:-0 I Got Kicked Out of the 2018 Retrocollect 52 Games Challenge!

Hello everybody 🙂

There is a yearly event, hosted by the Retrocollect online gaming community, called the 52 game challenge. It’s a computer game playing informal event, it has been running for a few years, and usually it’s a fun thing to participate in.  The idea is to play and complete 52 computer games within a year, with the games being free choice and accordingly being of varying genres and lengths.

I got kicked out of the 2018 52 game challenge recently because, according to the no doubt superior gamers over in the retro collect topic, the games I play are a load of fluff and all equivalent to playing (and I quote) “Fidget Spinner 2017”.

I completed this challenge three years running (I completed it twice last year) and will allow that this year some of my completed games have been somewhat less sturdy overall, than in previous years. But… so what, really? I find it very peculiar that certain other gamers are so deeply upset by me playing a variety of games including some which are lightweight.

The concept of the challenge was completely undefined for the first year, apart from the stipulations that participants should aim to complete 52 games before the end of the year and also should upload screenshots or photos to “prove” that they had completed each game. Anybody could take part for whatever reason, and could play whatever they like.

The second year, somebody else got kicked out of the challenge because they’re a game reviewer who kept posting links to their reviews. These reviews were hosted on their own website and included several photos and a good description of each gaming experience. Retro collect does not let you upload pictures directly, so it’s a pain in the backside to submit photos to the thread. All of the participant’s reviews were solid and on their own website, with photos. I don’t see the big problem. But he got told to gtfo, on the basis that “he wasn’t posting photos to the thread to prove that he had played each game”.
Another participant got very upset and left voluntarily, after a convoluted discussion about whether DLC “counts” as a separate game or an extension of a game, and whether a game is “complete” without the DLC having been played. My view on this is that DLC is hugely variable, with mission based expansions ranging from multiple brief extensions of the main game (as is the case for Dragon Age or Sleeping Dogs) to being mid-length semi-independent games (as was the case for TTG: The Walking Dead “300 Days After” and “Michonne” DLC), with some DLC effectively being a full sequel (such was the case with Hare in the Hat’s “The Abyss” DLC). My view on the matter is that people should be allowed  to define their own 52 game challenge to suit their own personal goals, particularly since DLC is so hugely variable.
There was also some palaver about the same person wanting to count each chapter of “Life is Strange” as a separate game. Which is no problem, in my opinion. I counted all six chapters as one game, but if somebody wants to count each one separately for a total of six then I don’t see the problem. Perhaps they have less time than I do to play games, or just need extra motivational boost by having a sense of playing lots of games. Certainly a lot of games are about the same length as a single chapter of “Life is Strange”, being around 1.5-2 hours long each.  Apparently, the challenge host disagrees. He was determined to impose various notions on the challenge participants regarding what does or does not count as “a game” for the purpose of the challenge, by imposing difficult to administer and poorly defined rules, and did not deign to reply to my post calling him out on his nonsense. Rather upset, the other participant understandably gave up on the challenge altogether when faced with such constraints being imposed on them.

Then this third year, seemingly the guy hosting it has taken the notion that only “console games and those with a console release” are allowed, to “prevent people submitting fluff and ruining the challenge for others”, or “playing fan versions which aren’t real games”. One guy got told to gtfo because he wanted to try and do 52 mario hack games on the hardest setting. Which imho is a perfectly good challenge concept.
I commented that the challenge is a personal one, not one against other members , that everyone has their own reasons for doing it, and said that in my opinion there shouldn’t be a problem with that. During the third year I had a big steam backlog from humble bundles and wanted to try new game experiences of all sorts, much like I had done during the second year of the challenge. I also noted that since console games last anything from 30 minutes to over hundreds of hours long (with some having no ending) it was absurd to view it as a competition among members.
A bunch of people teamed up to badger me about how all I play is a bunch of crap, and claim that I was “ruining the fun” and “diluting the challenge for others” by only playing “trivial fluff”… which I think is nonsense. I am told that this kind of heavy handed judgemental gatekeeping is present in all sorts of hobbies, ranging from (and including) book reading challenges, to song writing challenges.

One of the reasons my games this year were shorter is because I was playing obscene amounts of ingress, and over the last few months decent amounts of Pokémon go. A lot of games just don’t ever end. I sunk many hours (I think it was 50 hours in the end) into Puzzle Quest, which is a good game and very fun but the final boss is a notorious shameless big hairy psychic cheat and I couldn’t get past him due to unfair game algorithms after all that time. I think it’s perfectly ok to balance that by playing stuff like Sonic Chaos, Lion King, Pony Island, or even “5 minutes to kill yourself”.
I don’t even know what they are complaining about. I play a good range of game genres and lengths, on a wide range of different platforms. I didn’t even submit “Don’t shit your pants”, despite being very proud of completing the game by successfully avoiding shitting my pants. 😉

Worth noting is that it was a completely different guy who thought of the challenge then hosted it during the first year. The second guy barged up around 20th December 2016 and declared that if the first guy had no problems with it then he would be hosting the next year’s challenge.  He didn’t ask whether anybody else wanted to host it last year … or this year, either. Instead, he just started a new challenge topic towards the end of December.
When I was resistant to the idea that it was legitimate to kick me out of this year’s challenge, he started throwing a big drama king fit over how he allegedly “took over the challenge when the previous owner unceremoniously dumped it” , and “[isn’t] paid for this and [has] a job, running the challenge is cutting into [his] own gaming time” etc. He clearly thinks that these things should allow him to throw his weight around and impose whatever restrictions he likes on challenge participants, without anybody expressing a problem with his approach.
I would have been quite happy to host it but he didn’t bother to ask. He updates the scoreboard every few weeks or so, it should take any normal person at most 5 minutes to do.

In conclusion,  am not interested in the Retrocollect 52 game challenge any more. It has grown into being something more tedious and those people just seem like uncool people to be around. So, this is the reason I will not be participating again this year.
I would rather play longer games this year without trying to hammer through 52 games before next January anyway, to be honest. I have just finished completing Prey (Xbone), which was an enjoyable gaming experience, and have recently embarked on a voyage through the epic world of Elder Scrolls : Online.  This is a very pleasant game to play, and I expect it to last for a very long time and have no ending. For the time being, I am content to play games without a focus on completing them.
Perhaps next year I will launch my own 52 gaming challenge, where people can play whatever they like without progressively constrictive restraints on what “counts as a game”, or other deterrent rules. And everybody will be welcome, even people who exclusively play Fidget Spinner 1-52