I Started Tracking Which Games I Play and You Should Too

Three years ago, I started keeping track of which games I played throughout the year in a note on my iPhone. I even devised a simple key to track new releases and which games I rolled credits on.

I’ll be the first to admit that this is an incredibly nerdy thing to do, but it’s been an interesting exercise and one I’m going to keep up. In fact, I wish I’d been doing it a lot longer.

Why I Started Tracking What I’m Playing

If you think about it for a moment, keeping lists isn’t that weird. As human beings, we’re prone to forgetting things. I literally wouldn’t be able to do my job if I wasn’t able to scribble down half-formed ideas at inopportune moments. Sometimes you end up dictating notes into your Apple Watch in the shower like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Lists are little more than things we don’t want to forget. I use my iPhone’s photo library like a list, snapping a quick shot of a place I visited or a band I watched purely for the purpose of helping me look back and fill in the blanks in my memory. Lists can be just another way of journaling: recording your experiences to better help you process them.

While I no longer play games as much as I did as a child, I still spend a good portion of my free time with a controller in my hand. A little while back I started thinking about which games I’d enjoyed from the year gone by, as “game of the year” season approached. I realized that I could barely remember the previous three games I’d played, let alone what was hot in January.

Around the same time, I was listening to a podcast and the host revealed that they had been documenting which games they played throughout the year so that they had a list they could consult during end-of-the-year discussions. It was a lightbulb moment for me.

As soon as the year was done, I started my list. I devised a simple way to differentiate brand-new releases from old ones. When the next year rolled around, I linked the new note to the old one using Apple Notes’ linking feature. I now have three and a half years worth of personal gaming history.

I don’t just track the new releases, I track the old games I return to as well. It can be fascinating to see how many new games you really do play in a year, and which old titles keep creeping back into the rotation. Sometimes you’ll spot a game that you were once obsessed with but that you haven’t touched in the years since (like my month-long obsession with World War 2 shooter Hell Let Loose).

At the end of the year, you can get a quick snapshot of your “year in gaming” which is interesting even if you aren’t a podcast host. Thumbing through the old lists is a lot like looking back on those old gig photos. It’s more than just looking at game titles on a page.

Video games, like music and other media, can take you back to specific times in your life. I remember playing Mario Kart 64 in high school, spending evenings with old friends in Half-Life mods like Counter-Strike, and playing a borderline obsessive amount of (since retired) PS4 online racer OnRush when a friend was visiting from overseas a decade ago.

The only problem is that back then, I hadn’t started recording any of this stuff. Consoles and platforms like Steam track your playtime but they lack the sort of context you get from a year-by-year record. The best we can hope for are gaming wrap-ups like Steam Replay.

There’s one other reason to do this if you’re a bit obsessed with your gaming backlog. Since I also mark off which games I’ve completed, I happen to now have a list of games that I’ve started but never actually finished. These sit on the page, taunting me, reminding me I have unfinished business to attend to.

The next time I’m looking for something to play, I might boot one of them back up. Maybe.

The Simple System I Use

I use a simple bulleted list in the Apple Notes app, but any note-taking app or word processor would do. The key is to make it easy to access on the sofa when you’re basking in that post-game feeling of accomplishment or starting something new. I’m not obsessive about adding to the list, sometimes I’ll forget and add two or three at a time.

I add games in chronological order, with the games I’ve picked up most recently at the bottom. I won’t bother listing the same game multiple times in a year, but I’ll add my unfinished business from the last year to the top of a new list when I start again in January.

While this started as a simple list of games, I’ve since added a small formatting key to quickly gauge my year in gaming at a glance. Newly released titles (within the current year) are bold, with games I complete earning a strikethrough. Anything that’s still in early access gets italicized, and games I “help out” with or share with my partner get underlined.

At a glance, I can see that I’ve only rolled credits on two games so far in 2025, while only four of the games I’ve played in the last few months were actually released in the present year.

I Wish I’d Started a Long Time Ago

Can you imagine if you had a list of every game you’d played since you were a child? Or just the games you played during the PS4 generation? How many games have you forgotten about entirely? I’d extend this notion to books I’ve read or movies I loved but cannot name. Sometimes I can remember plot lines or scenes but the titles escape me.

While it’s not such an issue in the digital age, there are so many games from my childhood that I have only a vague recollection of. My dad and I used to mail-order games for the Commodore Amiga 1200, with plenty of big-name releases like Theme Hospital and Cannon Fodder. But many more were obscure titles, what we’d now consider “indie” games programmed by a single person or very small teams.

While I’m lucky enough to still have some of these games, most of them have been lost to the sands of time. I’m stuck trying to remember the name of that weird edutainment Battleships clone where you’d select coordinates on a map to hunt for treasure, or a simple shoot ‘em up that tasked you with defending Pearl Harbor from invading forces.

The same is true for the mobile games of yesteryear which have been seemingly forgotten even by video game preservationists. I’d bet if you scrolled through some classic iPhone games that remain playable today you’ll spot an old favorite that you’d completely forgotten about.

These games don’t have to be genre-defining masterpieces, they just have to be important to you.

That’s why I write down every game I play or pick up again. It takes a few seconds, but I’m glad for the reminder. Even the act of writing this stuff down makes it less likely that I’ll forget.

Of course, you could get super into this and start a full gaming journal. You could write a small review, assign gaming scores, and even record which endings you get or your character builds.