Most Similar Games By Genre
If you were ever done playing a game, like so done to the point where even if you wanted to continue playing the game there is nothing that you could do that you haven’t already done a hundred times. You might want to find a new game, but if you still wanted to play something similar to what you just finished playing then you would have to search for something like “game like ___”. For my 3rd assignment, I have written something that decides which games are most similar to a target game so that you can keep playing an engaging puzzle, or action-adventure game similar to what you already had fun playing before.
The data source for this project is a Kaggle data set submitted by a user on the site that I have downloaded and used. To clean the data set I got rid of some columns that had little to no use in this assignment and focused only on the genres of the games. The similarity metric that I have used to determine the games closest to the target game was Jaccard similarity which is essentially the intersection between the target and the game genres divided by the union of the same.
What I found was very interesting because the average Jaccard similarity score was very high, and the reason that I think that is, is because there are a lot of games that have something like “action” or “adventure” in their list of genres and this causes the similarity score to be higher than what I have seen before in class examples.
For the game Shenmue an action, brawler, rpg, and simulater genre game the most similar games to it where:
19 Yakuza 0
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
17538 Dynasty Warriors: Gundam Reborn
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
18817 Yakuza 0: Digital Deluxe Edition
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
45954 Soulworker Academia
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
26548 Sonzai
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Indie’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
1242 Moonlighter
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Indie’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
1905 Yakuza 4
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’, ‘Sport’]
27838 BoneCraft
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Indie’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
12296 Cowboy Life Simulator
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Indie’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
17068 Blossom & Decay
[‘Adventure’, ‘Brawler’, ‘Indie’, ‘RPG’, ‘Simulator’]
As you can see, the most similar games here are ones that share very similar if not the exact same set of genres.
The limitation of this analysis is that it is conducted only using the Jaccard similarity metric. I think that it would have been a little better to use another metric, something like cosine similarity to compare this to so that we could see if there are better results while using that. But this result returns games that seem to be really good in terms of similarity so this seems to be a success even without doing very long and extensive work to compare it with something else.
Now that we have reached this result I hope that the next time that you need a game to play, you use this.
