Video Games

2/22/2026

The reason I became so adept at using a computer is because of video games. I think the same could be said by many of my friends and people within my field of work. Downloading mods for video games forced me to learn how to the basics of navigating file systems, which led me to learn that software is not just the shortcut on the desktop that starts it. I still remember thinking that deleting the shortcut for a game from my desktop would erase it entirely from the computer.

There is a picture of me as a toddler trying to ascend a chair to access a computer. As I got older, I would watch my father play video games late into the night over the weekends; sometimes he would make both of us milk shakes. He's not much of a gamer any more, but I very much am. In fact, I have a massive backlog in my Steam library that only seems to be getting bigger. I also have a slew of games in my GOG library that I bought at discounts or received for free. Here's the long list of games I own but still have yet to finish:

Arken Age
Armored Core VI
Black Mesa
Breachway (Early Access)
Citizen Sleeper
Citizen Sleeper 2
Control
Deep Rock Galactic
Disco Elysium
DOOM Eternal
Everhood 2
Falcon Age
FAR: Changing Tides
FIGHT KNIGHT
Firewatch
FTL: Faster Than Light
Hypnospace Outlaw
Into the Breach
The Last Clockwinder
Monument Valley
Myst (remastered)
Neva
Nine Sols
Noita
Outer Wilds (Echoes of the Eye DLC)
Paradise March
Recompile
Replicube
Satisfactory (I've been playing this one for ~2 years now - I reached the 200 hour mark this weekend)
Slay the Spire
Thronefall
TUNIC
The Witness
The Wizards - Dark Times
Worldless

And that's just my Steam backlog. I would include the games from my GOG library, but that would require me to sort them in ABC order with this list and I don't feel like it.

Why do I own so many games that I have barely finished or touched? The short answer is that buying digital commodities is fast, cheap and provides instant gratification. Of course, there's also the sense that my money is going towards funding creative endeavors; many of these games have cool concepts and I simply want to see the studios succeed.

There is no way I'm going to be able to dedicate enough time to finish all of these games; I'll likely be trying to plow through this backlog for the rest of my life. The only way I could conceivably finish all of them in a timely manner is if I take a vacation for a year and do nothing but play video games; essentially a gap year of life. It would be miserable. I would be inside all the time, no matter the weather, partaking in no other form of entertainment. No reading, no writing, no programming. It would essentially be a year of skill, bodily and social atrophy; however, it would make for some pretty good YouTube videos.

Maybe if I became a multi-millionaire I would drop everything and do that. This is pretty much what Moistcritical is. His Steam library is bigger than mine because he's rich and does nothing but record his video game exploits and play Magic: The Gathering. He also works out, which I think I would want to factor into my life as a millionaire, too.

I hope that I will continue to play video games as I get older. It is the hobby that introduced me to the digital world of computers. Even though I may never complete every game I own, I will always be open to experience variety. There's so many new video games being made, and there are also many older games that I still have yet to try.

Video games are amazing because they can satisfy so many different niches of entertainment. Some are made to be playable infinitely; some are made to be more like movies - linear, story-driven adventures. What unites all of them is that technological innovation, the personal computer, the game console, drives their adoption. Video games will always be linked to computation.