Why I don't post about everything I play
I've never started a Backloggd account, and I do not think I ever will. I don't think I would post very often! Mainly, I don't usually complete videogames... because I don't often play games which I actually like.
I play a lot of games I dislike because I feel like I have to keep up-to-date on new material in my industry. But I also really enjoy playing bad games! It's funny and entertaining, sometimes, to play something terrible and weird or not-quite-fun. And there are people in my personal life whom I can talk to about that kind of thing, in face-to-face conversation. That's better than posting about it.
I also play games I dislike because they are built with interesting or instructive technology. I find that I don't like most narrative games, for the same reason I don't like most books that have ever been published. I think I'm typical here. But I do still play narrative games full of content I dislike in order to see their narrative tech up-close.
You can absolutely learn a lot from playing through narrative systems filled with content you personally find uninteresting. For example, I recently played what I thought was an extremely bad dating game - but I learned a lot from it! I'll talk about it at work in the future, for sure. I'll be using it as both a negative and a positive example. You can get a lot of very instructive examples from bad videogames!
But the main reason I do not blog about most of the games I play is that most them are indie titles, or very small games, and I fundamentally do not believe that most indie games need "negative" coverage.
I will only occasionally blog about small games I disliked if they also had a lot for me to love - if they were in that mentally-engaging, mixed-bag zone where I appreciated so much about them that I could genuinely praise parts of the experience as well. Landlord's Super was in that zone, for me.
But if I just really dislike something? Well, small, bad things - particularly brand-new releases - simply do not need negative attention. I don't need to warn anyone off them. I don't need to defend my stance on them. Whose life am I improving by waving you down, then telling you, "this thing you've absolutely never heard of before (and would never hear of without my input) sucks ass?"
Besides, I've been proven wrong plenty of times. Many of the games I dislike are certainly interesting to someone else. I can often tell that the games I dislike are extremely well-made, craft-wise. I would really hate to speak negatively about a game I hate which is a masterclass in craft.
I was assigned to run a small games website in 2015 and 2016 while working for Zam, a Tencent-owned games website company. While running that site - which later became Fanbyte - I did have a policy that I wouldn't cover any bad small games. I originally built that policy from the perspective of a website with the power to influence larger audiences, but I've found that I still hold that policy now that I'm just writing for my personal blog. What is the point of drawing attention to tiny stuff that sucks? It's like spraying sand in someone's eyes.
Power is still a part of the calculation for me here. I do get a fair number of readers on this blog. However, I get far more engagement on non-games stuff, and it's clear that most of the people reading this blog do not give a shit about the stuff I do for my career. So the real hazard with slamming extremely small bad games here is not that my reading audience would curse that game's future trajectory. I don't think most of them are even gamers.
The risk is actually that Bear blogs have uncommonly good SEO! They tend to turn up very high in the rankings for a game title search. I don't want to take a big shit on a very small game that way. I've seen that blogging about some of these games at all could really fuck with them unless the content was entirely neutral.
I've wondered whether I would write a post picking apart a small game's narrative systems if I didn't like them. I think I could write a couple different educational blog posts using negative examples like this... but I won't. Games work best as instructive examples only when the audience has actually played them. It makes sense to use AAA games as negative examples, but it rarely makes sense to use games with less than 500 Steam reviews in this way.
Anyway, that's why I don't post about shit that sucks! I think a lot of this really only applies to games, however. Very few people are publicly releasing feature films on game-developer-esque shoestring budgets. The same power differentials simply aren't present in that scene. So, I do have a Letterboxd, where I have been tracking every movie I've watched since late 2018. I shit on plenty of bad movies there!