Crunch Magic Gamifies Steam Game Recommendations
When faced with the arduous task of rating media for new recommendations on services like Amazon, Waylon Flinn thought that it was simply too boring. He believed that if listeners on Pandora can listen to music for music suggestions, gamers should be able to play games for game recommendations and thus, Crunch Magic was born.
Crunch Magic connects to your Steam account and forces you to save some of your Steam library games from dying in a painful, pixelated fire. You can choose to save certain titles but at the cost of health points (a la Zelda). To refill your health, you will need to answer a series of a personality questions and go through another gauntlet of burning games to level up. Level up 3 times you can find your most recommended games and a personality profile. Here’s mine:
I like the concept of playing a game for game recommendations but what I was actually doing in the game wasn’t immediately apparent to me. You had to save games from burning in the fire but choosing not to had no repercussion. However, saving too many games would completely deplete your health and make you lose — which seems counter productive to creating useful recommendations in the first place.
Finding recommendations for me based of my current Steam library is also a really great idea but for me to actually save games I care about — I would’ve had to play them! Anyone who uses Steam has already been a victim to one of their amazing sales and has probably amassed a number of games without playing them all. I found myself not saving no games in certain rounds because I didn’t know if these games were actually any good.
It might be useful for recommendations to know what games you’re willing to buy if they were cheap enough but it’s hard to say whether or not that is productive for finding out what games you actually enjoy playing.
Nonetheless, Flinn is in communications with Valve to bring Crunch Magic integration into Steam according to Polygon. The concept is there and unique but could use some refinements to the formula. After all, I did play the game to completion and 5/7 of the final games it recommended I had already played and loved on another platform.
To try Crunch Magic out for yourself, visit their website and login with your Steam credentials to see where your game-burning takes you.
agree
I tried this out. When saving games it is hard to make a decision because often I hadn’t heard of any of them, so I didn’t know what I was choosing between.
I would maybe like to see game trailers load up one by one and you can shoot them down when you think they’re boring?! At least that way you get a gist of the games.
That’s certainly an option but I think it would make the game really long to play. And trailers aren’t always the best indicators of gameplay either. I think this really only works for people who are really serious gamers and know games inside-out without even having played them.
I understand that one needs to be selective in order for it to work, but the motivation to play is quite poor (IMHO).
The idea is good, but I think it’s missing something