My Library

I always had a total lack of self-control when it came to Steam sales, Humble Bundles and cheap deals from developers. Now that I also review games, I get a lot of offers of Steam keys. Even passing on most of them my Steam library has balooned to a huge, voluminous number.

The eminently First World problem that this presents is that I have no idea what to play most of the time. There are loads of titles I’ve never played even once, or bought ‘cause it was on sale, even though I was too busy to play it. There are also some fun smaller games I’ve reviewed on a deadline and had to blast through that I might want to return to someday long after I’ve forgotten them.

A few years ago, when my collection was still young, I considered burning backups to DVD (don’t worry, it’s legal) and printing out artwork for them all. I thought it’d be nice to be able to browse through my collection, discover something I didn’t know about or hadn’t thought about in a long time, and to be able to install and play right away.

Any shoppers with gog.com will be familiar with their bookshelf account view:

So, so much nicer to look through than this:

…this…

…or this:

The problem with my original plan of course is that optical media is now totally obsolete. Someone suggested that I could buy and re-cover old books with game artwork and either create a hollow inside for a high capacity USB key or just keep a large (~4TB) external drive nearby that housed backups of the entire library so I could still install at will. I might do something like this yet, but I’d love to hear other people’s ideas on what I could do to present my content.

As we move our libraries to online stores, I think there’s a place for recreating the tactile relationship you used to have with your media. Cloud-based services are convenient and cheap and everybody (except for GAME, EBGames and GameStop) wins. I love my Steam library, that I can redownload any of my games essentially for free and presumably for a long time to come, but I would also love flexibility – to be able to view and browse through my content however I want. It must happen to everyone; you spot a title or an icon in your library and think “Hmm, what’s that again?” Imagine doing that on a bookshelf and being able to pull it down and read through the storefront blurb and reviews on the back.

If I decide to go through with it I’ll post a series on this blog about my progress.