I don’t think this was officially announced, but it’s been live for a while, so…
There is now a rough, experimental feature on IFDB for finding games that have the same genres and tags as another game.
As a tool for recommending a game based on another game you like, it’s…unreliable. Maybe a more standardized (and hierarchical?) system of tags would help. Adjusting the similarity scoring system would probably also help.
But if you want, you can play with it, and see how the tags you add affect results.
To try it:
Log in.
Go to any game page.
In the URL, change the word “viewgame” to say “similargames” instead.
In many cases, this will only show games that have at least one genre in common with the original game. Without this limit, the query was basically causing the web page to grind to a halt. So if a game has a custom, one-of-a kind genre instead of a standard genre, it may not work that well.
While this feature is not based on any of OtisTDog’s Magic 8 Ball code, it’s based on the same general idea of trying to find similar games.
I just tried this with Illuminizmo Iniziato. The tag [cheese] earned 4 uniqueness points!
Together with other similarities, this brought up a great list of recommendations, many of which I have played and which I would indeed place in the same broad family of games. I’m curious about the games I haven’t played yet.
Are there plans to make this a live feature? Though the methodology and result sets are a little different, it works at least as well as the Magic 8-Ball does; in general, the games that look like the best matches to me appear in either result set.
I know it’s not perfect, but I think it does add value, and it will encourage tagging activity by people who think that there are games which should be linked.
I’m not sure what the plan is, other than gathering feedback from people and discussing it. @dfabulich?
An issue I see with some of the results is a tone mismatch between the original game and the result. Maybe having some standard mood/tone tags could help, and maybe sub-genres (e.g. dark fantasy).
I was thinking we should probably figure out if we are going to overhaul the tagging system or not, because that could affect this a lot.