Dealing with the “analysis paralysis” of a vast game collection

Most of us playing games today have backlogs that extend to an embarrassing degree. Speaking for myself, I have games going right back to the 8-bit era that I really want to spend some protracted time with — and yet sometimes it can be difficult not to fall foul to “analysis paralysis” when it’s time to settle down for some gaming for pure entertainment, rather than work.

Analysis paralysis, if you’re unfamiliar, is the situation you find yourself in where you have so many options to choose from that you end up not actually choosing any of them, instead simply sitting there in an anxious haze about what might happen if you make the “wrong” choice. It is, as you might expect, something that those prone to anxiety tend to suffer from — but we’ve likely all been there to one degree or another over the years, especially if you have shelves heaving with games to play, a Steam library with four digits of digital games and perhaps even an emulation device loaded up with ROM sets.

So let’s take a look at some ways you can tackle analysis paralysis, and get stuck into your backlog rather than staring at a wall for hours on end.

Time management

Your free time is precious, particularly in today’s busy world — and as such it’s important to make the most of it rather than languishing in analysis paralysis. That doesn’t mean rushing through things as quickly as possible or attempting to do multiple things at once, mind — it means that the things you choose to do for pleasure should be enjoyed and savoured.

As such, if you’ve got a game that you want to play, it pays to actually set aside some specific time to play it. Think of it like any other activity — if you were going to play squash with a friend, you’d set aside some time to do that; if you were going to watch a movie, you’d set aside a couple of hours to do that. Gaming can and should be no different. Decide that, for the next couple of hours — or, if you’re a “planning ahead” type, the hours between, say, 6pm and 8pm next Tuesday — you’re going to sit down and immerse yourself in that RPG you’ve had on your shelf for six years.

You don’t have to rigidly structure yourself — some people don’t respond well to that — but if you are someone who works well to a schedule, this can be a really effective means of making sure you allow yourself the time to enjoy the things you want to enjoy. If you leave no time in the day for analysis paralysis, you’ll never be afflicted with analysis paralysis!

Streaming

A more extreme take on anti-analysis paralysis time management is to take up streaming. It’s important to bear in mind that for the vast majority of people, streaming probably won’t become your primary income source — or, depending on how much time and effort you put into it, may not become an income source at all — but if you do it just for fun, it can be a good means of focusing your gaming time as well as finding others who share similar interests.

Pick a game. Pick a time slot or two or three throughout the week. Settle down and play the game on stream. Commit to those scheduled slots, and before you know it, you’ll have made it through even the longest games on the market — and perhaps made some new friends in the process, particularly if you’re streaming something that not a lot of other people are streaming.

Even if that doesn’t happen, though, you’ll have a nice permanent record of your time with the game — remember to export Twitch streams to YouTube to keep your videos forever — and the knowledge that, at some point, you might have entertained somebody else besides yourself.

Curation

So you have three thousand unplayed games across multiple platforms and no idea where to start? That’s the very definition of analysis paralysis. Time to get curating!

Set aside a bit of time to go through one or more of your “game lists”, be it your Steam library, your GOG account or the playlists on an emulation device, and pick out the things that you definitely want to play sooner rather than later, the games that you probably want to play, the games that you might want to play and the things you can probably safely discard.

Many platforms provide some sort of facility for sorting games into collections or folders, so make good use of this. On Steam, for example, you can group games into collections and mark specific titles as favourites, while retro-centric emulation frontends such as Batocera (as we use on the excellent Anbernic Win600) often provide similar functionality. You may even want to go so far as to hide or delete titles you know you’re never going to get to.

Consoles vary in how useful their functionality is for digital titles, but one extreme possibility is to download the stuff you want to play now, and delete all the other stuff from your console’s storage. If you find yourself missing it, re-download it. If you don’t miss it, leave it be until you have a sudden craving.

When it comes to physical collections, if you can bear to take your games out of alphabetical order, build yourself a literal “pile of shame” of the games that you want to play next, in rough order of priority. Next time you feel analysis paralysis coming on, pick up that top game, pop it in and play it. Job’s a good ‘un.

Focus

One of the biggest causes of analysis paralysis is not just having too many possibilities available to you, but having already chosen some of those possibilities. Now you’re stuck with seven huge RPGs on the go, and you can’t remember what’s happening in any of them, nor how any of the mechanics work.

At this point, it’s time to stop, think about which one of them you were enjoying the most, and focus on that one. Start it again from the top if necessary, and concentrate on that game to the exclusion of other “big” games. Don’t feel bad about leaving the other games behind — they’ll get their time in the spotlight soon.

Don’t feel like you can’t participate in “side activities” while tackling a large game — there’s nothing wrong with enjoying some Splatoon 3 matches when you don’t feel like slogging through a lengthy affair like Persona 5, for example — but make sure those side activities are something that doesn’t distract your attention away from the main event too much. Unless, of course, you want to become the best Splatoon 3 player in the world, in which case feel free to make that the main event!

Bedtime

What do you do before going to sleep? If the answer is “fiddling mindlessly with your phone” and/or “doomscrolling through stupid social media platforms”, then it may be to your benefit to rethink your bedtime activities. If you have a handheld device, this is an ideal time to make good use of it. Steam Deck (and equivalents such as the aforementioned Anbernic Win600) and Switch (and Vita, for that matter) are great for this — but many of you may well have a television in your bedroom, too, so get a console hooked up to it.

Bedtime is a great time to play story-centric games — visual novels are a particularly good fit. And while bathing your face in the blue light of a video game device or TV before trying to sleep is widely regarded as not the best idea for a truly restful night, if you were only going to stare vapidly at the endless torrent of crap that is TikTok anyway, you may as well enjoy something with actual artistic value to it while further blocking up your melatonin tubes.

The golden rule

Games are there for your enjoyment. They shouldn’t be stressing you out or making you anxious. If they are, think about why that’s happening, and what you might be able to do about it. More often than not, the solutions are fairly simple — so we hope some of these suggestions for dealing with analysis paralysis help!

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