It's a big problem: Players can't find the games they might like. And developers can't locate prior art, either. Here's an attempt at solving discoverability issues.
Discoverability is a huge issue for developers: Players that might love their game may never even know it exists. But in a related problem, developers will have trouble finding out about games they might want to explore, too.
The UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media has debuted a new interactive database called GameNet, which currently contains over 11,000 games released up until mid-2014, and allows you to explore games both related and, oddly enough different than the game you selected. For more info on that tool, read its FAQ.
Alongside GameNet, the school has debuted GameSage, which overlays GameNet and tries to make recommendations based on plain-english descriptions of games -- a user writes up a description of the features of the game they're interested in, and GameSage makes recommendations. You can read its FAQ here.
The data is extracted from search results from sources such as Google and Wikipedia, but presented a more readable format aimed at making recommendations.
"We tried to make it informative and easy to use, so you can quickly see if a game interests you," said UC Santa Cruz professor of computational media Noah Wardrip-Fruin, in the school's blog post on the projects.
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