07 · The Pile of Shame Is a Lie You Tell Yourself
“Pile of shame” entered gaming vocabulary somewhere around the rise of digital storefronts. Before Steam sales and Humble Bundles, you had to physically buy each game. Your library was self-limiting. After, the friction collapsed and libraries grew faster than playtime.
The pile was a way to acknowledge the gap. The shame was a way to perform sheepishness about it.
The first part is fine. Libraries grew. The second part is a problem.
Why the framing is wrong
The phrase implies that the unplayed games are a moral failing. Money was spent, time was committed, and you didn’t follow through. You’re a gamer who can’t game.
But this framing imports values from other domains. A pile of unread books on your nightstand is supposedly bad because reading is good for you and you said you’d improve yourself. A pile of unfinished projects in your basement is supposedly bad because you should be productive.
Games occupy a different category. They’re entertainment. The math of a $2 Steam sale game you never play is: you spent $2 and got no entertainment from it. That’s not a moral failure. That’s a refund-tier purchase you didn’t bother to refund.
There is no version of this where you owe the unplayed games anything.
What the pile actually is
If you reframe the pile honestly, here’s what’s there.
A library of options, larger than any one person needs. Insurance against any given evening, where one of the games will fit your mood. Receipts for past versions of yourself that wanted different things. Some genuinely bad purchases mixed in with good ones, which is true of every purchase category.
None of these descriptions involve shame.
The shame is the problem, not the pile
The pile itself is harmless. The shame attached to the pile is what creates the avoidance loop. You don’t open Steam because you’ll see the unplayed games. You don’t try new games because you’ll add to the count. You buy games anyway because the buying is satisfying and the playing is now contaminated.
If you removed the shame, the pile would be a feature. You’d open Steam, see your library, pick something that fits the mood, play it, close Steam. Some games would never get played. That would be fine.
Practical reframes
Stop calling it the pile of shame. The phrase carries weight you didn’t choose. Call it a library, a collection, a backlog if you must, but not a pile and not a shame.
Stop counting unplayed games. The number doesn’t tell you anything useful. It only tells you the size of your collection, which is not a moral metric.
Stop apologizing for it in conversations. You don’t owe other gamers an explanation for your unplayed library. They have one too.
Treat each game like a possibility, not an obligation. The next time you scroll past a game you haven’t played, the question isn’t “why haven’t I played this.” The question is “do I want to play this tonight.” If yes, play. If no, scroll past without comment.
One more thing
Maida is built around this reframe. There is no count of unplayed games. There is no progress tracker. There is no completion percentage. The only thing Maida knows is what’s installed and what your behavior signals are. The pile, with all its imagined weight, doesn’t appear anywhere in the interface.
If the pile has been bothering you, it might help to use a tool that doesn’t acknowledge its existence.