Getting Organized

Organization is possibly not my strong point. Although, I have been getting better, but I do feel a little crazy to have to rely upon several calendars, my iPhone, my computers and various websites. But it helps. Catalogging my ever growing game collection was a pain in the ass, in general. Spreadsheets were decent enough, and for a while I used Delicious Library, although that felt restrictive in a few ways. A while back I found Gamepedia and now I don’t know what I’d do without it.

Basically, like Delicious Library, it hits up Amazon.com to get as much information about the game as it can. I fill in the rest manually with information from GameFAQs. Well, just the game’s cover mostly. Had no idea GameFAQs was such a good resource for this, but I haven’t met a game yet without a picture of its cover there. Anywho, there are tons of stats and charts and tables it can get out of all your data and it has Smart Libraries, just like iTunes, where I can pick and choose the information I want to see easily without needing to do lots of manual sorts. For example, I know right now I have 199 unfinished RPGs to play. Ugh.

In that aspect, it’s been a great motivator for me to complete games that I haven’t yet and sell games I have no intention of ever touching. Having all that information there is just nice.

It also has export functions for text, iPod and even more importantly: html. It has a nice iPhone option so I can, in two clicks, have a folder on my desktop that contains all my stuff in my collection or wish-list that I can plop on this site and then check when I am out in a store. No more “did I already pick up this game?” moments.

So, for $18US it was a hell of an investment which I heartily recommend to anyone who is looking to get some organization beyond what is done on the shelves.