I keep one question in a drawer for the days I can't decide anything.
If I died tomorrow, would I still be doing this?
Morbid, I know. It works because death doesn't negotiate. The moment it shows up the lies run for the door: there's no time left to tell yourself the good version, the one where everything fits and you come out looking fine.
Picking a game on a Tuesday night doesn't need that much drama. But the mechanism is the same: the right question, asked the right way, leaves the lies nowhere to sit.
I asked myself these four. All four were the wrong question.
Which one do I start, when I own two hundred?
None of them. Two hundred games don't sort into an order, because there is no good order: build whatever list you like and the winter sale turns up and breaks it.
Tell me something else. Tell me how you're arriving tonight, how long you have before someone needs you, and who else is in the room.
Three answers, and two hundred turns into three. Choosing between three takes twenty seconds, which is roughly how long your head lasts choosing before it gives up and opens YouTube.
What about the game I haven't finished in three years?
That one isn't pending. That one is finished, you just didn't see the credits.
Try it this way: if somebody handed it to you today, brand new, never started, would you install it tonight?
If the answer is no, there you go. You're not dropping it now, you dropped it three years ago. What you have been carrying since is the receipt.
Isn't this just having less time than I used to?
No. That's the comfortable lie, and I told it to myself for seven years.
At twenty I had whole evenings and not one ounce of taste. Now I get ninety minutes on a Tuesday and I know exactly what I want. The trade came out in my favour, and it took me a while to admit it, because admitting it means accepting I wasted those whole evenings too.
What changed isn't your clock. It's that the industry learned to charge in hours, and we agreed to pay in hours.
And no, you're not some sad outlier. The average player in the US is 37, and three in four parents play every week (ESA, Essential Facts, June 2026). There are a lot of us. Sleepy, but a lot of us.
How do I play with the kid next to me without it being a disaster?
This is where I gave up, which isn't the same as giving up.
A dad on a Spanish gaming forum put it better than I can, back in June: he can't play without his son anymore, and the boy notices if he has got ahead without him (Myshkin).
That's the part no guide tells you. With the kid next to you your session stops being yours and turns into a show, with a schedule and an audience. And a five-year-old auditor.
So don't play your game in front of him. Play one where getting ahead costs him nothing.
All four questions are the same question asked wrong. Every one of them starts with "what", and not one starts with "when".
For when…
…he sits down next to you and has no plans to leave: LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. All nine films chopped into short levels, with the second controller plugged in.
He joins by hitting start and drops out from the menu without you having to stop, and levels replay in full whenever he fancies, so getting ahead costs him nothing. What it does charge you for is quitting halfway through a level: there's no manual save here, it runs on checkpoints, and it sends you back to the last one. Out in the open world that doesn't happen, you come back where you were.
Not for you if what you wanted was to play: here you're co-pilot and tour guide at once, and half the session goes on hunting bricks only he cares about. It's on PC and PlayStation.
Hit reply with your question, the one you haven't dared to google because it sounds daft. I read them, and the good ones end up in an issue like this.