The calendar has ticked over and it is somehow now July. The month where the video game release cycle gives us a brief respite that we can use the time to catch up on everything we’ve been missing. July is Shameless Gaming Month.

Almost everyone will have some games that they’ve bought and then never finished. More than a few of us will have games that were bought haven’t even played.This month we try to fix that.

Shameless Gaming Month is about finding those games that you own but didn’t know you loved. The games that couldn’t earn your attention over the shiny new release that everyone else was playing. The games that you heard were pretty good but never found the time to play. The games that caught your eye enough to hand over your money but didn’t somehow make it out of the shrink wrap.

The goal of Shameless Gaming Month is to finish the games that are sitting unfinished on our shelves. What counts as finishing a game is entirely up to you. If you’re happy to say that you’ve finished a game after beating the single player, so be it. If you’re one of those completionists and need to explore every crevice, find every collectible and earn every achievement, then that’s what you’re going to be doing. If you’re satisfied that you’ve finished the game, it counts.

This isn’t a competition.

Sites like Darkadia, Backloggery and How Long To Beat all offer great tools to help sort out what is in your pile of shame. Then it’s just a matter of picking the games that you want to play and playing them.

Regular updates will be coming out throughout July on this blog and on Kotaku.com.au. Join in the conversation, let us know what you’ve been playing, mock your friends for having a bigger pile of shame than you or envy their ability to finish games. Most importantly, play some video games and have fun.