I’m certain that it’s human nature to feel shame about things that we shouldn’t be ashamed of. We feel ashamed if we’re not monetising our hobbies. We feel ashamed if we sit down to watch TV after a long day at work because it’s not ‘productive’. We feel ashamed if we buy a video game and don’t get around to playing it. For me, those are all the same thing. I know I often feel this way, and from talking to friends, those feelings seem pretty universal.
As is so often the case, the Japanese language has a specific word for hoarding books: tsundoku (積ん読). More specifically, tsundoku is the feeling of acquiring books but letting them pile up, unread. Last year I read 51 books, infuriatingly one short of my goal, but I acquired an additional 14 paper books and 6 audiobooks that I didn’t get around to. At first, I felt ashamed whenever I bought a new book, thinking of all the others already gathering dust on the shelf. But after learning of tsundoku, which is not a pejorative term, I felt much better in myself.
I look at the pile of unread books stacked next to my bookshelf, which is full of paperbacks aligned two-deep. I look at the other pile of unread books in the bedroom, designated specifically as bedtime reading. I don’t feel shame, I feel potential. I’m not a slovenly oaf who can’t even read the books he buys, I’mpractising tsundoku. I believe this shift of perspective can apply to video games as well.
To apply tsundoku to video games, we might reroute the etymology to make tsungemu or tsunsobi (from asobi, play) and infer the same meaning.
We’ve all dropped dozens of dollars onSteam salesorHumble Bundlessimply because there’s too good an offer to pass up. If you’re anything like me and a slave to the live-service grind, those small, fun games you buy are often cast aside when the next season ofApex Legendsdrops. Some make a profound enough impact on you to occupy the entirety of your brain, but many languish in your libraries and hard drives like the precarious stacks of books in our bedrooms.
In his bookThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains the value of unread books, and calls your shelves of ‘to be reads’ an antilibrary.
“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones,” he argues. “[Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
I refute the term antilibrary, due to the fact that the word library already describes a room or building that holds hundreds, if not thousands of unread books, more than any person could feasibly read in a lifetime. However, Taleb’s point is about potential. Your unread books aren’t a mark of shame, nor of honour or status. They are a symbol of the vast amount of knowledge that you haven’t yet learned and your desire to learn more.
The same logic is easily applied to video games. The games you’ve played represent the experiences you’ve already made, memories of great stories and characters who will stick with you forever. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the unplayed games that you bought in a Humble Bundle in 2018 represent the experiences you’re yet to have. Don’t look on them with shame, as if you’re a bad person for not having booted up Jalopy or Sunless Sea (guilty). Look at these games with power, like they are new perspectives ready to be explored. Because that’s exactly what they are. They represent the excitement of seeing a wrapped present under the Christmas tree, a gift for your future self. They’re a digital pile of books next to your bed, they’re a spine ready to be cracked and pages waiting to be thumbed when you get a chance.
Maybe you’ll never play all the games in your library. That’s fine. If you played a new game every day between the ages of ten and 80, you’d play 25,200 games in your lifetime. 27,093 games were added to Steamin 2022 and 2023 alone. You’ll never play every video game, much like you’ll never read every book. If you actually attempted to play 25,200 games in your lifetime, you’d also miss out on so many longer, richer experiences that take more than 24 hours to complete and the host of joys in life that aren’t video games to boot. There are simply too many games to worry about the ones you haven’t played. Acquiring them isn’t a bad thing, it’s a statement of intent, a thirst for knowledge and experience, a commitment to broadening your horizons.
And if you still feel down about your four-figure Steam library when you log in to play another match of Apex Legends or whichever game you’ve put a thousand hours into, just remember that you’re not avoiding your backlog, you’re practising tsungemu.
