Backloggd (for those that are looking for a gaming journal site like Letterboxd)

Games Video Games
23

As for myself, I don’t think I’ve added any games to my Backloggd that I haven’t played myself. But I do feel like, given the right kind of game, I would feel comfortable doing that. Games that are less geared towards mechanical interaction. If I watched someone else play, for example, a visual novel, and it was a relatively linear one, I don’t think I’d have any qualms putting it down on my Backloggd. But then there’s something like a point-and-click, or a JRPG, where it kind of rides a line between systems-driven and narrative-driven. But all this is hypothetical, because I haven’t actually gotten to a point where I wanted to mark one down.

What about you all?

24

This is interesting because there are many games that I feel I have experienced that are primarily mechanics focused. Like watching someone play through a hitman level, or watching someone navigate a few encounters in Heat Signature. Watching those things gives me a great idea of what makes those games click, and is an exciting experience all its own. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say I have a great understanding of a mechanics focused game that I’ve only watched, I can at least tell someone “oh yeah, I watched [so and so] play it, seems right up your alley”.

25

My ontological instinct is that a specific person playing a specific game is a performance that should be associated with both the game and the performer, and is a work in it’s own right. Quick: someone start playlistdddd(d).

I think for a certain kind of video game media consumer, (and maybe for particular people, particular games) that would count as getting the game off their backlog, which is (as you hint) where things get hairy.

26

I would say yes. If I’m watching a let’s play made by someone earnestly engaging with a game and having a bad time, I don’t have a problem drawing a conclusion that that game is maybe shit. Even if I didn’t physically engage with the media myself. This obviously isn’t a perfect method, and vulnerable to a lot of bias, but I guess I trust my own ability to spot someone fishing for hate clicks.

Would I go out of my to review something I only watched, however? Eh, probably not. I think in order to be fully confident in my own take, I would need to get my own hands on experience.

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27

Yes and no.

If I feel I have gotten the complete experience or at least an experience that gives me a good idea of how the game plays or how the story goes, then sure.

It’s basically the equivalent of watching a movie on tv, but never all in one sitting. Or watching enough of a fairly average or even good television series, but not every single episode.

Like, have I played all of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? No, I actually kind of hated my time playing it and never even got close to the second castle. But would I consider that I have “completed” it, I have watched dozens if not hundreds of speedruns of it across several categories and have played it’s successors to death? Yes, absolutely. There is nothing the game has to offer me, even if I haven’t fought half the bosses or ever done an Air Slash myself.

Yet there are still some games that I have watched way too much of, but still felt I had to beat on my own. Rogue Legacy was one of those games that I remember watching several different streamers and let’s players go through, yet still felt that I needed to beat it myself to have actually “experienced” it.

And it’s not just roguelikes. I may know the ins and outs of most of Breath of the Wild at this point, but until I’ve actually mapped that whole place out and killed Ganon myself, it’s still on my backlog list.

28

I could definitely count it, as long as the LP seemed suitably thorough. Even when there are mechanics I’m missing out on, my favourite LPs will foreground the mechanics in a way I can vicariously understand.

I haven’t played Pathologic 2 but it’s 100% on last year’s GOTY list after watching Marshall Dyer’s playthrough where she meticulously picks through the game. I think it was a better experience than if I did so myself, because I’m not convinced I could have engaged with the game as well as her.

But I would like a separate option to delineate what I have only watched and not played.

Also here’s my under filled backloggd:

29

I use Backloggd as a way to keep track of the games I’ve experienced, so I’d count it. At least once I’d finished watching it the whole way through or decided I’d watched enough and didn’t want to watch anymore. I also include games I’ve played but haven’t completed if I feel like I’ve played enough and won’t return to them.

I don’t really consider these games completed, but if I go back through my games list in a few years I’d like to remember my experience of them.

30

A very hardy “it depends”. If you can watch a game and feel like you have had enough of an experience with it, sure! 100% not 1:1 but if you listen to an audiobook, that’s experiencing the book. There isn’t that mechanical layer, but the performance layer is there for both.

I have been watching more Let’s Plays recently given the situation, but I’m personally less inclined to say I have completed a game that I have watched because I am watching them as much if not more so for the performance element. I can’t separate the two and nor would I want to. To contradict myself I’m trying to find some good Kingdom Hearts Let’s Plays to get through the side games I don’t want to play but want to get the story. I wouldn’t check those off my backlog…but also would remove them from my backlog? I wouldn’t put on this site “Hey, done” but would silently remove this from the “to play” pile.

31

I’ve been using this a lot ever since it was mentioned here. I really like it! It’s basically exact what I’ve wanted for a while. Here’s mine:

My only worry is that I tend to get obsessive with these sorts of things - I had to make myself stop using RYM years ago because the drive to catalog more and more media and rate things “properly” was negatively impacting the way I listened to music. So I’m trying to engage with this more casually.

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32

Just remembered this and thought this weekend might be a good time to go back through and update it some more.

If I do any reviews it’s probably just going to be a paragraph at most. I think I’m going to try and remember every game I’ve played? I tried to do this years ago with a spreadsheet and had some trouble but I think it would be a fun nostalgic thing to do because a lot of older games are tied more to moments in my life and what was happening at the time and who I was playing with.

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33

Having basically tried to do that with mine, the thing that seemed to work was going by console? Like I started by trying to remember old GBA games and then worked my way forward in time to now. I felt like I managed to remember almost everything, even stuff I played as a kid.

34

I will say going back through this has reminded me that I actually used to like racing games when they had 0 plot and were more arcadey.

Does anyone know if there’s a way to file a “This game needs to be updated”? I’ve noticed a few games don’t have all the platforms they released on.

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35

Could ask them about it on Twitter (if you’re on it). I’ve tweeted a couple of questions at them and they tend to be pretty responsive? I think there’s also a generic email form on the site.

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36

Hello everyone! I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve added everyone who put their Backloggd links here. My Backlogged username is redlandcannibal. (Sorry for not having a clickable link, I can’t seem to add links yet since my account is new.) I’m also on Letterboxd as hatspro.

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37

Thought I’d revive this since I made a backloggd back in april and filled it up with everything I’d played at least until my 3ds years. My backloggd username is also kaj (can’t seem to add links since my account is new).

I’m curious how people treat their ratings scale. Do you set one and stick with it, or do you revisit it and revise all your ratings every so often (maybe after playing a game you consider perfect and bumping everything else down as a result). And since many of you have letterboxd, do you ascribe the same scores to your movies and other media, or are they treated with their own scale and attributes?

I think my emotions play a large part in how I rate things, rather than having any objective review, and often I find myself feeling differently about a game the farther removed I am from actually playing it. Whether it’s thinking back on the story or having the soundtrack stick with me, I’ll find that factors like these can end up overweighing possible frustrations I had while actually playing, and in retrospect make me remember a game more fondly.

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38

I’ve started one up too - filling it out, and I definitely need to get in the habit of actually consistently logging when I play. I’m so bad at remembering that step.

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39

My rating scale is all over the place! I kinda just go for what I’m feeling at the moment. For me, Backloggd is more of a journal of all the games I played than like an objective ranking. For me a 5 is a game I consider in my cannon of all timers, and a 4 to be something I had a great time with. A 3 is something good that I’ll probably forget about later, and anything lower than that is something I had a bad time with. I see people (including some from this forum!) with perfectly parabolic ratings scales and I envy them! I wish I had the brain to categorize things so perfectly! But as it stands now, my ratings skew positive mostly because I try to only spend time with games that I enjoy.

I definitely go back and revise scores too! Usually after a month or so has passed I’ll go back and adjust a score, usually down. Often I am more forgiving of some dodgy/problematic theming if the game is fun in the moment, only for my queasiness with that to become the most prominent memory (see my rating of RE5, which was originally a 4).

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40

A couple of months ago I went through my ratings to sort of review them, because at least half of my almost 400 ratings are somewhere from 4 to 5. I looked through all of them and I think I ended up changing maybe 3… and one of them went upward.

In the end I think I just don’t often play games I think I might not like, not so much because I’m worried about wasting money (lord knows how many games on my Steam account I’ve never touched) but because I just don’t have time to pick up something I won’t enjoy at a fairly high level. The ones that rate below a 3 are almost all there not because they’re “bad” games but because they really disappointed me in some way that felt like an affront, like the Battle for Bikini Bottom remake or Pokemon Ultrasun/moon.

I also think rating games is weird in a way rating other media isn’t, in the way that games can be broken in a way things like films or books just aren’t, because distributors/publishers just won’t release them that way. Games are more decentralized and, especially for smaller projects, have less quality control… so, perhaps paradoxically, if I’m playing a game that’s technically sound I find myself giving it a floor of a 3/5, 6/10, etc. You see this in things like Metacritic scores too — games just skew a lot higher than other media, and I think I’m largely of that same mindset that, in a world where even something like Cyberpunk 2077 can be released as a glitchy broken mess, a game being technically competent is worth several points on a rating scale. Which ruins any chance of a nice parabolic distribution I’ll ever have.

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41

I’ve been using Backloggd for a long time now but never got around to posting here. I used to just make a basic text list of stuff I’ve played as Gmail drafts and GOTY rankings on Giant Bomb’s listmaker, but this has been way better. I haven’t written any reviews though because… I’m lazy lol.

Gonna start following everyone who’s posted their profile here!

But yeah, I’m mostly posting here now after reading the latest posts. I ended up spending the last 30 minutes or so going back to all my ratings and changing up a decent amount, most of which was to lower scores haha. Recency bias is a helluva thing!

Skimming through everyone else’s profiles, it does seem like we mostly share a general enjoyment of the games we have played, with ratings skewing more towards 3 stars and up. Budget is certainly a factor for me, but time also plays into the games I choose to play.

As for how I personally rate games, I don’t have hard and fast rules either and mostly go with my gut.

5s are reserved for my all-time favorites, and while “perfection” in design certainly helps, I can overlook obvious flaws to give a game 5 stars if it resonates with me emotionally or makes me rethink things or reimagine the potential of the medium.

4 and 4.5 stars are for games that are great but are just missing that… special something.

3 and 3.5 stars are for games that I mostly enjoyed but have some glaring flaws.

2 and 2.5 stars are for games that I’m 50/50 on in terms of enjoyment and frustration/boredom, or for games that I can see are going for something but have a lot of big problems.

Only game I have that’s lower than a 2 is… Resident Evil 0 at 0.5 because good god did I absolutely have a miserable time with it and hate myself for pushing through all the way to the end lmao. I think I’ll only reserve that spot for experiences like that. Maybe if I actually play another game that I have zero fun with that also happens to be completely offensive and/or broken that I also manage to finish, maybe it’ll top RE0.

Definitely agreed on the point about the technical aspects of games making rating them weirder than other media, at least for my relative inexperience actually thinking about other media to the level of criticality that I spend on games.

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42

Oh! I’ve been using Backloggd for a few months now after it got mentioned in the Discord, didn’t know we had a forum thread for it! I gave y’alls some follows, here’s my profile if you’d like to take a gander at it.

I’ve really enjoyed the Lists function for doing silly things like ranking the Yakuza franchise based on each game’s version of “Receive You”. Arbitrary rankings are fun and I need to think up some more to put together. It’s also something I used to make a big list of games I’ve gotten for free that I actually want to play, mostly to manage the large number of games from EGS and Twitch Prime giveaways. Having a place where I can quickly glance at a game and pick something at random has been super helpful in clearing out a bit of my backlog this year.

For rating things, I feel like only using whole numbers instead of half-stars has helped me to sort things out easily in my mind. One star is some devoid of fun and/or atrociously offensive, two stars is unenjoyable but probably has something good/cool about it, three stars is fine but nothing special, four stars is great but missing something special, and five stars is something I adore regardless of its flaws. I’m kind of on the side of “assigning numerical ratings is a bit silly in general” so I tend to just think about it as a quick mark of how much I enjoyed something and not worry about whether a game is objectively ‘good’ or whatever. I feel like that leads too easily into silly stuff like using average ratings to determine if Super Mario Bros is a better game than Fortnite, or something like that.

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