My year in gaming / 2021

For the last three years I’ve kept records of the games I’ve played, just for my own interest, and to help more closely examine the hobby I put so much time into from different angles.

Each year I evolve the data I collect a little, while still trying to keep it manageable and not a burden. What I actually want is a service like Letterboxd, but for games. Services like Letterboxd, Spotify, Strava, and many more do an end of year recap with a bunch of interesting stats, and I love the idea of that. Lacking a similar service for games that ticks all my boxes though, I make do with Airtable. This year I decided to be more rigorous with time spent playing (where possible), as well as adding year of release.

So let’s get into the data!

Totals

In 2021 played 84 games (for at least 1 hour) across 5 platforms. I finished 34 of these. These are slightly up from last year (73/24 respectively).

I played games for 1207 hours (That’s 150x eight hour work days, why did I track these stats...). NOTE: This is by far the most dubious stat, as PS4 and Android games don’t track time played in any meaningful way, and hours may include some idle time, depending on how the platform tracks it. For PS4 games I’ve estimated based on howlongtobeat.com averages. Thankfully half way through the year, Xbox re-added time spent playing to all games on their platform, with historical data.

I spent a total of £506.36 on games that I played (this doesn’t include ones that I bought but didn’t play yet). This includes subscription costs, like Gamepass.

A year of Xbox

Xbox Series X was my platform of choice for the vast majority of this year.

I had a bunch of great PS4 games in the backlog, but only really played a handful of exclusives on that platform this year. I just never really turned it on.

Switch also took a major back seat, due to another year of no commute, and virtually no holidays outside London. I use the switch almost exclusively as a handheld, but my 3 year old got a lot of use out of it at least.

I expect this trend to continue next year, though the PC skew could increase if the Steam Deck ends up being great. Fingers crossed.

Patient gaming

Of the games I played, only 29 of them (34%) were 2021 releases. 24 (28%) of them were backlog games from 2020, and the remainder were surprisingly varied! I spent a lot of time doing the NYT Crossword on my phone this year, which technically started in 1942.

Of the 2021 releases I played, 72% of those I played via Gamepass.

Value for money

Value is more than just monetary, and I absolutely do not believe that on a game to game level, the length of games in relation to their price should be at all indicative of the value of a game (to me, at least). Two of my top 5 games this year are under 6 hours to complete, and one of my honourable mentions I completed in 2 hours. People value different things, interesting mechanics, surprising story beats, emergent gameplay moments, time spent playing with friends, cozy vibes, it’s different for everyone.

With that said, for *me* personally, Gamepass as a service is absolutely the best deal in gaming right now.

This year, Gamepass games accounted for 64% of the games I played, but only 15.5% of the money I spent on games.

Before you think, “maybe that’s just because you dipped into a lot of bad games you didn’t really like”, Gamepass accounts for 67% of games I played to completion.

Overall, (hardware aside), gaming cost me £0.42 per hour played. For Gamepass, this is £0.16 per hour, and for purchased games it’s an average of £0.61 per hour.

Surprisingly, I actually spent more hours playing purchased games (701 hours) than Gamepass games (497 hours), but this is overwhelmingly the result of playing Valheim (157 hours) and Satisfactory (92 hours) on Steam.

Game length

I don’t think I have any really interesting insights here, it seems obvious looking at the graph below, but the shorter a game is, the more of them I play. I definitely find myself optimising for variety of experience a lot of the time, and that sometimes allows me to find the really special things that I’m happy to sink 30+ or even 100+ hours into. Gamepass has really affected my mindset when approaching games, I’m much more willing to try genres I wouldn’t usually, and if they don’t stick, I’m OK walking away after a few hours. I don’t feel the need to “push through” until a game starts feeling fun.

My favourite 5 games of 2021

The only through-line that I can find in my 5 picks, are that they all feel like stories that could only be experienced in game form. You’ll likely never see any movie or TV adaptations of these for good reason. They’re about inhabiting worlds, making choices, designing spaces, and seeing where your own curiosity takes you.

5. The Forgotten City (Xbox, Gamepass)

The best Time-loop game I played this year (I didn’t get to Echoes of the Eye yet), the Forgotten City sits nicely in this weird sub-genre of non-violent games built by people who clearly loved Skyrim (much like Eastshade last year). It’s a small, contained town where you can freely interact with a couple dozen NPCs, engaging in conversation trees and trying to unravel a mystery, as well as the nature of the situation you find yourself in. There’s some very light combat, but it’s mostly a game about talking and exploration. It’s short, satisfying, and has a handful of really fantastic (and funny) moments. I also recommend the Noclip documentary about the making of it (it doesn’t contain any spoilers).

4. Unpacking (PC, Gamepass)
Environmental storytelling: The game. What this game is able to achieve narratively, through it’s mechanics alone (essentially pick up item, put down item, rotate item) is remarkable. It also finds the *only* satisfying part about the act of moving house, which is putting things in their right places. It’s surprising how emotional a cup, a diploma, or a soft toy can be in the right context.

3. Inscryption (PC, Steam)
I only finished this last night, it’s fresh in my mind but is so unique and audacious, there was no way it couldn’t make this list. If you don’t click with card games like Gwent or Hearthstone, this may not be for you, or it might be the game that makes you understand why that genre can be so varied and fun. It’s a game full of surprises, so read as little as possible and go in blind if you can, and you’re in for an incredibly unique experience.

2. Sable (Xbox, Gamepass)
Sable very nearly made my number 1 spot. The demo didn’t hit for me at all, I didn’t click with the art style at first, and the animation framerate rubbed me the wrong way, but a few more hours into the proper open world and it started to feel like a stripped-back indie Breath of the Wild. There’s incredible things in that game that are totally miss-able, and I’m glad I spent the time just cruising around the landscape, following my curiosity. I never felt challenged, I wasn’t trying to save the world, I was just trying to better understand the world and my place in it.

1. Valheim (PC, Steam)
I’d put 30 hours into Valheim playing by myself at launch, but it only really elevated to being my game of the year after two friends and I started semi-regular play sessions on a dedicated private server. The building mechanics allow for so much expression, even with the huge limitations they put on you, that it often felt a bit like a more adult-centric Minecraft. I sort of played it like The Sims: Vikings. Everything I do is to improve my current or future building projects.

Honourable mentions

A few gaming experiences that didn’t make my top 5, but hit me in a special way and are worth calling out are below.

NY Times Crossword

Myself and seemingly hundreds of other long-time Idle Thumbs podcast listeners discovered or re-discovered a love of crosswords when ex-Idle-Thumbs podcast host Chris Remo started his Daily Solve YouTube series (inspired by the very popular Cracking the Cryptic channel). I got a subscription for an intense 3 months and did daily crosswords with my wife on the couch after work. There’s no time tracking for this one, but somewhere in the realm of 70–90 hours is probably about right. We fell off after those three months (I think it’s a little overpriced as a subscription), but had a great time with it.

Halo (all of them)

I played through every single Halo campaign this year, having only really played Halo 3 on Xbox 360 on release before. Overall, I can now confidently say I get the appeal of Halo, and it helped me contextualise Halo Infinite (which I enjoyed a lot). People often criticise the 343 games (Halo 4/5 in particular) as worse because the stories are forgettable and make little sense. Let me just say, I think this is true of the entire series. The story is nonsense. The gameplay is excellent. I think Halo 4 and 5 are kind of underrated. Halo Reach is my favourite.

Townscaper & Cloud Gardens

These are barely games (Cloud Gardens is definitely a game, as it has progression, levels, and unlocks, but they have extremely similar vibes so I’m lumping them together here).

In Townscaper you start with an empty sea, and a palette of colours. You select a colour, and tap the screen and a foundation appears on a little island, floating in the sea. You tap again, and a little house springs up. You keep tapping, and houses keep building. They merge together procedurally in delightful ways, with little stairways, gardens, and pillars being added automatically based on the surrounding geometry. It’s impossible to make anything ugly. (it’s on everything, but I recommend it as a phone experience)

In Cloud Gardens you’re creating dioramas of overgrown urban decay. Each level starts with a sparse diorama setting, maybe an abandoned section of train track, or the top floors of a concrete apartment block. You find seeds in the level and plant them wherever you like. Vines on the walls, a tree here, some bamboo there. But in order to get those seeds to grow and flower, you need to surround them with junk. You get a random selection of junk added to your inventory, and satisfyingly drop them into the scene within a radius of your seeds. Each new piece of junk causes the nearby plants to grow a little. It’s a fascinating mechanic and the results are incredibly satisfying and equally beautiful.

Before your eyes

This is a game played almost entirely by blinking your actual eyes. It uses your webcam and blink-detection. You are placed into a scene, usually a memory of the character you’re playing, as you remember scenes from your life. You are stationary, but can look around, listen, but when you blink, the scene changes and time jumps forward to the next memory. It’s a perfect melding of mechanics and story, and is truly unlike anything I’ve ever played before. It took me just over 2 hours to complete.

That’s it! I hope this inspires people to either do something similar, or just discover some new games they might not have otherwise have played.

You can find the full raw data on airtable.

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