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–December 30th 2016–
Realistically, I think we need to trim down our libraries to no more than what we could reasonably play within 1 year. This means we need to get down to about 400 hours (That’s about 8 hours a weekend) of playtime in our Steam libraries.
Chezni: 2000 hours = 1/5
LepcisMagna: 8000 hours = 1/20
Ideally, this means that as we clean up our libraries, I should only be putting 1 out of every 5 games in the Tier 1 slot, and you should be putting about 1 out of every 20. If we are to complete around the same time, this also means you would need to work through 4 times as many games as me per week, but I understand that this is likely not possible.
Tier System
Tier 1: Excellent games worth finishing.
Tier 2: Good games worth picking up at some point.
Tier 3: Mediocre games not worth the time to finish.
Tier 4: Bad games that weren’t worth the time put into them.
There will always be some gray space concerning which tier to put a game in. What is most important is to remember that we need to go into playing these games expecting to put them into T4-T2, which brings us to the hardest part:
We don’t play anything from T2 or lower. That guy who wrote the Reddit post is right. We’ll never catch up. We need to start letting go; otherwise we’ll never discover the new cool things that are coming out. Things may change tiers later on – I may realize that I actually do want to play Kentucky Route Zero and that it’s compelling me to play it. I may realize that Zeno Clash really isn’t as good as I thought it was and it needs to be lowered. But the bottom line is that our goal is to get to that place within a year so we have a clean slate.
–August 20th 2018–
It’s been nearly two years since Lepcis and I embarked on our journey to catologue our Steam games, and looking back, it’s been a pretty successful span of time. We’ve both discovered Netrunner, and while Lepcis got his master’s and binge-watched every good anime known to man, I’ve managed to get promoted at work and cook over 75 different kinds of hamburgers. As can be gleaned from our respective “finally finished sorting” posts, you can gather that we are both *very* happy to have burned off our unwanted Steam flab that was weighing us down, and we’ve been enjoying our slimmer, trimmer libraries ever since. If by some chance another human being aside from us is actually reading this, I *heavily* recommend following in our footsteps if you find yourself in a similar predicament in regards to your game library.
But the sands of time run ever through the glass, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that just a few weeks before Lepcis finally finished sorting through his massive game list, we have both set sights on a newer and greater challenge–learning Japanese. Considering it helps with accountability to have a recorded (and public) account of an intended goal, and because it’s fun to have something to look back on, I determined that the new Rules for our second challenge could be recorded here. And so here we go.
While studying leadership, I heard a motivational speaker say that if you spend 1 hour each day studying a topic, you’ll be an expert in 5 years. As it happens, every year in December, a Japanese Learning and Proficiency Test is held in America that has 5 levels of proficiency. This gives us 365 hours, or roughly 15 days, a year to devote to learning another language. Our goal then, is to use this time to raise our ability to speak, read and understand (audibly) Japanese in line and at the rate of each level of this proficiency test, at least, each year. Whether or not we decide to actually take the test at any point is TBD, but regardless it serves as our marker.
We’re about a month in already, but considering our proximity to December this year already, we’ll shoot for JLPT level 5 (the lowest) proficiency by about this time next year.
Why are we doing this? Simple. There are a lot of good things that come from Japan, but we have no way of experiencing them. Books, comics, games, anime, movies–so much of our consumption of our favorite media is at the mercy of commercial localization teams or hit-or-miss availability of fan translations. While reaching a level 1 JLPT would be nice, our true success is the day we can sit down and watch a Japanese dubbed anime without subtitles, read our favorite manga written in Japanese, or possibly best of all, finally have access to any game made in Japan, regardless of whether there was an English release or not. I’ll be the first to admit that a 5 year project is going to be much harder than a nearly-two-year project, but who knows–it could be that in 5 years we’ll be looking back on our 2nd successful challenge, whilst planning our 3rd.