Regularly Playing
Games Played 2021 Edition
Well friends it is that time once again to do my “Games Played” post for the year. Each year this image becomes significantly less readable as I am slowly expanding the width of what is shown in frame. For those who are completely new to the blog or might not have experienced one of these posts before I have a strange obsession. Back in 2015 I started keeping track of the games that I played during the year and have since then expanded my spreadsheet to included 2013 and most of 2012 all the way through the current year. Why do I do this? I honestly am not even sure at this point other than I enjoy making data points.
The truth is that I used to use a service called Raptr and it was a great way of keeping track of what I had been playing at any given time. Once I moved away from it I lacked any meaningful way to collect the same sort of data for producing any sort of long term trends. In 2015 I started keeping track of things in a very simple format. If I played a game during a month, it got a tick mark regardless of how much time I spent playing that game. This allowed me to tabulate how many months during a year was I actually engaged with a specific title. There are ways to track things at a more granular level, but for me it was enough knowing what I happened to be playing at a specific time. This has allowed me to go back and see when I have dipped in and out of games like World of Warcraft or Rift, and when I actually started playing a new game for the first time.
Since I started this officially in 2015, you might be wondering exactly how I was able to back populate up through 2012. The first way is that I am pretty prolific when it comes to taking screenshots in video games, in part because I need a constantly flow of them to break out the walls of text in these blog posts. At the time of writing this I have roughly 120 GB of screenshots in cold storage representing roughly 34,000 individual screenshots. I have an unknown number of active screenshots sitting in various directories on my machine that I have yet to file away properly but they represent roughly another 20 GB. On top of this my blog itself acts as a pretty great journal because if I am playing a game regularly, I am likely going to be talking about it. Combined this has given me a pretty good view of what I was doing at any point forward from 2013 when I first started the whole daily blogging thing.
Top Games Played of 2021
The rules for this whole experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game at all during a given month I fill in a box, and then tabulate the number of filled boxes to give me a number of months I played a game during the calendar year. There are going to be specific “forever games” that game a regular showing and then a bunch of games that I only play for one or two months at a time. The biggest difference this year is that I made an attempt to keep better track of the mobile games that I happened to be playing. As such you see games like Mitrasphere, Tales of the Wind, and Undead World: Hero Survival consuming a few months. When it comes to mobile games I have this pattern of installing one, playing for a few months out of boredom before I fall asleep at night and then never playing it again. A new feature this year is that I actually got my shit together and started keeping proper track of the total number of games that I have played in each of the years. Notice there is this sorta trend where I dip back and forth between 70ish game years and 40ish game years. I think more than anything this denotes just how involved I was with any specific games that ate up all of my time, or if I was floundering a bit and trying to find something to really sink my teeth into… but failing miserably. This was very much a year dominated by only a handful of games, but you can see how it ranks against other years in the above bar chart. Let’s specifically look at only the games that I spent more than three months playing.- New World – 11 Months
- Final Fantasy XIV – 7 Months
- Outriders – 6 Months
- Elder Scrolls Online – 5 Months
- Destiny 2 – 4 Months
Top 15 of All Time
Another thing that I find interesting is how the games that I have played the most number of months shifts over time. The above graphic is sorted by total months played and shows 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now one thing that I need to talk about quickly is that some of the previous numbers were off significantly. When working on this years data I noticed that the numbers being tabulated were completely missing some of the past years, which means that some numbers went up a bit as compared to last years numbers. For example I did not play World of Warcraft at all this year but it is going to show that it went up to 75 over the 69 I listed last year. So with this correction in mind this is what the top 15 list looks like now.- World of Warcraft – 75 Total Months
- Destiny 1/2 – 69 Total Months
- Final Fantasy XIV – 67 Total Months
- Diablo 3 – 55 Total Months
- Elder Scrolls Online – 50 Total Months
- Rift – 47 Total Months
- Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
- MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
- Guild Wars 2 – 19 Total Months
- Minecraft – 17 Total Months
- Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
- Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
- The Division 1/2 – 16 Months
- Everquest II – 14 Months
- New World – 14 Months
Longest Streaks
This is something new that started last year based on a conversation that I had with my friend Tam. We were curious which games I had played the most number of months in a row without pause. This year I have expanded this a bit and added a bar chart to show games and length of a given streak. For the most part there is not a lot of change here, but we did add a new game to the “more than six months” list and technically there would have been two but I already had a much longer FFXIV streak. New World was added to the list with its eleven months, which is pretty solid to be honest as streaks go.Another Year of Gaming
This year saw a significant number of changes to the format of this post. More than anything I just expanded upon some footnotes that I used to talk about in this final section and turned them into proper charts. As I said before this game was marked by a handful of games that I spent a lot of time playing, but that does not mean that I also did not have several one off experiences. For example I had twenty five games that I only booted up and played during one month, and among these were games like Dragon Age Inquisition that I played through to completion. I think more than anything we are all entering the third year of this pandemic and have had significant changes in the way we exist in life as a result. I know I did not expect most of the changes that have occurred in my own life, and would have had a hard time predicting any of them. I know for me at least I want to spend way less time in my office upstairs… where my gaming consoles and primary gaming rig are… because it also represents my work from home office. I play almost exclusively through Parsec now playing remote from my laptop downstairs and even most of my console gaming is done through a remote play app as well. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold during 2022, but for now I am not making any predictions. If you are curious about the past gaming trends since I have started this experiment you can find my posts dating back to 2015 below. The format for the 2015 post is not quite following what ultimately ended up as my standard going forward.- Games Played 2020
- Games Played 2019
- Games Played 2018
- Games Played 2017
- Games Played 2016
- Games Played 2015
Games Played 2020 Edition
This was one hell of a weird year, I think for pretty much everyone involved. Traditionally on the last day of the year (or as close as I can actually manage to it) I have had this tradition since 2015 of attempting to talk about the games that I played during the last year. I am not entirely certain why I started doing this thing, but if you have been around for awhile you will recognize this sort of post. I do this thing where I keep track of what games I played during what months of the year. I think in part this has been my way of keeping track of when exactly I played something now that tools that I used to use such as Raptr no longer really exist, or at least I am not really using them.
The challenge as well is that so many games are spread out across so many different platforms. I consume content from Steam, GOG, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Nintendo Online or Xbox Game Pass. So instead of relying on a single source of information… I started keeping track of things in spreadsheet form and then collecting what games I actually touched during a given month based on what I had been talking about on my blog and what games I was taking screenshots of from my massive archive of past screenshots. The end is a compiled list of games that I chart in spreadsheet form… which is by no means as complete as tracking hours (which would be impossible) but does give me an idea of what my year looked like.
The Top 10 of 2020
The rules of this experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me the number of months in a given year I actually played a specific game. There are always going to be a number of “Forever Games” that eat up a lot of my time, but throughout the year I ended up spending at least some time in seventy different games. Here is the list of games that I played the most months during the year of 2020.- Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played all 12 Months
- Destiny 2 – PC – Played 10 Months
- World of Warcraft – PC – Played 9 Months
- Ghost of Tsushima – PS4/PS5 – Played 6 Months
- Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Played 5 Months
- Phantasy Star Online – PC/Xbox One – Played 5 Months
- Genshin Impact – PC/Android – Played 4 Months
- Hades – PC/Switch – Played 4 Months
- New World – PC – Played 3 Months
- The Division 2 – PC – Played 3 Months
The Top 15 Of All Time
Another thing that I like doing is keeping track of the total number of months I have spent playing a game since starting this. I have data reaching back to 2012 and that gives me an eight year view of my gaming habits and trends. Since that image above is way too small to reasonably read, going to once again break it out into a text list.- World of Warcraft – 69 Total Months
- Destiny / Destiny 2 – 65 Total Months
- Final Fantasy XIV – 60 Total Months
- Diablo 3 – 53 Total Months
- Elder Scrolls Online – 45 Total Months
- Rift – 39 Total Months
- Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
- MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
- Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
- Monster Hunter World – 16 Total Months
- Guild Wars 2 – 15 Total Months
- Division 1 and 2 – 15 Total Months
- Minecraft – 14 Total Months
- ArcheAge – 13 Total Months
- Fallout 4 – 13 Total Months
- Wildstar – 13 Total Months
Longest Streaks
While working on this post, I had a random conversation with my friend Tam about this process and that I was going through pulling together this post. To this he posed the interesting question of which game has the longest streak of unbroken months. I didn’t have an answer to this at all, which lead me to quickly compile a list of the longest streak for all of the games on the above list. It was around this time that I realized that if I did a longest streaks list… I would end up with a completely different top 15. Several of those games are played in short bursts over a large period of time which add up to a big number in the end. The end result is a bit surprising.- Destiny – 33 Months in a Row
- Diablo 3 – 28 Months in a Row
- MTG Arena – 23 Months in a Row
- Pokemon Go – 23 Months in a Row
- Rift – 22 Months in a Row
- World of Warcraft – 21 Months in a Row
- Elder Scrolls Online – 20 Months in a Row
- Final Fantasy XIV – 20 Months in a Row
- Dragalia Lost – 16 Months in a Row
- Monster Hunter World – 15 Months in a Row
- World of Warcraft: Classic – 7 Months in a Row
- Anthem – 6 Months in a Row
- ArcheAge – 6 Months in a Row
- Bloodstained Ritual of the Night – 6 Months in a Row
- Ghost of Tsushima – 6 Months in a Row
Other Interesting Data
In 2018 I played 70 unique games, which fell to only 48 in 2019. However with 2020 I returned to 70 games which means I seemed to be extremely restless as it comes to gaming. In 2019 I played 19 games that I considered to be “singletons”, or games that I only played for a single month and then walked away from usually meaning I bounced. During 2020 I played 44 of these Singletons so I wound up bouncing around quite a bit. I would like to play more single player narrative adventures, because I seem to really enjoy them when I allow myself to play them. However I still find myself being drawn back into the usual titles that I find familiar and comforting, which was something that I needed quite a bit during this year of Pandemic. If you are curious about past gaming trends since starting this experiment, you can find my posts going back to 2015.- Games Played 2019
- Games Played 2018
- Games Played 2017
- Games Played 2016
- Games Played 2015 – The format is kinda wonky with this one
Regularly Playing: April 2020 Edition
Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies.
Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.