Best Of

1. Maybe if we had some kind of horse race display could be fun. it could be as simple as google doc bar graphs for every person. (each person would set up their own page and their overall progress would then feed into a master file with the graphs). That way we could see progress and use it for motivation as well as friendly competition.

2. Also I think the play order of the games should be optional. That way the unbearable grind through one game could be rewarded by playing a game you would enjoy right after.

3. A dedicated "backlog night"? There's a tf2 night, Raid nights, etc. We could all hop in mumble or something, keep each other company or offer encouragement/advice for games. People could even group up and knock off the same games together.

I would like a Kanban/Trello-style list of games in various columns, from "Backlog" to "In progress" to "Done". I already organize my games in Steam kind of like this:

"Games" is my backlog. "Started" are games that I've started and am (somewhat) committed to finishing. "Won't Play" is a combination of games I got as part of a bundle and games I tried but just don't care for. "Ongoing" is for games like Binding of Isaac and FTL that are randomly generated, although I think most of them have victory conditions. "Multiplayer" is for games like TF2 and CS:GO - when are you "done" with TF2?

It would also be helpful to get Metacritic and HowLongToBeat information on games, and maybe be able to sort by some combination of the two (like show me the shortest game above 60 on Metacritic).

If it could import my Steam library that'd be great, if it knew which games had "done" achievements and automatically moved them even better. If it can hook into Humble Bundle and deliver an electric shock when I try to buy a bundle, that'd be fantastic.

I have a few principles I use to approach my backlog:
1: Limit work in progress (from Kanban) - focus on finishing not starting. Have as few games in progress as possible and finish them before starting something new. I'm not great at this but it's something I aspire to do better.
2: I use HowLongToBeat to figure out what games are the shortest (while still being something I want to play) when picking what to play next.
3: If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. A game has to be very interesting or very short for me to consider buying it at this point. I have too many backlogged games, and I still wind up just playing BF4 with some friends.

Right now time is my limiting factor so I try to spend it wisely. I don't have weekends where I can do nothing but play video games anymore, so anything that helps me spend my time more effectively would be very helpful.

So a couple of years ago we started the gaming backlog of shamek has really carried the torch for that, the recent discussion @Linc and I had about the future of the site led to a discussion about what the next evolution of this should be.

The core idea of the gaming backlog of shame was to help people accomplish a few things:

Catalog their games
Track their progress (beaten/100%/unbeaten)
Share their progress with friends
Encourage each other
Review their experiences

To me, gamifying the experience of playing through your games library is what helps compel us to make progress on our gaming backlogs.

k, you deserve a prize for keeping it up).

So here's what I'm asking: What do you think v2.0 should look like? I was inspired a bit by Backloggery but their interface is awful. We would like to make this a core feature of the site, so give us your feedback. What would a perfect gaming backlog system look like to you? How would it integrate with Icrontic? What's the workflow look like? What should the rewards be?