Yes, I’ve actually found a few interesting games I had never heard of before! So the project has been a success for me already.
But there’s still plenty of places where games are placed strangely on the map, and I like to investigate why that’s happening (it’s usually because Steam reviews are pretty noisy signal).
The first version of this idea was actually based on cosine similarity. The user would enter arbitrary text or an existing steam app id, and would get a list of games back.
The arbitrary text results were never very good because to get related results you needed to write a fake review of the kind of game you were looking for, which is a difficult concept to explain to users. Most users just entered text like "beautiful game", and that lead to bad results. "Not a beautiful game" winds up very close to that.
The results based on steam app id were much better, because it was comparing like-for-like. That lead to me considering different ways of presenting the games based on their review similarity. And so this map was made.
The umap projection does introduce a fair amount of distortion, so it's not a strictly better result than cosine similarity between specific Steam games. I'm still playing with the umap parameters to try and find something which causes the least problems.
But there’s still plenty of places where games are placed strangely on the map, and I like to investigate why that’s happening (it’s usually because Steam reviews are pretty noisy signal).
The first version of this idea was actually based on cosine similarity. The user would enter arbitrary text or an existing steam app id, and would get a list of games back.
The arbitrary text results were never very good because to get related results you needed to write a fake review of the kind of game you were looking for, which is a difficult concept to explain to users. Most users just entered text like "beautiful game", and that lead to bad results. "Not a beautiful game" winds up very close to that.
The results based on steam app id were much better, because it was comparing like-for-like. That lead to me considering different ways of presenting the games based on their review similarity. And so this map was made.
The umap projection does introduce a fair amount of distortion, so it's not a strictly better result than cosine similarity between specific Steam games. I'm still playing with the umap parameters to try and find something which causes the least problems.