01 · You Didn’t Forget the Game. You Forgot Why You Wanted It.

You didn’t forget the game. You forgot why you wanted it.

Somewhere in your library there’s a game you added during a sale, or after a friend mentioned it, or because a trailer caught you at exactly the right moment. At that moment, something clicked. You knew why you wanted it.

Then life continued. The context dissolved. The game stayed.

Now when you scroll past it, it’s just a title. The deliberate, calculating part of your brain looks at it and starts asking: Is this the right genre for tonight? How long is it? Will I actually finish it? And somewhere in that calculation, nothing happens.

The game wasn’t rejected. It was orphaned from its own reason for existing in your library.

This is not a backlog problem. It’s a memory problem.

Two different brains, one library

Daniel Kahneman described two modes of thinking. System 1 is fast, emotional, reactive. System 2 is slow, deliberate, analytical.

When you added that game to your wishlist, System 1 was in charge. Something excited you — a trailer, a recommendation, a moment of curiosity. That decision was made in seconds, with a context that made complete sense at the time.

When you sit down to play something tonight, System 2 shows up. It wants to evaluate options, weigh time investment, consider whether you’re in the right mood for this genre. It looks at your library of 300 games and sees 300 decisions to be made.

System 2 doesn’t remember why System 1 wanted anything. It just sees the list.

This is where the paralysis comes from. Not from having too many games. From having too many games with no memory attached to them.

Why recommendations make it worse

The obvious solution is to ask an algorithm. Steam will surface something. A recommendation system will narrow the options.

But recommendation systems optimize for what you’re most likely to click on right now. They look at your history and find the pattern. If you’ve been playing action games, they’ll show you more action games.

Over time, your taste as seen by the algorithm becomes narrower, not wider. The games at the edges of your interest — the ones that might surprise you — get deprioritized. The algorithm doesn’t know about that moment three months ago when you added something because it reminded you of something you were thinking about then. It also doesn’t know that you haven’t played it yet because you forgot that moment, not because you changed your mind.

The games you want to play are already in your library

Most people experiencing decision paralysis already own the games they need. The problem isn’t access. It’s the gap between the moment you wanted something and the moment you’re ready to play it.

The backlog doesn’t shrink by finding better recommendations. It shrinks by reconnecting with the reasons you made those decisions in the first place.

A few things work when recommendations don’t.

Reduce the list to what’s already installed. Once it’s installed, you’ve already made one commitment — you wanted it enough to use disk space on it. That’s a real signal. Work from there.

Accept that you won’t play everything. A library isn’t a checklist. Let some of them go without guilt.

Don’t choose. Let something surface. A random pick removes the optimization pressure. You don’t have to justify the choice to yourself because you didn’t make it. Once you’re an hour in, you’ll either want to keep going or you won’t. Either outcome is fine.

One more thing

“I wasn’t playing games. I was playing the game of browsing games.”

That’s how I described it when I finally admitted what was happening. I had around 80 installed games on Steam. Every time I opened it, I’d spend ten minutes scrolling, get distracted, and end up doing something else. I didn’t need better recommendations. I needed fewer choices in front of me at any one time.

So I built Maida. It shows you one installed game. You decide in about thirty seconds: try it tonight, or not now. That’s it. No library view. No sorting. No browsing.

Maida is the space you pass through before you begin.

It’s free, open source, and runs on Windows and Linux. If you recognize the browsing loop, it’s here.