Documenting Your Gaming Experience

I love playing games, and I’ve been participating in the Retro Handhelds Discord‘s Game of the Month community for nearly four years. In that time, I’ve played and beaten 335 different games. I know this number exactly, because I catalogue everything I play through Backloggd.

Game collection and cataloging sites are an excellent way to keep track of the games you’ve played. They offer a way to engage with friends and other users about the games you’ve played or want to play, as well as documenting your personal gaming journey.

There are several of these types of sites: How Long to Beat, Playnite, and Infinite Backlog are a few that come to mind. Some of these sites are super helpful for those with Steam, PSN, or Xbox libraries, as you can import your libraries from other locations to ease cataloging.

Why Bother?

That is an excellent question. Why take the time to create a profile on a site, search for a game, rate it, review it, group it into a list, and showcase it for others to see? I use Backloggd to specifically catalogue and review every game that I finish through the Retro Handhelds Discord.

Backloggd Games Page

It’s a large community, where new people are coming in and asking questions all the time, and it’s really nice to be able to go back and specifically pinpoint when I completed a game and how I felt about it when I was done.

Why Backloggd is My Favorite

Backloggd was first recommended to me by another user on the Retro Handhelds Discord. I’ve found it to be an easy-to-use and aesthetically pleasing option to document my journey through Game of the X, and there are several different lenses through which you can view and interact with your collection. Some of my favorites:

• Your Profile is where you can assign favorite games, see what your friends are playing, view your stats and badges, and even complete a short bio about yourself.
• Games shows you a list of all the games you’ve played. You can apply filters like Played or Playing, for which you can sort by rating, date, etc.
• Journal shows you a timeline of what you’ve played across several months in a tidy little list.
• Lists allow you to create lists and group games together based on your own criteria. Personally, I have lists broken out by the different GOTX categories and year, which makes it really easy to see what I played and for which Game of the X category.
• The Stats page allows you to view stats relating to your entire collection, including Time Played, Platforms and Genres, Studios, Series, and Categories. It’s a really neat way to get a holistic view of the types of games you’ve been playing, as well as showing what other games you may have missed or might enjoy related to what you’ve played before.

Improvements

Backloggd is, as I mentioned earlier, a completely free site. However, there is an option to support the creator through Patreon (yours truly is a supporter, aka Backer), and doing so can get you a couple of additional site perks, along with previews and updates from the site’s creator. The thing I love the most about Backloggd is that the creator is active, listening, and working hard to improve the site based on user feedback and suggestions.

Backloggd Backer Email Snippet

As I’ve received these previews and updates, I’ve learned that Backloggd has mostly been a side project for the creator until roughly this year. Now that Backloggd is getting the creator’s full attention, the amount of recent growth that the site has gone through this year is nothing short of incredible.

Give it a Shot

Maybe this is just a thinly veiled attempt to get more people to write, but I honestly think documenting your gaming journey is a fun experience! It’s a way to see what you’ve played, when you played it, and an easy way to catalogue your thoughts and opinions. I like interacting with others on the site who share my same love of gaming, and it’s been a fun way to watch my journey through Games of the Month.

Backloggd Notifications

Whatever site you use, and however you choose to interact with the medium, I implore you to give it a try. Who knows, you might find a new way to augment your gaming experience.

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