Further Classification: My Steam organization

Further classification seems to be an ongoing series about how I mentally, digitally, and physically organize games. In this installment, I talk about Steam.


This is my Steam games list. You can't see the games, because it's minimized. When expanded, you can't fit it all on one screen. This is because I have, quite simply, far too many games. Many of the games are currently hidden, because I didn't like them or care about them. At the bottom are "Games" which is shorthand for "Haven't Even Touched Yet."

There are several ways that I organize games, but mechanical genre is the most important to me. Of course, Steam has a flat-level hierarchy (coincidentally like Valve's) so all you can do is use tricks in Steam's string organization to sort things.

So, I use the #Hash symbol to define thematic genres. I'm not particularily interested in games based on their themes, with exception for extremely thick pulp like Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction. Which is why I have a category listing for each of them.

Below that I have some selectors, basically, tags about the status of a game. At the moment, simply it being unbeaten. Here is the first instance of me using a /ForwardSlash to define a sub-category. Again, categories have to be flat-level, but that doesn't mean I can't have associated categories. Thus subcategories get associated with their higher category. In this case, "Play With Mandy" refers to the fact that a game is meant to be played with my wife.

And then we move onto the mechanical genres themselves. Pretty much stuff we've talked about before, nothing to really refer to there.

I don't organize by difficulty, but if I did, I would probably use a !Bang because that seems suitably important. Maybe a number surrounded by bangs so that it organizes the difficulties in order. !1! Common, !2! Normal, !3! Hardcore, !4! Master, !5! Cruelcore. Something like that.