A word of warning, this one is kind of navel-gazey and winding, and probably not in a good way.
There's a kind of person that's best motivated by lists. My current job can be described as clerical work, and there's no surprise everyone around me is very list-oriented. Not being wired for all aspects of this work myself, I'm often given lists of tasks directly. I do appreciate it, even if it's the tiniest bit patronizing and a band-aid for a bigger problem. It's not too important. I find it funny how these people are so impressed by text processing models whittling down their calls' transcripts into more of their beloved lists with whopping 70% accuracy. But this is not what this post is about.
You know the old memes about people with clean homes having messy desktops and vice-versa? Those felt like they were everywhere back when the computer was the dominant digital doorway for most people. Well, as someone with a passable home, but a very clean desktop (the icons are even disabled!), as someone very bad at making and keeping to-dos for my actual work that keeps me fed, I still am someone who is kind of obsessed with lists. Lists of media, specifically.
Like many of my stories, this traces some lineage back to me sitting at the family computer around the start of the '10s, unknowingly enjoying the twilight years of the aughts internet, and looking for music. Yes, this is kind of an Eternally Incomplete Library post, and while I won't label it as such, that throughline is very strong here. For what it's worth, that makes two EIL addenda (to two EIL posts). Brevity might be a skill, but unhinged logorrhea is why this blog exists.
Anywhoo!
As previously described, I went through a phase of discovering what I had labeled as "real" music. And it was a long phase, long for someone that age at least. Gone were the loose MP3s of the radio songs that I thought sounded the coolest, the ones I could get a name of at least, downloaded from shady sites and Spongebob AMVs from YouTube via Realplayer. I was visiting the proper high seas, and downloading "real" music. You know how it is. You turn 14 and you get into Pink Floyd and torrenting. Whomst among us.
A lot of those torrents were more than just all the officially released music. I naturally gravitated towards the collections, rather than downloads of the loose albums. And my word, some of those collections just exude the internet magic I can't stop calling back to. For some bands, you could often find meticulous compilations of every LP, EP, single, Japan Edition, concert bootlegs, and even promotional art. Some of my favorite classic rock tracks ever are bits from the For Badgeholders Only bootleg, an unofficial concert recording of a Led Zeppelin concert from 1977. I would never have found this if it wasn't for these collections. As I mentioned in another post, I really got into categorizing and filling in all the additional fields in iTunes, I loved being able to sort and filter the tracks in so many different ways.
Inevitably, this is where I learned the word "discography". This is where, I think, I was doomed to a life of feeling like bodies of media are monoliths designed to be systematically chipped at, with intention. What does that look like in practice? Well, let's keep looking at Led Zeppelin. This band's first four albums are just called Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin III, and Led Zeppelin IV. Therefore, I had to listen to them in order. I felt absolutely required to listen to the more challenging stuff from the '60s, that I knew I was less likely to enjoy, before getting to the hits. Bands like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd were active at a musical tipping point, where a lot of conventions were challenged and a lot of tech was being used in novel ways (and substances lol). This meant I was kind of trudging through early stuff I didn't really like, telling myself I have to appreciate the work of these unquestionable geniuses, kind of like when a schoolteacher would confront you with a poem you didn't quite get. But I was doing it to myself, at a pretty young age. Perhaps this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I do sometimes wonder if I would have benefited from being sat down and confronted with a lot of classical Arabic music.
Of course, after I got to the good albums, I would hang out there. My most played albums from these two bands are the popular fare you'd expect from any self-respecting pretentious teenager.
In retrospect, it's kind of funny how much more important I thought these two bands were to general culture, the world, and the human experience at large.
I'd find the albums I liked, add them to my rotation, but I'd rarely reach the end of a discography before jumping into another one, which meant there were albums I didn't "reach" yet. So when I would tell someone that I am a big fan of Pink Floyd, and they immediately talk about their favorite songs off The Division Bell, I'd have to sheepishly admit that I haven't "gotten around to it". This album was published in 1994. Haven't gotten around to it?
I wasn't always like this. I was a voracious reader as a little kid, and I was blessed to have found pretty long stories that were aimed at younger readers - something that, if I really think about it, didn't necessarily need to exist. One series I loved dearly was a kids' fantasy, Charlie Bone, by Jenny Nimmo (Sidenote: I look her up every time I remember her, and I'm relieved that she's still alive at 82). Living in Lebanon, these books weren't always stocked during their run, so the first two books I received, a gift on my birthday, were evidently the only two volumes the bookstore had: the first book, and the fifth book. The fifth book happened to be the final book.
So, naturally, I read the first, and then immediately the fifth - the one that ties threads together from four previous installments and finishes the narrative. And as I slowly acquired the remaining books, the missing pieces of the story started fitting together, but there was something a bit funny about how all these secrets were already revealed to me, how all the revelations were something I was completely aware of, how the grand twist was something I knew before it was even hinted. Obviously that didn't hurt my enjoyment of the stories too much. And when I walked into the bookstore one day and saw a sixth book, I was very happy. That series ended up going three books past its ending, so I did end up getting new twists to experience properly.
I reread the series around 2021. The writing was clearly an older lady's impression of a young boy, and the accusations of this being a knockoff Harry Potter were a bit harder to swat off. But hey, they brought me joy as a kid. The more grounded British setting and toned down eugenics undertones (but only just!), and Nimmo's quiet old age post-writing, compared to Harry Potter's ahem interesting legacy... Well I think my child self picked the right series. I have no HP tattoos to regret, and no reason to always be ready in case I need to debate the separation of art and artist.
I am no longer as eager to experience things out of order.
But yes, the mentality of having a systematized Discography folder, and having to experience everything in order, pervaded past the music downloads.
Around this time is when I moved from an iPod nano to a Touch - which meant access to the internet and the early app age. I discovered, as every teenager does, the IMDb - and crucially, the top 100 rated lists on there. A list of 100 shows and a list of 100 movies. I didn't know it at the time, but I can totally recognize it in retrospect: I felt like I had to watch all of them. These were the best movies and the best series. And I therefore had to watch them.
I didn't. Of course I didn't. But I had to.
It's interesting that I reveled in having what I thought were niche tastes, while I also deferred so much authority to... mass user ratings? And that I simultaneously felt this need to go through that entire list, using it to choose what movies to next watch, while also being proud that half of my favorite movies were nowhere near it.
And yet, I tried to "know" the movies on there, even the ones I didn't watch. I loved casually whipping out a "Oh yeah, that's one of the highest rated movies ever" when I had nothing else to say about a movie I didn't watch as it came up in conversation.
And this list did guide a lot of the movies I did end up downloading and watching, no longer bound by the circumstance of whatever was being broadcast on TV or whatever my DVD my cousins happened to be renting when I slept over (they lived near a rental store and I thought that was the coolest thing ever). I know that if I dig deep enough among my hard drives, I'll find some of those earliest movie downloads, and music downloads. I don't ever want to delete them, even if they were in atrocious quality. There's a lot in there that I downloaded, waiting for the "right moment" to finally be watched. These files were downloaded over a decade ago. Many of them have been shared, and surely watched by others that have long exited my life. But the files still wait.
I haven't watched a movie in about a year. I haven't been watching movies at all for a while now, this isn't a "death of cinema" thing. I never had the patience for TV shows, I'll watch one every three odd years. My attention span is too emaciated for any serious reading (outside of airport terminals). My strained relationship with music has been detailed pretty holistically throughout my blog. What media am I actually ingesting?
Well, it's podcasts and YouTube, but most importantly, it's video games. Obviously. Look at how lovingly I wrote about a forty-hour municipal inspector simulator.
I got onto PC in the mid '10s, before it really blew up around 2020. PC has always been around, but it was temporarily playing second fiddle to dedicated consoles when I got my start. Of course, most of what I played was pirated, as is default here. But I had early access to something most people my age in my country absolutely did not have: a bank card specifically designed for online transactions. This kind of thing was unfortunately necessary at that time, and arguably still might be: it formally uses a US billing address, which makes a lot of things possible.
Well, possible if you still want to pay for them.
And yes, PC games were cheap enough that I did! Game bundles still exist today, but the early days of Humble Bundle and similar services were amazing. I would want a 30$ game, and I could get it alongside six others for 8$, for a one-off limited bundle. A lot of these were also indie titles made by smaller teams, so I was more motivated to make sure some money reached them. I found a lot of amazing games and amazing studios and developers this way, just playing games that incidentally got delivered beside something I knew I wanted. Very often, these would end up being more fun than the game I wanted the bundle for. Really, this was huge!
Quickly, my library grew, split mainly among two providers: Steam, where the bundled games mostly lived, and GOG, where a lot of old stuff was available for cheap. There was also EA's service, Origin at the time, I had that exclusively for the Sims games. They're not the focus of this post, but in keeping with the theme, I have indeed played all four(.5) extensively and I have a lot of thoughts.
At some point, in 2021 (typical), I decided to sit down and make a complete list of my games. And I really mean complete: a huge spreadsheet with the game name, how much I paid, who made and published it, whether I finished it, groupable by bundle, store, and platform. It spits out tons of statistics on how many hours I got out of every dollar, how many games I've played from each bundle... Even a randomizer to break indecision. I was proud of this thing! Little did I know that Excel was going to suddenly become much less fun very soon. But it was probably good practice.
Distressingly, since those early bundles, my library has only grown as my financial situation became more independent. I also started buying a few big titles (on sale), after upgrading my hardware. And these big titles were obviously not as cheap as the indie stuff sold in bulk. Still, I don't have any buyer's regret. I've played a few AAAs and they were great fun!
A big PC library is pretty common, and I think the list does help me digest it. Will I ever play all of them? Most certainly not, I've accepted as much. So how does the completionism factor into this?
I remember the launch of The Witcher III back in 2015. A game of incredible magnitude, by a studio that was still seen as an upstart. I was excited to play it, as someone who still positively thought of those open-world games. I bought it half off in 2017.
I have not yet played The Witcher III. It is over a decade old. But I have not reached it yet.
I played the original Witcher, in all its quirky glory, and I absolutely loved it, around 2018. Then I tried getting into the Witcher II, two separate times. A game that is famously nowhere near as good as the one that came after it. But I didn't really get into the second game, while also feeling like I really had to play it before jumping into the third one. Reportedly, the third game sold four times as many copies as the second - surely most people who played it and loved it, now or when it launched a decade (!) ago, than have played the second. And yet I still feel like I need to play the second. I bought it for two dollars and played it for ten hours, I can safely say I was not robbed of my money. I can let it go. I can play the Witcher III. The second game isn't even that good!
But I haven't done that.
This is just one example. There are tons and tons of games like this. One of the curiosities I picked up on GOG in ye olde 2014 was the Ultima series, a legendary set of games released between 1981 and 1999. They were giving away one of the spin-offs for free (The Savage Empire from 1990), which I downloaded, and without really playing much, I thought the old-school manual and accompanying documents were cool. So when the opportunity to buy the whole series for like eleven dollars came up (15.18$ adjusted today yippee), I thought it could be a great history lesson.
Or it probably would have been had I been willing to play each game for two hours. Instead, I butted my head against Ultima 1, to prove to myself how cultured and civilized I was as an enjoyer of the classics. Being ancient, it is unforgiving, a fucking eyesore, and not exactly a riveting interactive experience.
Can you tell which of these two is Ultima 1 and which one is The Witcher III?
You can probably tell that one of those can only really be enjoyed in an academic sense. Of course I didn't keep playing through the later Ultima games, because I never felt done with the very first. I played Ultima 1 for some time, enjoyed its quirks for what it was, and then bailed. Some of the later games are still held as the peak example of a certain philosophy of games, relics from a bygone age but a cherished one nonetheless, and I can play them at any moment - but I do not play them at any moment.
Big games, and big game series, like the TV series I've avoided so handily, have started to feel like commitments.
That's a crazy thing to say, right? Commitments? They're computer programs made to have fun with. I can turn them off. They're not exactly watching me sleep from behind the curtain. Most laughably, when I consider a game a commitment, I rarely even commit to it.
~~This year~~ This October (?!!), I finally played a game I had read about in a magazine around the time it came out in 2008. I have a lot of thoughts on it, which I might or might not articulate in a post someday. I had wanted to play Mirror's Edge ever since I read about it, and goddamn it, I finally played it, after deciding to buy it in 2023, a mere year and nine months prior.
I put off this game for, essentially, a decade. And then I finally installed it, configured all the mods needed to run it on a modern system, and pressed play. It was done in eight hours. I must be so glad I put off that massive commitment for so long eh?
What am I even doing with my time that I'm not committing to these games that I don't even act like I want to play?
Well, I play games that feel like less of a commitment. Counterintuitively, this is usually sandbox games and especially factory/automation games, which are highly addictive, take hundreds of hours to complete (if at all), are full of troubleshooting and planning, and come with their own set of quirks. After a tiring day at work, I'll procrastinate in a fucking video game, and go to bed fatigued. It's almost poetic.
The most played game right now on my Steam account is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, an automation game disguised as a city builder, with obscenely detailed mechanics. You don't buy buildings, you have to have functional construction industries to set them up. You don't magically draw colored lines to set up bus routes like in SimCity, you have to buy buses at the border one by one and then set up a maintenance schedule. You don't highlight a dark patch on the map and suddenly have a metallurgy industry like in Cities: Skylines, the fuck you don't, you need to set up a coal industry and rail transport over the course of thirty odd hours before you start cranking out steel. And that's without even considering food production, alcoholism management, pollution from the necessary chemicals industry, storage and handling of fresh meat, and of course, citizen loyalty to the Party. It's a fucking insane game by and for people who probably have to be insane themselves.
Why is it so much mentally easier for me to just sink two months of free time into this "game" that almost feels like more effort than my actual job, than to sit back and enjoy something I know I want to play?
Worse still, I mentioned that I procrastinate in the games. I put on a video in the corner, or a podcast, or anything to distract myself while I'm playing a game. I thought I was being clever when I first started doing this in university, to double up on the time I had for entertainment, but I think this was a contributing factor to the current lizard brain dopamine event horizon era I find myself in now.
Nice combination of words, isn't it?
If I want to properly enjoy a movie, or to be extra pretentious, a film, if I want to read a book, or critically listen to music, or play a game with a narrative that I care about, I need to be present. I have found myself standing over the sink scrolling for something to listen to to wash three dishes. I've put earphones in to throw the trash, a 3-minute chore. I have charred my attention span to a crisp over the past decade, and I think this has made me hesitant to be alone with my thoughts for a second.
I'm not describing anything new. Loads of people in my life are being very intentional about their phone use because they're seeing similar phenomena within themselves. But I'm amazed at how this kind of desperation for distraction has even wedged itself between me and video games, something that is widely considered a low-common-denominator activity, for better or worse. Seriously, all I need to do to experience some of the best storytelling ever made is to push a few buttons. And I'm too scared to do that. Lest I commit to anything. Better dump another eighty hours into Dyson Sphere Project.
So I finally played Mirror's Edge, right. I have finally ingested a story I spent over ten years waiting to enjoy, I finally experienced the novel (in 2008) parkour gameplay, I finally completed this leg of my gaming safari. It's just an eight hour game, why did I feel like I had be "ready" for it?
My favorite stories are things I've come across and enjoyed during a much busier times in my life. I feel like, paradoxically, having a relatively calm schedule and an irresponsibly lackadaisical attitude to fill it in for dear life has made me fill it with whatever expands into the space, and I feel like I avoid stories I would find meaningful. Every time feels like the wrong time, to start a cool game, to read an important book, to make a years-overdue phone call.
I genuinely feel like I am someone who has interrupted their life and failed to get it back going again. And I feel like itemizing media, for a long time, was a way to manufacture an obstacle out of what should be a diversion. A symptom of Bad Brain. Sure it has its uses, like the game spreadsheet, when I want to make sure I tried everything in a bundle I bought in 2017. Sure it can be a way to get introduced to new things, like when I was actually downloading the movies in the IMDb top 100 that tickled my fancy and following through on watching them.
But right now it truthfully looks like another pillar of wonderlessness. Taking things I should ostensibly be enjoying, itemizing them into a list of chores, and expending mental overhead on (extremely poorly) managing my enjoyment of thingsI should just be enjoying is not doing me any good. Sometimes life gives you the first and fifth book, and you still have fun.
I think a time will come in my life when I will have to just cut out all this stuff. The podcasts have stopped distracting me, and are feeling less like a fun way to stay entertained and more of a reminder of how much I really do need more of others' company. Likewise, throwing a video in the corner has finally gotten old. Sure, YouTube is an endless well of good stuff for those willing to wade in the trenches and dig it out, but there's so much more slop on there than ever before that it's really become an even more precarious slot machine game to get anything new that I enjoy. Seriously, half of my viewing history are videos I've seen before. I feel like I'm becoming an iPad baby.
I'm sure I'll be playing video games for a long long time, but I don't think I'll be playing Factorio ten years from now. It's not that I wouldn't love to complete Factorio between now and then. But such massive time commitments, that drip-feed dopamine and give not much else, are so colossal that they come at the expense of other aspects of my life. I find it easier to waste time in an endless game, barely making any progress, than to actually make progress in a game that I'd like to finish. Or than making progress practicing the guitar, or making progress taking care of myself. I am choosing to refer to choosing the worse path as something related to my lizard brain, but that's just a rhetorical crutch. My brain is making poor judgements. I'm making poor judgements. In a vacuum, there's nothing stopping a person from fitting even these types of games into their lives without displacing too many things. I'm constantly in awe at how people can fit watching shows and melting their brains scrolling in with a social schedule. It's the same way I can consume alcohol without feeling like I'm flirting with alcoholism: I have like eight drinks a year, I enjoy them, but I don't feel compelled to drink ever really. Perhaps I'm susceptible to these games. Perhaps I'm susceptible to falling into the trap of cataloguing movies or games or music during moments I really need to enjoy them in.
I feel like what happened with games for me is not dissimilar to what I've written about my relationship with music. Displacing music I felt was meaningful with "disposable" music, so I don't waste the good music on bad moments. Well guess what. Good music can improve moments! Music was such an important part of my life for so much of it - cutting it out for modern Muzak is just wrong!
And now the buried lede: postponing things indefinitely has unfortunately not just been something I have done to media. By breaking down the insignificant and just postponing the meaningful stuff, I have a fleet of carts in front of their horses. Here's a slightly less benign example than the games: I live in the Middle East. The situation in Lebanon is very, very bleak. I need to think about moving to a different country. I have been very capable of thinking about what items I should sell, keep at home, or pack up and take, of what relationships will have to change, and of what I need to pay attention to in building a life somewhere new. What I haven't properly thought about is what actual country I plan on moving to, what actual career I'd like to pivot to, what kind of long-term life I'd like to build. You know, the actual moving part of moving?
So many big decisions, so many ambiguous relationships, so many things to experience both at my desk and out in the world, feel like something I need to wait to assess properly. But I cannot wait forever.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this one. I think the conclusion is keep playing Factorio and worry about it some other time. It's been some time since I last watched that LEMMiNO video about Jack the Ripper anyway. I have an evening to waste.