How I keep track of my gaming

Every weeknote and monthly summary, I list all the videogames I played. There are a few things that I do to help myself keep track of it all. Some tools I’ve mentioned here and there, but never all in a single post.

I won’t really be making any specific tutorials, but leads in the right direction, in case you are interested on tracking your gaming like me.

I’ll be honest, while a lot of these tools are pretty easy to set-up, there’s still a lot of manual work required to have it all nice and tidy, there’s an argument to be made that I shouldn’t really be obsessed by how much I play videogames and keeping track of everything. However, having a full history of everything gaming brings me joy, where as trying to remember what happened in the past and being unable to, does not.

After all, it is a bit sad that I have no idea when I realized Parasive Eve was a game I was interested in playing. I don’t really remember the exact date I tried Chrono Trigger for the first time. I have no memory of when I completed Ocarina of Time. Yes I have rough estimates, but that’s it, and I also lack the context of it all, which is kind of important sometimes.

I just wish I had kept some sort of journal entry that helped me figure out things, like where my headspace was at the time, and at least how long I have played certain games.

Newer consoles have finally started to include some tools to know how much I play videogames. Platforms like Steam have a built-in playtime counters, and well, thanks to all the tools I mentioned here, I can bring it all to a single place.

Playtime per console

First, I wanted to write about how I keep track of the gaming I do on each of my gaming devices, as all of them have different setup, be it using custom firmware or a separate app. Only one of them has a feature complete built-in tool, but we’ll get to that later.

Nintendo Switch

While the Switch features a pretty basic Profile Activity screen, showing how much you have played the twenty most recent games. This is an approximate and it won’t even start counting the time reliably until you play from 5 to 10 hours of a game.

Have no fear though, the Switch Parental Controls app features a great inteface to display my gaming per day, with a monthly view as well! However, this app does not have the full playtime of each game, and it doesn’t provide a full history either, as data vanishes after a few months.

A great option to see the full playtime is Exophase, a website I connected to my Nintendo account, displaying the playtime of each game I play. You need to launch a game you want to track at least once after connecting your account so it gets synced with the website, it will not automatically scan every game in your library.

It is unfortunate that the Switch has never had a proper Activity Tracker, especially because their previous handheld console has one of the best implementations I’ve ever seen, we’ll talk about that later.

Emulator handhelds

A few months ago, there was no good way to keep track of the games in my handhelds. The only one that worked okay was my Miyoo Mini Plus running OnionOS, although sometimes I ended up with duplicated data and other issues when renaming ROMs. Nothing to worry about, I wrote a post on how to fix those issues!

Nowadays I use the Anbernic RG35XX SP, and I prefer to use the muOS software. They have finally added a built-in Activity Tracker screen, which is awesome, although not as feature complete as the upcoming trackers.

You can access a particular game’s data by simply using the select button while it’s highlighted on the screen. For some reason, this only works when viewing the game list from the Library, it doesn’t work on the History or Favorites screen.

Of course, the full Activity Tracker can be accessed from the Info screen where you can see the full list displaying playtimes and times opened of every game in the handheld. Pretty useful, if rather simple.

Nintendo 3DS

In case you did not know this, the Nintendo 3DS has literally the best activity tracker implementation I have ever seen, and it’s completely native to their OS: The Activity Log. There’s no hacking necessary to have access to it, it just works.

Not only does it track the total playtime and the times a game is opened. It also has a full timeline of every single day, divided by the hour in both a graphic and a list view. It also displays the steps you take while carrying the 3DS in sleep mode.

There’s little for me to add here, it’s genuinely impressive stuff and I wish the Nintendo Switch had implemented something half as good as what this is. Absolute top tier functionality and features.

The surprise: PSP!

However, the PSP is the real reason I wanted to write this post in the first place.

For years now I have been wondering why the PSP did not have a built-in activity tracker. The interface already let’s you access information about a game by pressing the triangle button, but it doesn’t really have anything regarding playtime, which always seemed like a missed opportunity for me.

Since I mostly play JRPGs, I usually knew my playtime based on the in-game info, which was good enough for me, but it was still not a given on every single game, and I had to take some extra steps in some videogames just to know how much I’ve played it. For example, on Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, I had to exit a mission, go back to the main menu, load a save, and only then I would know how much I had played it, taking into account the loading times, it was a bit painful.

Thankfully, a couple months ago developer OniMock released a homebrew application and plugin that that can track PS1 and PSP games running on the device. It’s called GameDiary, and it’s incredible. To get it to work you need to have a modded PSP of course. I recommend this guide as of mid-2026. It seems like version 5 of that custom firmware is being worked on, but it’s not as stable as ARK-4 yet.

Anyway, if you’ve installed a PSP plugin before it should be quite simple, but the instructions are found in the link I already shared.

For me the plugin worked great from the start, it didn’t affect performance in any noticeable way. The new application looks amazing as well, featuring playtime for a current session, as well as the total playtime and other stats, featuring the videogame artwork and a really pretty interface.

This is a feature I always wanted, and it truly competes with the 3DS’s built-in tracker! I highly recommend giving it a go.

Keeping track of everything with Backloggd

All of the tools I mentioned often work by themselves, with different interfaces and functionality to each, some are built-in, some required some setup, but at the end of the day, all the information on them ends up in different places, be it locally, on an app, or a certain website.

For better or worse, I consolidate everything by hand using Backloggd.

I have been using this website for a few years now, and I don’t see myself ever leaving it! It’s full of incredible features and an amazing stats page that I absolutely love.

I personally don’t care at all about putting in the work. Every single day I play something, I log it to to the game’s journal, write a short text of what happened and the amount of time I played. You can sort in all manner of ways, but my favorite is sorting by Most Recent Session, since it removes all duplicates and displays full playtime of each game logged in order.

You can also create lists and other useful things, but well, you should really give it a try if you are willing to put some work into it. I guess you can simply put start and end dates like a normal person instead of being like me, you do you!

Personally, I’m super proud of my journal, so please give it a look and let me know what you think of it! Of course, if you decide to make an account there, give me a follow!

This is day of #100DaysToOffload