As someone who studies Psychology and is fascinated at how the mind and body both interact and also in-love with Video Games, I decided to tackle a topic that everyone can relate to—backlogs. The backlog phenomena is crazy, and is even multiplied through the multiple steam sales, and getting games at a discount. By getting so many games this eventually accumulates to become a "Backlog" or a catalog of games gamers must go through and beat one by one, until they reach the end. It becomes a catch-22 type of situation, because you beat a couple games and then pick up more through a sale - thus creating a cycle. There are other types of backlogs such as movies and television shows, for now lets just focus on games.
First, The Psychology of Choice plays a huge role.
If you ever look at your backlog and think to yourself "What game should I play" and find yourself having a dissonance, the Psychology of Choice is playing a role. Mainly, it's human nature to love options. We relish in this fact, we enjoy it so much with our multiple cars, houses, and consoles. People feel deep down that the more options they have, the greater chances of finding the choice that will satisfy your own goals and needs. But choice after a certain point can become disruptive, affecting the mental capacity. The reasoning for this? We love to weigh our actions as-well. We fear picking the wrong choice may affect our gaming experience. Furthermore, another phenomena is at play called the Reference Point. Whenever we have a huge list of options and we have to make a decision: such as buying an iPad after having a Galaxy Nexus or playing an indie game after playing a masterful story. Our point of reference changes as soon as we see better options: Well I can get the iPad 64 GB so why get the original, or why waste time playing a crappy indie game when I just played a well constructed game such as Uncharted 4. Our reference point changes, and we begin comparing everything to the last best thing we just enjoyed.
Second, The Anxiety
Something even greater that occurs when having such a huge backlog is the Anxiety that comes with it. I won't have time to play all these games. If I play a big RPG, I won't be able to reach the others. I have work, a girlfriend, school, etc I'll never beat them all. This anxiety gets to us: and it eats us alive. Further fueling this phenomena is something called Terror Management Theory: in a sense are passion for life conflicts with the inevitability that death is coming, we will die. This creates a war or a balance between life and death, trying to manage the terror that comes with our inevitable doom. When choosing and managing our backlogs the scariest thing happens: We will die one day, and some games we still be in our backlog. A bit over the top, but still contributes to the phenomena.
Third, Social Comparison: How a Backlog becomes Hoarding
The final piece of the puzzle the fuels this concept called the Psychology of Backlog, is Social Comparison. As human beings who are social, we love to compare are material aspects to others. Backlogs themselves have become a social and internet phenomena: we all get in groups and celebrate how crazy we are to have such large backlogs - but never question why we do it. We put on a persona/front and disguise to show that we as gamers have to have it all. We have to compare our backlogs to each other, we have to take screenshots of the 50 games we purchased the last steam sale, we just have to. This incessant comparison evolves our backlog into hoarding. We no longer want to beat games, we want to keep them. We want to boost how much bigger our collection is and how much bigger are egos are too. It becomes a staple, or a trophy even. A stupid one at that - because even for the social gratification, we gain this insane mental processes and an unhealthy obsession.
How can we overcome this?
Now, we reach our conclusion. The question becomes how can we overcome this? The answer is quite simple but difficult at the same time. Stop buying games. Give yourself a rule by only buying a game after you beat a couple. Don't view a backlog as a prize or trophy, but instead view it as a result of your rash actions. When people try to compare it and view it as a ego, educate them. A backlog isn't a horrible thing to have, as long as its managed correctly. So go ahead and finally overcome it.
