Plays Like Game Directory

Or watch it on YouTube

Check out the working prototype.

Opportunity | Pitch | How It Works (In a Nutshell | In Detail) | Tech | Pitfalls | Final Thoughts | Links

Opportunity

Create a front end for video game discovery that doesn’t rely on moving targets such as meta tags, review scores, influencers, or marketing.

Pitch

The Plays Like Game Directory is a front end for video games that relies on similarities between titles such as gameplay mechanics, tone, storytelling, and genre.

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How It Works (In a Nutshell)

Games are categorized by their similarities and influences of other popular games that the customer would more readily recognize. This creates a sense of familiarity to a game they haven’t play. Some games are more influential than others, so a tiered system is in place to put a perceived percentage to its gaming parallels and ranked from most to least.

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How It Works (In Detail)

It works a lot like when you are trying to describe a movie or band to a friend that may not have any experience with. This conversation would include phrases such as “they sound like this band” or “it reminds me of this movie”.

Much like video games, there can be hard lines made when describing them. The majority of games have a line of influence that can be used as the main foundation of the comparison. From there, we can make sameness from smaller things like similar themes, style, mechanics, etc.

The thought is that these similarities don’t change. Sure the game you might be comparing it to will fall in and out of popularity over time, but even the game that replaces it will more than likely be extremely similar to the one it replaced. And the cycle continues.

The idea works using a database that has an entry for each indie game and three (or more) columns of relatability such as 90%, 60%, 30%. These percentages will correlate to which popular game it’s closest to. Let’s take a look at an example of how the database would work.

Super Meat Boy is a fast-paced, tough as nails platformer by developer Team Meat. The fact that is it primary a platformer at its core, uses an over world of sorts to move from level to level, and has a protagonist saving a kidnapped damsel, shows an extreme high level of influence to Super Mario Bros. We can safely say that if you enjoy Super Mario Bros, then we are 90% sure you will also enjoy Super Meat Boy for the same reasons.

Super Meat Boy is brutally difficult and has been designed to push players to learn from their mistakes and restart again and again. Not only is the level design and enemies difficult, you only have one hit point before dying and starting over. This type of gameplay is similar to another popular title called Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Ghosts ‘n Goblins is known for its difficult level out of the gate that most people mention when the title comes up in conversation. Because of this, we can assume that if you enjoyed Ghost ‘n Goblins mainly for it difficulty, we can say that we are 60% sure you’ll enjoy Super Meat Boy.

Also, when speaking about difficult games, I’m sure you can get ideas of Dark Souls and Ninja Gaiden. I believe that sticking with the 2D aesthetic and the thought that it’s better to avoid enemies than attack them, Ghost ‘n Goblins becomes the more likely comparison. My opinion, of course.

Truly, the closest comparison to Super Meat Boy would be the Japan only release of Super Mario Bros 2 (known as the Lost Levels on Super Mario All-Stars). It’s a platformer, it’s 2D, it’s extremely difficult, and has a kidnapped princess story line. But, from a general community view point, SMB 2 Japan is not as well known or popular as the other two titles. Because of this, we say that there’s a 30% you will also enjoy Super Meat Boy if you are fond of SMB 2 Japan.

The percentages are based on what someone’s potential view would be towards a game rather than how much influence is in the game. By someone’s view, meaning a perfectly sane, knows enough of the industry to be wanting to purchase new games, and can view from a majority point of view.

This works on the premise that people are more likely to purchase something they have no experience with if they are able to make a sound decision based on things they already enjoy.

Tech

The extremely crude prototype I’ve created uses a combination of PHP and MySQL. The database sits in MySQL on the server side and we use PHP GET statements to search for particular information from the database to create the game’s web page.

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Other than the four fields in the database we mentioned earlier (game title, 90%, 60%, and 30%) we can also include information that will help fill the game’s page out including screenshots, trailer, links to developer website, purchase links for Steam, GOG, etc.

Note: the prototype only uses a single comparison tier due to timing and simplicity.

At the bottom of the game’s page, will include links to other games that share the similar comparison tiers. Also we can include links to games that share the same format such as a traditional paid game, a freeware game, or a browser only game. It’s possible that the reason the gamer may have enjoyed the game was because they could play it for free or because it has the convenience of playing right in their browser window. All of this could be expanded on to make those connections even better for the player.

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Ideally, a system would be set up to allow the developer enter all of this information on their own accord. That way if something changes, like a download link, the developer can easily go in and make the necessary changes without interrupting anything important to the end user. This will also cut the work down for the site holder tremendously by only having to approve the entries before adding them to the database.

Then, of course, all of the wonderful things that come from having an operating app on the web including user accounts, wishlist, etc. Build a community that can interact easily with other games to suggest new games will help increase discovery of new games.

Pitfalls

With any project there’s all sorts of pitfalls that could come up.

The idea itself: categorizing video games into a readable database; is an extremely heavy undertaking. Steam alone averages 21 games released a day. That’s a crazy amount of games to play to be placed in the database correctly. There are also tons of games that only exist on personal web pages that may or may not be maintained anymore. Finding these games and adding them to the database is almost impossible without previous knowledge of their existence. The amount of work alone is far too much for a single person let alone a small team of people. The work is endless as video games become more and more popular and easier to access.

There’s also the integrity of the database itself. The people behind the project need to be trusted members of the community or else why would you trust the comparisons to begin with? Over the years, we’ve seen notable people go in and out of the gaming community and that could affect how the database’s suggestions are perceived.

Final Thoughts

The Plays Like Game directory was born out of a pain point for me personally. I’ve always been a big fan of games and when introduced to the concept of “indie games”, I was completely taken back by the shear amount of games that were available at my fingertips. All sorts of genres, styles, gameplay mechanics spanning over a wide range of influences and admirations. It’s incredible. Then I noticed how little these developers get based mainly because they aren’t a big name like E.A. or Nintendo. They deserved their fair shot in the spotlight and I wanted to find a way that could give them that that doesn’t cost money for marketing, ads, or giving up free copies just so people could try it out.

Does this fix everything? No. But I do believe it is a step in the right direction that puts more potential sales back into the developers hands, is adaptable, and doesn’t rely on phoney review stats or paid influencers.

Links

Below are links to all of the available content, free of charge, and free use to manipulate to your heart’s content.

• Working prototype
• .zip HTML files that make the prototype run
• Screenshot of the database