Games are most of my free time
This used to be one paragraph on my About page, and that undersold it considerably. Games are one of my actual passions, not a hobby I list to seem well rounded. So here's what's installed, what I keep going back to, and what I'm currently poking at.
Where this started
A very old PC in my primary school's computer lab, when I was eight, that nobody could get working. I had never touched a computer before in my life. I fixed it anyway, mostly by refusing to leave it alone, and my teacher gave it to me to take home. That's the whole origin story. The first computer I ever owned was one I earned by fixing it before I knew what I was doing.
Everything else on this site is downstream of that afternoon. The self-taught thing, the homelab, the refusal to accept that something is simply broken. It all started with a machine somebody else had given up on. I still work that way. That afternoon taught me that broken usually means nobody has sat with it long enough yet, and I've never found a good reason to stop believing it.
After that came a Nintendo 64, a Game Boy, a PlayStation 1 and an Xbox, then Neopets and MapleStory, then Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic. That's where the multiplayer half of my brain got wired. Since then I've played most of the things you'd name: Halo, Zelda, Monster Hunter, and a truly unreasonable amount of Final Fantasy, XI and XIV very much included.
What I actually like
My taste isn't subtle and the hour counts give it away immediately. I want progression systems, survival mechanics, and RPG systems. Games you can sink hundreds of hours into and still not really be finished with. If there's a skill tree, a crafting chain, or a number that goes up in a way I can plan around, I'm already interested.
There's an obvious overlap with the rest of this site. I gamified my own self-care app, and my About page is literally a character sheet. I find a well-designed progression loop beautiful in the same way I find a well-designed API beautiful. A good system is a good system.
The other half of it is co-op. A lot of what's installed right now is short, chaotic, and better with other people in a call. Those don't accumulate hundreds of hours each, but they're the ones that actually get played on a given evening.
The phases, in order
My taste has moved in fairly clean stages, and I can name all of them.
As a kid it was pure enjoyment and wonder. No strategy, no meta, no opinion about balance. Just the fact that a screen could be a place. Have I ever got that exact feeling back? No. I've stopped expecting to.
As a teenager it was competitive shooters, and that's where the wonder got traded in for wanting to be good at something measurable. As a young adult it was StarCraft and League of Legends, same instinct, much steeper wall attached. I got a lot out of both and I also know exactly what they cost me in evenings.
The throughline underneath all of it is RPGs. RPGs, MMOs, and anything progression-based have never left, through every other phase. Solo RPGs, multiplayer RPGs, it doesn't matter which. If there's a character to build and a build to plan, I've probably already started.
Where I've landed now is different again, and it's less about the games than about who's in the call. I mostly play things that let me socialize at the same time. That's the actual filter these days. A game that's excellent but demands total silence and full attention loses to a mediocre one I can play while talking to people I like. I'd have found that embarrassing at nineteen. At thirty-six it's just true.
Currently obsessed with
Gloomhaven and MTG are both new to me and I'm learning them properly instead of button-mashing through. That's its own kind of fun: being bad at something again, on purpose, with people patient enough to explain it twice.
The RPGs I keep going back to
If you want my taste as a list instead of a paragraph, this is it.
🏆 My favourite games, sorted
🕹️ Installed and in rotation
A snapshot of what's sitting on my desktop right now, not a curated favourites list. Some are long-term. Some I tried once and haven't uninstalled yet. I think that's a more honest picture of how anyone's library really looks.
Two of those are launchers, not games. Riot Client is Teamfight Tactics and League of Legends. Hytale, Enshrouded and Palworld are the three I also built server stacks for. They are offline now, but hosting them was a different relationship with a game entirely and taught me more about Docker than any tutorial managed.
⏳ Where the hours actually went
Every game I've put serious time into, on one chart, whether or not Steam knows about it. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most of the biggest entries here don't run through Steam at all: they're Battle.net, Riot, browser games, consoles and launchers that predate Steam existing. A page built only on Steam's numbers would have quietly left out the larger part of my life in games.
Two different standards of evidence are stacked here on purpose. The Steam figures are measured. The off-Steam ones are my own recollection, because Battle.net doesn't hand you a lifetime total and a browser game from 2003 certainly doesn't. Treat the second group as an honest estimate, not a receipt.
Six years of continuous play, give or take, spread across about twenty-eight years of owning a computer. That averages out at roughly five hours a day, which sounds implausible until you remember that an MMO habit doesn't average. It arrives in twelve and sixteen hour days that run for months at a stretch, and then in years where the game isn't installed at all. The average is the arithmetic. The raid nights are what happened. The one thing I'll say for the shape is that it's consistent: persistent worlds, progression systems, and a strategy habit that starts at Brood War and never really stopped. The "in my Steam library" tag on this chart means I own the game there, not that Steam supplied every one of those hours: a few of those totals blend time played across other platforms too, so they don't nest cleanly inside the Steam-only 9,014 below the way a strict subset would.
🗡️ The hole where an MMO should be
Right now I'm not in one, and I'd like to be. That's the state of things: between MMOs, looking for the next one, picking at a lot of smaller games in the meantime. The library below has an obvious pattern of me trying every MMO that appears and bouncing off most of them. That turns out to be what "looking" looks like from the outside. Lost Ark and New World are both on that chart at a few hundred hours each. That's exactly what a failed audition looks like next to five thousand.
So what am I after, if you've got a recommendation? Real progression that respects the time I put into it. A world worth being in and not a lobby with extra steps. Ideally not a second job. Tell me what I'm missing →
💸 Nineteen years of Steam, totalled up
Account made 10 December 2006. These are real figures off my account, not anything I've rounded in my own favour, and a couple of them aren't especially flattering.
Nine thousand hours is a little over a full year of my life if you ran it end to end, and that's Steam alone. It's also comfortably the smaller half of the chart above.
The split is roughly two thirds paid games and one third free-to-play, with mostly Team Fortress 2 and Destiny 2 doing the heavy lifting. Thirty-six cents an hour is, in fairness, an absurdly good rate for entertainment. That's the number I point at when someone says gaming is expensive.
And then there are the 131 games I've never once opened. That's CDN$365 of good intentions sitting in a list. Every one of them was bought in a sale by someone who was certain they would get to it. I'm including it here because a library page that only shows the hours is telling you half the truth.
⌛ How that time breaks down
Every game I own, bucketed by how long I spent in it. The shape is the honest one: a small number of games I've properly lived in, and a very long tail I bounced off inside an hour.
The two biggest bars are the two I'm least proud of, and they add up to 244 games, nearly half the library, that never got a real hour. Meanwhile 42 games account for the overwhelming majority of those 9,014 hours. That's what a nineteen-year library actually looks like when you stop curating it.
📚 The whole library, searchable
A searchable index of the library, accumulated since December 2006. Type a name to check whether I've got it. Fair warning: owning and having played are two very different numbers, and the chart above isn't going to let me pretend otherwise.
This index holds 458 titles against a true owned count of 520. The gap is bundle filler, delisted things, and a few entries that resolve to something other than a game. I haven't padded the list to make the two numbers agree. A miss here also doesn't mean I haven't played something. Plenty of what shaped my taste was on a console or another launcher entirely, and a lot of it predates Steam existing.
📊 What that library is made of
Sorted into rough buckets by hand, because a library list doesn't come with genre labels attached. The shape is about what you'd expect from the rest of this page.
🧬 Series I have gone all the way into
Counted straight from the titles in my Steam library, not from memory. The number is how many entries of that series I own. Hover a tile to see exactly which ones. Blizzard is the one tile I counted by hand instead of by Steam. None of it ships there, and leaving my favourite publisher off a page about what I've gone all the way into would have been a strange kind of accuracy.
View the full library on Steam ↗
🖥️ What I play on
The main rig
Does triple duty: gaming, streaming, and hosting whatever local AI I'm running that week. The full breakdown lives on the infrastructure page.
The whole setup →Steam Deck
The portable half. Good for the long-progression games specifically, because those are the ones worth picking up for twenty minutes at a time without losing the thread.
VR
Mostly VRChat. Less a game than a place to be. It's one of the few social spaces I've never found draining the way voice calls sometimes are.
The ones I turned into infrastructure. I hosted Hytale, Enshrouded and Palworld, monitored them, and wrote status tooling that fed both the site and Hazel. The smaller VPS does not run them now. The project still taught me more about Docker, APIs and reverse proxies than any tutorial did, so the honest archive stays. The Game Server Archive is here →