I have a huge spreadsheet about games and here's why that's cool
By 1p 56 Comments
Hey! Know what's awesome? This baboon is awesome.
(Ethan knows.)
- Various game details - title, platform, release date, region (since it might be an import), etc.
- The day i started playing a game. (Full game, not demos.)
- The day i finished playing a game. (Some games obviously can't be finished; this is for games that have some kind of end point.)
- Some other stuff, like game clock if the game measures the time spent playing. Sadly there is no real standard for how to measure that, so it's kinda worthless as a hard data point.
There are now 437 games in this spreadsheet. Keep in mind, these are all games that came up since ca. mid 2007.
So let's take a look at some charts:
What does this chart say? In the last couple of years, i cared about games pretty evenly across all current platforms. Sometimes old stuff comes up too - the SNES games at 1.72%, for example, could either be games i played or games i intend to play in the future.
Now, before i pulled the numbers i did not expect the PC to be my number 1 platform. My PC was built in early 2006, thus i stopped playing resource intensive games on it a while ago. Yet 18.97% of the games on my spreadsheet are PC games. I just underestimated how many relatively simple games (technologically speaking) i played over the years, e.g. Plants vs. Zombies, World of Goo, P.B. Winterbottom, stuff like that.
I now realize that PC gaming has been diversifying more and more, and i didn't really think of it all as the same platform.
Next up: More charts!
So, why did i start playing almost 70 games in 2008, vs. 43 in 2009 and 39 in 2010?
- It was a great year for games.
- I was still catching up on games that came out in 2007 (an even better year for games, remember?).
- I first got a PSP that year.
Note how the amount of games i finished per year stayed about the same. Let's look at started & finished broken down by month:
This nicely demonstrates how more games tend to come out during fall than during the rest of year, and by extension how i play mostly newly released games. Not surprising, but still neat to see.
Note that i finished most games in August. I think this is because i was trying to make sure i get games out of the way before the holiday rush starts. I don't really know though!
Here's a timeline:
- Again, 2007 was a crazy year for games.
- See the decrease in activity during late 2009 and early-mid 2010? During that time i had a job that kinda messed up my priorities.
- See how shit went nuts in the last few months? That's after said job ended... aww yeaaah. I caught up on tons of games during that time.
- April 2010 was the only month since late 2007 where i didn't start or finish any games. Might have been playing a lot of FFXIII.
- This data doesn't indicate how much time i actually spent on games. For example in periods during 2009, i was playing Rock Band every day, at least 5 hours a week. I wish i had that kind of data, but tracking it manually would be too tedious. It'd be cool if the console makers gave us access to it, since they're obviously tracking it.
Here's another timeline, games started per month, separated by platform:
Not sure about this one. The main takeaway is that there haven't been many PSP games i care about recently. I still haven't played Valkyria Chronicles II and Peace Walker yet, though.
Also interesting is that the PC line doesn't show notable spikes during Steam holiday sales, even though Valve always gets me to buy a lot of stuff. And then i never play it. It sure seemed like a great idea at the time to buy that train simulator!
Various fun facts i discovered in spreadsheet-land:
- Examples of games i finished on the same day i started them: Halo 3, Limbo, Penny Arcade Episode 1, And Yet It Moves.
- Examples of games i finished on the day after the day i started them: Bioshock, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Heavy Rain, Gears of War 2.
- Longest recorded time between starting and finishing a game: Ouendan 2 on the hardest difficulty, at 414 days. Second place: PixelJunk Eden at 194 days. That's not including Encore, which took another 33 days.
- I generally don't beat games more than once these days. The only exceptions since i started collecting data are Portal, MGS4 and Bioshock. Started a second playthrough of Gears of War but never finished it. There is some ambiguity here with certain games, e.g. Gitaroo Man Lives!, which i beat on regular difficulty and then again on the hardest one. I'm not sure if that should count due to the nature of that game. Then there's stuff like Rez, which i have probably played through more than 15 times, but it only takes about an hour to do so i'm not counting it.
See? Data is fun! Imagine how much more interesting this will get 5 or 10 years from now.
Does anyone else keep track of their games like this? Please do share. You're also free to criticize my charts.
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