Disrupting Video Game Discovery For Better Play Time

Andy Robertson draws back the curtain on his Ludocene Kickstarter project that hopes to change how children discover video games for the better.

It can be a mystery how children discover their next favourite video game. Gaming trends bubble up from the playground, online chat and the various digital gaming stores. Over the past five years, I’ve created tools to help parents discover video games they want to play. But this month, I’ve launched a project to offer a new way for children (or anyone) to find their next game in a playful way.

Ludocene is a game discovery app currently gathering an audience of enthusiastic backers on Kickstarter. It’s unusual because rather than complex check-boxes and sliders, it enables game discovery through a single stream of game cards.

The player is presented with a card that represents a particular game and can decide to add it to their list of favourite known games, discard it as unwanted or pin it to play later. Each of these decisions affects the next game that the app offers. In this way, the player builds a deck of cards that represents their taste, then the app offers up to 16 similar games they might like to try next.

It’s a novel experience that itself feels like playing a game. But it’s also unusual for how the data works behind the scenes. Rather than an algorithm comparing tags for genre or platforms in a generic fashion, each suggestion is based on human-selected similarities between games. This draws on over five years of building a dataset that is deeply researched by analysts who have a broad knowledge of games and how they work in the lives of players.

This approach enables the final feature that players searching for games can use: select an Expert card of a journalist, streamer or podcaster they know to influence what’s suggested. Experts are paid to set up a profile and select games that match their specific tastes. When they are selected by the player, the stream of next games reflects their choices and offers a new direction of discovery for the player.

Experts currently include: Simon Parkin (New Yorker), Lucy Bundell (Videoverse, Kinmoku Games), Alexander Donaldson (RPG Site), Christian Donlan (Eurogamer), Matt Lees (Shut Up And Sit Down), Dominic Tarason (Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer), Rachel Watts (LostInCult, GamesRadar), Susan Arendt (Previously The Escapist), Brian Crecente (founded Kotaku, co-founded Polygon), Matthew Castle (Backpage Podcast), Josh Boykin (Intelligames Streamer), Nick Suttner (Panic, Eggplant Podcast), James Batchelor (GamesIndustry.Biz), Chris Schilling (Previously Edge), Mairi Nolan (Escape Room Championships), Joseph Mansfield (Thinky Games), Angela Hickman (Education and Healthcare), John Rogers (Gaming In The Wild), Cath Knibbs (Game Therapist).

This may all sound a bit complicated, but the reality is a fun “deck-building” game where winning results in the discovery of a new game to play. My hope is that this empowers children (and any player) to escape the funnel of every bigger and ever more expensive games they may find in store fronts.

If it sounds like something you would like to exist, please back the Kickstarter to fund the project. All backers will get early access to the functional prototype in mid-March.

 

 

Andy Robertson is a journalist focusing on games and families. He writes for BBC, Forbes and wrote the Taming Gaming book for parents.