I wish videogame culture would take more cues from readers

The book readers have it figured out. I listen to book podcasts and follow a lot of (I hate this word) bookstagrammers, and the turnover of a new year is the best time to do either of those things. This is because they're all reviewing their reading goals for the year that was and the year to come. Did they finish the number of classics they'd hoped? Did they finish the bibliography of Ballard novels? And will next year be the year they really commit to #JanuaryInJapan, when all over the world people dedicate themselves to reading translated fiction from the country?

I wish we did more of the same in videogames. Our equivalent discourse gets as far as ranking the best games of the year that was, and then immediately moves on to anticipating the next year's new releases, pre-emptively stuffing our backlogs with games we'll rue not having had the time to play when the next year draws to a close. Couldn't we set ourselves some more interesting constraints?

The problem - I don't think I'm blowing anyone's mind here - is in part that videogames culture is so commercial. Publishers make money by selling you something new, and the relentless marketing cycle has seeped into everything. Our awards shows are about games that aren't out yet, all our websites are mainly about games that aren't out yet or have just come out. Gaming discourse lies downstream from that, talking about games for two weeks after their release, then mostly falling silent until the inevitable remake or remaster.

While the discourse works this way, game playing obviously doesn't. A relatively new (but already recurring) beat on the gaming discourse calendar is shock at Steam Replay, which showed in 2025 that the median number of games played Steam users is just four. I played 63, because it's sort of my job, but the median being low doesn't shock me at all. When I worked at PC Gamer in the late 2000s, we could see that every month the best-selling budget game at UK retail was Theme Hospital, even a decade after its release, over and over again, and it was clear by the early 2010s that the audience that just want to play Skyrim forever is far, far larger than the audience that wants to seek out new games to play each week, or even every few months.

A healthier gaming discourse might find ways to galvanise and direct all the energy going towards older games, helping to generate better conversations about work that isn't brand new. As it is, it often feels that even 'forever games' fade from the wider conversation quickly: the likes of ARC Raiders soon ignored bar the patch notes, and everything else becoming a backlog item we never make time for - and stay silent about if we do.

"This is really just a complaint aimed squarely at us, the videogame websites."

Book culture is, by comparison, much less concerned with what's new and what's to come. The channels I follow might be hyped for the occasional new novel from an existing author (currently: Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy), and BookTok might occasionally overwhelm all other conversation for a few weeks (eg. R.F. Kuang's Babel, a few years ago), but by and large all of the readers I follow on social media are making space for books completely separate from the release cycle, and yet still participating in rich public conversations about those works.

JanuaryInJapan is followed by KoreanMarch. One novelist I follow (Holly Gramazio, also a game designer) resolved to read debut novels one year and aimed to prioritise short books this January. One host of a book podcast I listen to set a goal to read books about boats in 2025. The host of a different book podcast is currently reading, and blogging about, every regency romance written by Georgette Heyer.

These aren't challenges or competitions, like speedrunning or beating Elden Ring with scarlet rot applied, two ways games culture already keeps older games in the conversation. No reader feels bad if they miss their goals, or makes others feel bad for missing theirs, and there's space for even "mood readers" - who choose what to read almost entirely based on whim - to participate. (Mostly. I don't want to glaze readers too much, there are some wildly petty dramas in the reading nooks of social media.) The aim of hashtags and reading goals is just to offer a little structure to a hobby where keeping up or catching up with the medium as a whole is an absurd impossibility, and to bring a little community and conversation to a pursuit that can otherwise be solitary.

There are clearly videogame communities doing something similar. The patientgamers subreddit is a long-running home for folks playing games at least twelve months after release, and there are plenty of podcasts, such as Into The Aether, which intersperse deep dives into older console libraries among the coverage of new releases. YouTube, also, is home to an endless supply of nostalgic gamers celebrating Nintendo classics.

So maybe this is really just a complaint, and a wish, aimed squarely at us, the videogame websites. We're the ones that seem to set the tone of the most visible conversations. Several outlets have, over the years, made plays to cover games more often post-release (PC Gamer magazine made a big pitch for this circa 2004), but none of it has really made much of a dent.

It's a shame, because to my eyes, the people talking about books seem to be having a lot more fun than we are, as we tumble from announcement trailer to release date post to layoff news. I take heart at least when I read all the comments under What You Should Play This Weekend each week (for all of its two weeks of existence) and bask in the diversity of what you're all playing and how divorced it is from what's trending. Maybe it's all of you who need to be more at the forefront of the discourse.

Does this mean that Jank should launch JanuaryInJRPGs? Maybe. Not me though, I'm more of a mood gamer.