So, two things:
Last week, Valve announced Steam Labs, a new initiative where Valve pulls back the curtain on various projects they're working on internally but that aren't quite ready to be rolled out publicly just yet.
Given the timing, I decided to go ahead and release a janky half-finished prototype of a little weekend project I had cooked up called Steam Diving Bell. You can play with it here. Just please don't hug my server to death.
So now that my little project is out there, I'd like to talk a bit about it and Steam Labs in general.
Diving Bell is an experiment meant to address discoverability on Steam. It serves a similar purpose to Steam Labs' Interactive Recommender, which is a really neat machine-learning based recommendation engine you can read all about here. I've tried it myself, and it really works -- it's an incredibly neat piece of tech.
So what the heck is Diving Bell, who is it for, and how is it different -- why would anyone want to use it if we already have the fancy interactive recommender?
All great questions.
What is it?
It's a (prototype) web app for quickly discovering interesting games on Steam.
Who is it for?
Anyone who wants better discovery for games on Steam. This means players (who want to find games), but also developers (who want their games to be found). But let's not forget that curators need good tools, too. Human-powerd curation stands to benefit from better tools that make it easy to quickly find the games you want to showcase and talk about.
How is it different?
Diving Bell and the Interactive Recommender take entirely opposite approaches:
Interactive Recommender uses your play history to get to know you, and uses smart algorithms to serve up games it thinks you will like. You specify a few parameters, and it shows you a list of recommendations. Interactive Recommender is like a sommelier that uses their expertise to suggest a wine that pairs well with the courses you've already chosen.
Diving Bell has no clue who you are or what you like, and uses dumb algorithms to serve up games similar to a title you specify. From there you can browse around in any direction you want. Diving Bell, like its namesake, is a vessel that lets you safely descend into the murky depths to catch glimpses of weird and interesting fishes games.
The aesthetic I'm going for is "wikipedia binge." You start with some topic, then you click on links within that topic that seem interesting, and before you know it you find yourself following some totally weird but fascinating bunny trail you never expected you'd go down.
Let's start with a guided tour. You can tell Diving Bell to start with a specific game by adding "?appid=XYZ" at the end of the URL (sans quotes), where XYZ is a specific game's Steam application id. Let's start this plunge with Chrono Trigger:
Into the Depths
(There'll be a brief pause at the beginning while it bootstraps and then all subsequent loads should be faster).
Chrono Trigger is our selected game. Diving Bell serves up 8 games that it thinks are similar. There's an information panel (cropped from the screenshot for space purposes) that tells us more about the game, and includes screenshots, trailer, etc, and then there's some navigation on the bottom of the main panel: "Back", "More", and some mysterious blue buttons.
Clicking "More" will serve up another 8 recommendations, while keeping Chrono Trigger centered. At that point clicking "Back" will take us back a step and show us the previous recommendations. As for the blue buttons, these represent recommendation engines and can be individually toggled on and off. Right now all four are selected, and each corresponds to two of the currently visible recommendation results. I'll explain each of the recommendation engines with illustrations below. First, let's turn all four of them off:
Default Matches
These are "Default matches", and they should feel familiar if you've visted Chrono Trigger's Steam page, because I got them by scraping Steam's "More Like This" section.
For every game on Steam, there is a "More Like This" page, and it has exactly 12 games. The explanation Steam offers for how it makes these matches is:
"The tags customers have most frequently applied to CHRONO TRIGGER® have also been applied to these products"
...but I just treat it as a black box. The matches are solid, but tend to be familiar games that are already popular.
The first iteration of Diving Bell used nothing but "More Like This" matches for each game, because the first issue I was attacking was a UX problem: Let's say you want to browse more games like Chrono Trigger, then browse more games like those games, then visit one of those games' store page.
Here's how you do that currently:
Visit Chrono Trigger's Steam Page.
Scroll down way below the fold to "More Like This" and click a tiny button that says "See All"
The page reloads.
Find a game you seem interested in (Grandia II?) and click it.
The page reloads.
Scroll all the way down to "More Like This" and click "See All"
The page reloads.
Find a game you seem interested in (The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky?) and click it.
The page reloads.
That's 4 clicks, 4 full page reloads, and 2 scrolls (4 scrolls if you click a recommendation in the bottom row on the "More Like This" page). In Diving Bell, this same journey takes 2 clicks, zero page reloads, and zero scrolls. Granted, my prototype web app is a total potato and the async requests take longer than I'd like to fill in, but with a real database and some optimization there's no reason those couldn't be nearly instant.
Just by changing the UX I think we've already improved on the browsing experience of finding more games like Chrono Trigger. But there's a problem: the default "More Like This" recommendations are a bit too good.
"Too good?" What? How could that be a problem?
Obviously I'm using "good" a bit facetiously, what I really mean is they're too on-the-nose for the browsing experience I have in mind.
Take a look at Chrono Trigger's 12 default recommendations:
