Ludocene Is Very Silly
Ludocene is one of those things that I look at and just think, with a sigh, “why?”.
At my kindest, I can say that it is needlessly over complicating something that doesn’t need complicating to begin with.
At my usual levels of Rob, I’d point out it’s a complete and total waste of everybody’s time, money and effort and you could do more, better, with less effort. So why not do something else instead and save everyone the bother?
It’s been billed, sort of, as a dating app but for games. Obviously, nobody here is inviting you to actually take the games on a date so… it’s just another one of those websites people built bloody loads of about ten or fifteen years ago where rather than address any structural problems, address any needs people actually have, they’re like “ok, so how about if we did a gamified app?” and, frankly, we did this. Like I just said, about ten to fifteen years ago. Repeatedly.
Come on now. Did everyone else sleep through Web2.0 into the app frenzy? Or have we just decided to forget everything and hope this is it, this is the gamified app that will totally do the job? I feel like the only person who remembers the sheer amount of “take a look at my game recommended thingy” from every other month on Twitter for years on end and it’s mildly freaking me out. None of them caught on because all of them are more work than just doing what people already do.
Why, in 2025, when people are begging just about anyone who will listen to stop fucking around and let them just look at things normally, no app, no game-adjacent nonsense, just show them the thing, has nobody said “look mate, no” to this thing? It confuses the hell out of me. More so because with the notable exception of the stain on videogames/society that is Jason Rohrer and their involvement, there’s a bunch of people here I really respect and…
I would like to read their recommendations!
So many of them (again, not Rohrer) have something interesting and vital to say about videogames, a bunch of them I’ve already been going to for recommendations for the past fifteen or twenty years! There’s some incredible writers and designers and all the rest of it. So, yes, I would love to have more of their recommendations! They’re truly great people! With interesting tastes! It’s fantastic! They’re fantastic.
I do not want to train an app to do this though. Why would I? I’m tired of training apps for little to no gain, it’s a waste of my time and a waste of my life. It’s not worth it for a game recommendation, right? Besides! I am not short of ways of finding the next videogame to play. I am not short of ways to find opinions on videogames. I am really not short of ways to get personalised recommendations from someone’s database. Nobody is.
I do not want to “do a run” to find more games to play. Why would I want to do this? What does that offer me beyond, well, just showing me the game recommendations from people without any of that? And please, do not let’s do the “but it’s personalised” because we’ve been doing this for over fifteen years now and if ragging things out of a database and some tags was the answer, we’d all be running around in a much better world of videogames than we are. We’ve done just about every permutation of this around eight times over each. Adding people into the mix doesn’t make that much of a difference.
Every single step, from requiring log ins, to “doing a run”, to pissing around putting cards into piles, is needlessly adding to the workload required to get a recommendation, something you can just give people without all that. It is adding, not removing, barriers.
Anybody engaged enough with videogames is already swimming in places to find recommendations and, in fairness, probably swimming in a backlog of videogames too. They will have their favourite streamers, sites, reddits, forums, YouTubers, news sources.
Anybody not that engaged with videogames just wants to be left alone to play what they want to play.
So who is this for? People who would rather take the long way round? I’m sure these people exist but, yeah. Everyone is better served in ways we’ve already been doing for decades across multiple art forms and bits of culture. We already know what works.
So. I want you to spend a moment imagining something, okay?
I want you to imagine a way to use the internet to gather a bunch of lovely, erudite folks (not Jason Rohrer) together and offer people game recommendations. An internet where people could look at this thing, whatever it could be, and open up their web browser, type a URL in and have a look at what these people are recommending. And they wouldn’t need to log in. They would not need to complete a run. They would not need to move any cards about the place. They could just find some stuff they might be interested in. They do not need to do pointless bullshit work for an app.
You could call it, I dunno, a blog. A normal website. Anything. It could have a menu. Have you seen Deku Deals and the amount of granular controls you can fit on one website? Fancy an RPG? Try a link! Press the RPG button. If you want to see what a particular person is recommending, we solved this years ago, it’s “their name, but it’s a clickable link” and it doesn’t need any cards. Have you seen sidebars on blogs? They’re fantastic. You can just click a link. On the internet. Which works. These are solved problems.
Why is Ludocene not just a normal website? And if the answer here is “because the economics of that are fucked” and you think a dawn of touchscreen phones app is somehow a better answer, I genuinely don’t know what to say. Because no, it isn’t. It’s worse. For everyone.
Because you can interact with it? It’s twenty twenty five, nobody should be doing “but it feels nice to move things around the screen” anymore. We settled this long before everything started being made shitter at scale. It was needless faff then, it is needless faff now and it really isn’t that interesting. We’re always moving things around on screen, it never stops. It might have been vaguely exciting in 2011, it definitely isn’t anything now.
All of this, it’s more effort for less and with fewer chances to even claw back a few quid from for anyone involved if anyone wants paying. It’s a bloody accessibility nightmare too, good gracious. The box sizes, the text, all of it. So needless. And for what? To put a bunch of steps between people and game discovery. What are we doing that for?
So why, WHY, are people doing this when it flies in the face of what videogames needs to fix any of its problems, when it just makes people work more for … game recommendations (a not entirely equitable exchange there), and as I keep repeating, flies in the face of what any sort of knowledge acquired from the past fifteen years of repeatedly doing these things has taught us?
I don’t know. But it’s completely silly. And it totally weirds me out that folks are like “yeah, this is a good idea” because whilst its heart may be in the right place, absolutely nothing else is.
And Jason Rohrer? Come on.