reccr, the amazing automated video game recommender!

December 18, 2010 2:59 PM

reccr, the amazing automated video game recommender!
Just in time to help you decide what to ask Santa for, reccr is the amazing automated video game recommender; rate the games you've played, and it'll tell you what other games you'll like, in a similar fashion to Netflix's "Movies You'll ♥" feature. It's in early beta and currently capped at 500 users, but the all-important "recommendations" core feature is working great, and the more people add their ratings the better the recommendations will get!

Feedback is greatly appreciated here in the mefi projects thread (including feedback on what the best method would be for soliciting and providing feedback).

posted by luvcraft (12 comments total)

First thing I wanted to do is rate some NES games. That doesn't seem to be something that can happen based on Gamecube being the oldest system listed.

I realize I'm playing an ancient system, but there is the virtual console on the Wii so there is a way for people to get these games still today. Wikipedia has 89 NES titles, 61 SNES, 19 N6416 Sega Master System, 72 Genesis 63 TurboGrafx-16/CD, 27 NeoGeo, and 15 Arcade games. Some of which have no excuse seeing the light of day ever again so having a rating would be useful so people don't spend money.

You do have WiiWare on there. But that just doesn't seem like enough to me.
posted by theichibun at 5:39 AM on December 19, 2010

thanks for the feedback, ichibun! Wiiware is on there, and I'm letting users add VC games under the WiiWare category when they want to rate older games that are on VC. (The button to submit a new game is on the search results page)
posted by luvcraft at 9:09 AM on December 19, 2010

This is neat. Two suggestions:

* Allow users to choose other Amazon subsites, so you can get referral monies from those of us who order from amazon.co.uk or whatever
* Ignoring broad categories would be great. I wound up with a lot of Rock Band and Lego games being recommended, and neither of those groups appeals to me, so it just clutters the list.

As for soliciting feedback, a web app I worked on has had great success by just having a "Send Feedback" button which pops up a form and emails us without disrupting the user flow.
posted by cmonkey at 10:09 PM on December 21, 2010

This looks very interesting. I tried it a bit and my first issue was the same as theichibun: I want to rate some N64 games, but I had to register them as GC. My second issue is that, after rating a few things, the homepage now always says "We're sorry, but something went wrong." for me. I'll try again later.
posted by richb at 2:19 AM on December 22, 2010

Glad I'm not the only one thinking like that. When I saw this I instantly thought that I'd like to find a way to work it into my site, even if it was just linking to a game's page.
posted by theichibun at 7:22 AM on December 22, 2010

richb: there was one user who somehow registered without it automagically fetching a username for him; I suspect that might be you and might be why you're getting the "something went wrong" page. I copied the xbl username from that account into the main account name, so let me know if the main page works for you now. I'll also fix that so it fills in something generic for the username if the username somehow comes through blank from the authentication provider.

cmonkey: yes, I definitely need to add other Amazons. As for categories, right now the recommender is totally agnostic to the contents of a game, and just makes recommendations based on similar users' tastes. One of the first things I plan to add when I get back from Christmas vacation is user-submitted "tags", and the ability to see recommendations by specific tags. In your case, that wouldn't directly help you filter out Rock Band games, but it would let you just click on the "Rock Band series" tag and "Ignore" every game that comes up.

Thanks for the feedback! Please keep it coming! :)
posted by luvcraft at 11:03 AM on December 22, 2010

I've been using Amazon for a similar purpose; is there no way to import ratings data from Amazon or other data sources?
posted by pwnguin at 9:16 PM on December 22, 2010

I would really love to be able to not sign in with anything. Signing in is a bit of a deal-breaker for me. Couldn't you just use cookies instead?
posted by smoke at 10:56 PM on December 23, 2010

pwnguin: No, I don't think there's any way to import ratings data from Amazon / Xbox Live / whatever.

greg: try going to your profile page and make sure you have a username. if you do, please PM me here on mefi with your reccr username and I'll try to figure out what it's doing wrong. The alt text should be popping up when you hover over those icons; I'll check and make sure that's setup correctly.

smoke: if nobody signed in, then there wouldn't be any way to compare the similarity of users' tastes, and I couldn't recommend games, which is the whole point of the site! :) If you don't want to sign in you can always "window shop" on the "most popular games" page, and think wistfully about how awesome it would be to submit your own ratings for the games listed there. :)

Thanks for the continuing feedback! I just got back from vacation tonight and will get back to work on the site tomorrow!
posted by luvcraft at 6:57 PM on December 28, 2010

I'm still getting "We're sorry, but something went wrong." on the front page. I'll keep trying, as this is something I'm quite interested in.
posted by richb at 3:04 AM on January 5, 2011

hey rich, I just discovered what (I hope) was causing that problem and fixed it last night; in the process of improving the recommendation engine, I did something that was creating a bad sql query for new users, so new users would get that error instead of getting their recommendations for the first time! (oops. :( )

Please let me know if you're still getting the error! :)

I've also implemented tags; it happened a little sooner than I wanted it to, but I'm bad about branching, so the version that had that sql bug fixed also had the tags implemented so I just went ahead and went live with that one.
posted by luvcraft at 8:51 AM on January 6, 2011

I see this has gone offline :-(

I did like this, and checked back from time to time. I suppose not enough people did.
posted by richb at 7:13 AM on November 26, 2012