Have you tried Ludocene, the ‘Tinder for gamers’?
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The curse of the modern gamer is owning hundreds or even thousands of games and still never managing to find anything you really want to play. With myriad platforms, constant digital sales and almost 19,000 new titles released in 2024 alone, even the most discriminating player sometimes needs help in finding the hidden gems.
It was with the aim of recommending lesser-known titles that journalist Andy Robertson created Ludocene, a playful take on a dating app that matches players with games they might like. “There’s a better way to connect people to games rather than just what’s popular or what the algorithm is serving,” he says. “We can get really good games in front of people and surprise them.”
As the creator of the Family Gaming Database, a recommendations website that helps parents find appropriate games for their children, Robertson already had a bank of titles that could form the skeleton of the app. All he needed was a more eye-catching format – and an ever-increasing list of titles to offer to people of all ages and tastes.
The games will gradually be added to the database by the independent five-person team behind the project, while the format comes courtesy of a deck-builder – a genre of game that revolves around building up decks of different cards. The name is a play on Anthropocene, the current period of human-dominated history: what follows is the Ludocene, the era of play.
All of Ludocene’s games are presented on virtual cards: on one side, the name and gameplay footage from the game; on the other, a short summary and information on its genre, platform and availability. As you add the cards of games you’ve previously enjoyed to your collection, Ludocene will show you a stream of similar titles that you might enjoy based on its characteristics: adventure games, say, or pixel art.
As someone who probably already spends too much time looking for the next best game, I was pleasantly surprised to find the prototype app recommending games that had completely passed me by. In one test, I offered up a series of turn-based tactics games that I like to play and was met with Howl, a medieval puzzle game whose aesthetic I loved. In another, I fed the app a very motley selection of favourites – Rimworld, Age of Empires, The Witcher 3, Balatro – just to see what it would come up with. Suffice to say that the neon-drenched roguelike Cobalt Core is now on my radar.
The ace in Ludocene’s hand is the addition of paid experts – journalists, streamers, podcasters and so on – to help curate your matches. They also have cards you can add to your deck, based on their background and interests, and doing so will refine the recommendations you get even further. As they add to their favourites over time, those games will start to appear on your feed too. “The best way to find matches is through other people,” says Robertson. “The idea is that there’ll be loads of experts, and so a big part of the site in the future will be discovering and favouriting the people whose tastes you like.”
Crucially, Ludocene has been designed as a free app with no adverts. Funded by an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, it will launch, six months after funding, as a browser app with a dedicated mobile version to follow later. “It being free is very important,” says Robertson – both to keep the interface as clean as possible and to encourage a wide audience. “It’s designed not to have a barrier – it’s not jargon-heavy or anything like that.”
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