Benchmarking has completely ruined my Steam play time profile

2 years 7 months ago

I don't know if you know this about me, but I love a good list. For the past ten years, I've kept a detailed spreadsheet of all the games I've ever played. The bulk of it catalogues games by platform, but I've also kept a list of all the games I play per year since 2010. Call me crazy, but this document is a great source of joy for me. I love being able to look back and see when I last played a certain game, and it's also interesting to me to see just how many of them I manage to play each year. I also keep similar lists for films I see at the cinema, the books I read, as well as the plays and musicals I see at the theatre. I'm not kidding. I really do love a good list.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm also fascinated by the amount of time I spend playing games, too (and yes, I do have a list for this as well - albeit only for my Nintendo Wii games at the moment). Steam, of course, keeps excellent track of your play time - and because it's always open on my PC, there's no need to keep my own version of it. I can just load up my Steam profile and gaze lovingly at the hours and minutes in my All Games tab. Except I can't anymore, because four years' worth of professional benchmarking has absolutely ruined my play time figures. It upsets me. Because I haven't really spent 130 hours playing Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. Or 38 hours playing Doom. It's all benchmarking, and I wish there was a way to scrub these games clean again so everything can be nice and neat and orderly again, and most of all, accurate.

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Author
Katharine Castle