I also do my best to avoid reviews and scores. Sometimes I check on them, but generally I give them no weight.
Most people aren't autodidacts... even elite atheletes have coaches.
I tend to play older games, and games I can pick up and play for five minutes at a time. Think Game Boy. A level here and a level there can feel like you've achieved way more than some longer, more grindy games.
I keep a couple of lists of games.
A massive "sounds interesting" list of games that I hear about along the way. I may never play some of them, but it sounded good at the time. Title and system is about all I put here. If I come back and don't remember what it was, it probably wasn't as interesting as I thought.
The other is list with WIP, started, and finished games.
If something slides into the started pile and I forget where I was, I just remove it. Life is too short to worry about things that are supposed to be fun.
In general I'm like this, but I also have games that are exclusions to the rule that I pop back around to from time to time, like the save I have in Factorio that I come back to and tinker with now and then (I keep a text file around with my general to-do list so I don't spend an hour running around the base trying to remember what the hell I was doing, while marveling at various bits of kludged together spaghetti)
As for books, I'm generally working through at least 3 at a time: One on audible, for commutes, one on my kindle, and one in print. I try to keep the kindle/print books varied so I switch between whichever strikes my fancy at the moment.
My previous strategy was to begin a game, that would be my main game, while sampling others on the side. If one of the side games caught my interest more, it would take the main game's place, and I might return to the original game later.
This approach was low-pressure, but it often took me years to complete many games.
I used to handle my side projects similarly, starting numerous projects but rarely bringing them to completion. Lately, I've been making an effort to stick with a side project long enough to at least show it to friends.
Now, I'm pushing myself to stay committed to two games at a time. One game is from top of my list that I really want to play. The other is a shorter one. This way I can enjoy that satisfying feeling of accomplishment more frequently.
I'd never considered making a spreadsheet for this, but now I'm intrigued by the idea!
I've been following the same approach, but also noticed that it's less effective at utilizing my excitement. Every project hits the point where sooner tedious work must be done and I've found myself sometimes stay away from it for a few weeks and not pick up something I'm excited about because I should really work on the tedious thing, so I work on neither.
And wow storing them all as JSON that’s cool. I wish there was something with as much data as IGDB but you could download and access as easily as JSON files. Their API is really good but obviously has rate limits, etc.
I used Airtable to solve 3 problems:
1. With so many free games (Epic, GoG, PS+, Gamepass, etc), it's hard to know if/where I own a game 2. With so many owned games, it's hard to pick a thing to play. 3. Keeping track of what games I've played and how I felt about them. I do a big writeup of "my best media of the year" and it's hard to keep track of what I play.
Data wise, I also center everything on the IGDB ID, which gives me a lot of basic metadata. I also store Steam ID if available, because that's a more common foreign key. I've got a custom React extension that handles adding and fetching data. I've got tables for Games, Purchases, and Playthroughs, plus support for replay reasons and genre selection.
I recently did a big migration to add HLTB data, which I sure __thought__ was going to be simple and ended up being a big pain. I'm going to do a writeup for it once I find the time, because it did end up being interesting.
In terms of existing data, I found https://github.com/leinstay/steamdb very useful for collating information (though I had to shrink it a bit with `jq`- those are some pretty hefty JSON documents.
Here's my completed games list: https://airtable.com/shrJvjcnh0psf3ha6/tblF5D5k2qMuzrao8
I've got similar setups for books, movies, and TV shows. They're all linked on my site: https://xavd.id/#my-media-lists
I totally agree this is overkill for most people, but I've also found it super successful for increasing my enjoyment of videogames in an odd way. A bit part of that recently was recategorizing games from a 1-4 scale of interest level to a more human scale of "Play Next", "Play Soon", "Want to Play", "Play Eventually", "Would Like to Play", and "Won't Play". This lets me functionally hide games that I really don't intend to play (especially ones I just added to accounts for free). Narrowing my "Play Next" list down to about 15 games and restricting "Now Playing" to ~ 1 / platform __greatly__ reduces the cognitive overhead of a "backlog" and turns them into "a fun buffet of things I can do".
The important parts for me were:
* Don't assume you'll play everything or stress about "missing" games
* Easy visibility into what I'm currently playing, what I liked in the past, and what I've been thinking about playing next
* Try not to play more than 2 games concurrently. Then I end up never finishing anything, I appreciate the games I play less, and then I have less fun playing games overall.
Bonus points with this approach: Since I always have something I'm excited to play next, I'm never in a rush to buy games new. I actually save a fair amount of money because I'm almost always playing games a couple years old and on sale for 50%+ off.
This approach has been so successful and enjoyable for me I even thought about spinning this off into a product online but figured my weird OCD approach maybe isn't that generally applicable to other. Plus you can just create your own Airtable tailored to your own needs.