What Game Should I Play Next? A Decision Framework
Pedro Faiole·
You open your game library. There are 80 titles in there, maybe more. You scroll past the same ones you always scroll past. Nothing clicks. Twenty minutes later you're watching YouTube and wondering where the evening went.
This isn't a willpower problem. It's a design problem, and there's a clean solution to it.
Researchers at the University at Buffalo confirmed this isn't just a feeling. In a study with nearly 500 participants, people showed measurable physiological signs of stress when faced with larger sets of options, including a heightened sense that making the wrong choice was personally significant. The more options, the more fraught the decision feels, even when the stakes are objectively low.
For games, the dynamic is almost perfectly engineered to produce paralysis. Steam alone has over 120,000 playable titles, and an analysis of Steam user libraries found that the average player leaves roughly half their library untouched. That's not apathy. That's decision fatigue compounding across every login.
So how do you break out of it?
The Four-Question Framework
The core idea is simple: make the decision before you sit down, using a short checklist. Decisions made in advance, with fresh thinking, are almost always better than decisions made on the spot when you're already a little tired and just want to start playing something.
Here are the four questions. Work through them in order, and most evenings you'll have an answer within a couple of minutes.
1. What's My Mood and Energy Right Now?
This is the most important question, and it's the one people skip most often.
Research on how players use games for emotional regulation shows that different genres serve genuinely different psychological needs. Simulation games reduce anxiety through low-stakes repetition. Action games channel frustration and energy into something productive. Story-driven games create space for reflection and empathy. That's not just preference, it's how the brain processes these experiences differently.
Matching your game to your mood isn't about being precious. It's about not starting a tense stealth game when you're already wound up, or a slow narrative RPG when you only have half a brain to give it.
Current Mood / Energy
What Works Well
Relaxed, low energy
Cozy sims, exploration, light puzzle games
Frustrated or stressed
Action, rhythm games, something satisfying to smash
Alert, focused
Strategy, puzzle, immersive RPGs
Social, wanting company
Co-op games, competitive multiplayer
Nostalgic or reflective
Retro classics, story-driven games you loved before
A quick honest check here saves you from starting something that's going to feel like a chore.
2. How Much Time Do I Actually Have?
This one gets people all the time. You sit down with 45 minutes and convince yourself you'll "just get started" on something with a 6-hour prologue. Then you stop 20 minutes in, lose any narrative momentum, and it takes two weeks to come back to it.
Short sessions (under 90 minutes): Prioritize games with natural stopping points. Arcade games, roguelikes, sports games, anything episodic. Or games you're already deep into and know exactly where you left off.
Medium sessions (90 minutes to 3 hours): Most games are designed around this window. A narrative chapter, a dungeon, a few missions.
Long sessions (3+ hours): This is when you start something new with a long intro, or tackle an open-world game you've been putting off.
The key rule: don't start a brand-new long game unless you have the time for its opening. First impressions matter, and a fragmented start is usually a dead end.
A cozy desk setup with a gaming controller resting next to a notebook open to a handwritten list titled "Next Up," beside a cup of coffee and a warm lamp
3. Do You Have a Game With Momentum?
If you have a game in progress that you were genuinely enjoying, that one gets priority. Momentum is real. Picking up a game mid-story, mid-build, mid-level with a clear memory of where you're headed takes almost no mental energy. Starting something fresh requires much more.
Think of it this way: resuming a game you already like costs you almost nothing. Starting a new game costs you the investment period, the learning curve, and the mental overhead of caring about new characters and systems.
The only time an in-progress game gets skipped is when you've clearly lost interest, and at that point the honest move is to mark it as dropped and free yourself to move on. Acknowledging that a game isn't working is a feature, not a failure.
4. What's at the Top of Your Priority List?
This is the question that rewards people who do even minimal backlog planning. If you've already thought through which games you want to play next and put them in rough order, you don't have to think in the moment. You just look at the list.
You don't need a spreadsheet. A simple "Next Up" section with 3-5 games in priority order is enough. When a game finishes, the next one is already decided. The evening doesn't start with an existential debate about your entire library.
This is where mastering your backlog pays off most clearly. It's not just about having a list. It's about having a curated, honestly ranked list that reflects what you actually want to play right now, not what you thought sounded good at a sale four years ago.
The Shortlist Method
If you don't have a priority list yet, here's a fast way to build one without getting overwhelmed.
Open your library. Look at everything you own but haven't started.
Filter ruthlessly. Remove anything you know you won't play in the next few months. No shame, just honesty.
Score what's left against three criteria: How excited are you about it right now? How long is it, roughly? How much of a time commitment does it demand before it gets interesting?
Pick your top five. Put them in order. That's your queue.
The key insight here is that you're doing this work now, when you're thinking clearly, so that future-you doesn't have to do it tired and distracted.
How The EndWiki Makes This Practical
All of this is much easier when your library is visible and organized. The EndWiki lets you log every game you've played or want to play, see your backlog clearly, and track what's genuinely in your queue. You can mark games as beaten, in progress, or dropped, and you can browse your full library in one place rather than jumping between Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and whatever else.
The import tool at /import pulls your existing library from connected platforms so you're not starting from scratch. Within a few minutes you can have everything in one place and actually see the scope of what you own.
Then you can browse games to fill gaps in your queue or discover something that fits a specific mood. Looking for a 10-hour action game to clear before a big release? That's a searchable problem with a visible list.
The Real Reason This Works
The decision framework isn't magic. It's just structure applied before the moment when you're most likely to make a bad call. The paradox of choice shows up most strongly when you're already tired and slightly overwhelmed. That's exactly when you sit down to game.
By answering the four questions (mood, time, momentum, queue) you're doing two things. First, you're narrowing the field from "everything I own" to a meaningful handful of real options. Second, you're giving yourself permission to skip the guilt-loop of wondering whether you're making the right call.
Psychologists studying choice overload recommend entering high-choice situations with clear guidelines about what you want. That's exactly what the four questions give you.
Building the Habit
The framework gets faster with practice. After a few weeks of using it, mood-checking and queue-reviewing becomes automatic, and the debate about what to play shrinks from 20 minutes to about 30 seconds.
A few things that help it stick:
Update your queue when you finish a game, not when you sit down to start one. That's when you're thinking about it.
Mark dropped games immediately. Don't let them linger in an ambiguous middle state. Clean lists are faster to process.
Be honest about backlogs. A 200-game backlog isn't aspirational, it's a source of paralysis. The useful question isn't "will I ever play this?" but "do I actually want to play this in the next six months?"
Getting Started
The hardest part of any system is starting it. But this one has a very low bar. You don't need a perfect library. You don't need everything catalogued. You just need a rough answer to four questions before you sit down tonight.
Pick your first "Next Up" game now, while you're thinking about it. Open your library, spend three minutes applying the mood and time checks to whatever catches your eye, and commit to something. Tomorrow, do the same thing a little faster.
If you want a home base for all of this, create your free account on The EndWiki at /signup. Your whole library in one place, a clean queue you can actually use, and the log to look back on when you want to remember what you played and why it mattered.
The best game to play tonight is the one you actually start.
