Life & Place · A Decembers list
The games that swallowed your whole weekend
You said one more turn. You said just to the next save point. Then the room had gone dark around you and it was somehow two in the morning on a Tuesday.
This is where those games go. One line each — the name, the machine, whether you ever saw the end.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the one that kept you up, and the whole room comes back — the couch, the controller warm in your hands, the specific hum of the machine and the light it threw on the wall.
Nobody records the games. Your report cards survived, your tax returns, maybe a diploma in a drawer. But the hundreds of hours you poured into a cartridge or a disc left no paper behind — just the muscle memory of a button combo you could still do in your sleep, and the exact feeling of a boss you finally beat at one in the morning. That was real time, real life, and it vanishes unless someone names it.
And a game is small enough to name in a single line, which is exactly why it gets written when a whole memoir never does. You don't have to explain what it meant. You just put down what it was — the title, the machine it ran on, whether you finished it or gave up in the last dungeon. One line tonight, another next week. The list fills in the way the evenings did: quietly, one at a time, until it's a record of where your hours actually went.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The ones that come up again and again
The all-nighter
The game where you looked up and the sky was getting light. Usually a role-playing game or a strategy game with a save you kept chasing — one more quest, one more turn, one more base built. You knew you'd feel terrible at work, and you kept going anyway.
The one you never finished
You put fifty hours in and stalled — a difficulty spike, a life change, a new game that stole you away. The save file is still out there somewhere, or would be if the console still ran. You always meant to go back and never did.
The arcade money-pit
Before consoles at home, there was the machine at the arcade, the bowling alley, the corner store. Quarters lined up on the cabinet to hold your spot. You measured an afternoon in how much change was left in your pocket.
Platform by platform
- Arcade
- Standing at a cabinet with a fistful of quarters, chasing a high score with your initials on the line.
- Atari & NES
- Cartridges you blew into to make them work, played on a tube TV wheeled out on a cart or wedged in the den.
- PC
- A game installed off floppies or a CD, played in a dark room after everyone else had gone to bed.
- PlayStation & N64
- The disc-and-cartridge years — sprawling adventures and multiplayer nights on the living room floor.
- Xbox & later consoles
- Open worlds you got lost in for a whole winter, headset on, saying you'd stop after this one thing.
- Phone & handheld
- The little game you told yourself was just for the commute, then played in bed until the battery died.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of where your evenings actually went
Not the calendar hours, the real ones — the ones spent leaning toward a screen. Start with the one that kept you up the latest, and put down its name.