on some of us. There is now strong scientific evidence that digital clutter can be just as stressful as physical trash, and backlogs are one of the biggest sources of digital clutter we can accumulate.
So, if you’re struggling to be present and enjoy the game without worrying about all the other games you plan to play next, then it’s time to consider lagging bankruptcy.
Tear apart your “to play” list, delete old games from your hard drives, or put a stack of unfinished games back on the shelf – whatever it takes to erase all the unfinished games from books. Like other forms of decluttering, it frees your mind from those compiled to-do lists so you can spend your free time on what interests you at the moment and make it easier for you to move on to something when you’re ready.