What if finding the perfect game to play was as easy as swiping left and right in a dating app, minus the actual horrors of online dating? That’s part of the pitch behind Ludoscene, an app for game recommendations that uses humans rather than machines to tell you what to play. The other part of the pitch is turning personal gaming taste into a slick-looking deckbuilder rogulite.
“Lots of games that people would love will get buried,” Andy Robertson, author of Taming Gaming and freelance journalist for the BBC, told Kotaku. “Popularity is a way for some of those to float up but you have to kind of get lucky, you have to get that social traction.” If games never start to pick up that traction, social media and storefront algorithms quickly leave them behind, the plight of many a fantastic PC game with over 90 percent positive ratings on Steam and less than 500 reviews, indicating that maybe only a few thousand people ever played it.
Robertson is part of the team pitching Ludoscene, a web browser app that uses gaming experts to curate thousands of games users might want to play based on the ones they already like as well as on factors like platform, genre, and other preferences. “We wanted to have a system where it could be much more eclectic, and there’ll be a much greater chance that you’ll encounter games that you probably would never encounter if you just looked at what was popular on Steam or Xbox,” he said.
The project currently has a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter with the hope of launching the initial version later this year. There are three main components to building Ludoscene. The first is human curators like My Perfect Console podcast host Simon Parkin and Videoverse designer Lucy Bundell. The second is a database of great games with over 3,000 entries categorized based on the team’s input. And finally there’s the creative interface: a Balatro-like deck of cards you slowly build up by swiping based on what you like and don’t like.
It reminds me of a scene from Halt and Catch Fire, the cult AMC drama about the rise of computers, in which Lee Pace is filling up a whiteboard with colorful post-it notes in an attempt to fully map out the nascent world wide web in the early ‘90s. Before Google used algorithms to sort everything and eventually ended up breaking the internet in the process, life online was catalogued and curated by regular people just looking to connect over shared passions and hobbies. It’s inefficient and clumsy but also more intimate and meaningful.
I have no idea if Ludoscene could be that for game recommendations but it could certainly be the start of trying to move game discovery and recommendations back toward something more personal and authentic. And unlike mapping the entire internet, you only need a dozen really good game recommendations to keep you busy for a long time. The dating-app-like aspect of just getting presented with one choice at a time rather than being bombarded with 100 critically acclaimed games from the last five years is also very appealing.
The plans for Ludoscene also sound quite robust. It’s not just giving you names of games to go look up later. You can flip each game’s card over and see quick snippets of actual gameplay taken from trailers, what platforms the game is on, its price, and links to immediately go buy and download it on the platform of your choice. It’ll also tell you if the game is available on one of the subscription services like Game Pass or PS Plus so you know before spending the money.
“There’s quite a lot of nice, ongoing curation so it really is about creating a relationship person to person, both in terms of game suggestions and the experts, which is quite a different approach to just purely algorithms, or just using tags to try to float stuff up to the top, which works for some games, but not for others,” Robertson said. “It’s really about that human connection.” The team is looking at recruiting more than the few dozen experts it’s currently working with and hopes that personal touch will be a big part of Ludoscene’s draw.
Another thing the project has going for it is just how terrible the existing storefronts are at showing players games they might like. Despite years of information on what I own and play, the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, and Switch eShop are effectively useless when it comes to browsing for anything outside of broad genres and the games that are already popular in them. Steam is much better relatively speaking, but still not great in the broader scheme of things. Ludoscene sounds like a good antidote to those shortcomings.
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