Min-Maxxing Relaxing: Playtime and Privilege in the Post-Pandemic

Abstract

This article examines how post-pandemic gaming platforms and cultures transform "playtime" into social currency. Grounding our analysis in a collective autoethnography of unfinished Baldur's Gate 3 playthroughs, we situate backlog guilt and technical upkeep within histories of gendered leisure and argue that platform ecologies—from Steam metrics to Discord social play features—intensify the pressure to optimize leisure as capital. Contributing to critical conversations on digital playbour within the DiGRA community, we conceptualize how these platforms and subcultures produce manifestations of what we term playtime anxiety. This affective framework reveals how social playtime obscures the labour of play, narrowing legitimate participation and reconfiguring "not-playing" as a social and moral failure.