Feature Request: Lists (They're different from shelves!)

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TL;DR: Grouvee should have user-made Lists, they would encourage discussion and discoverability, take advantage of what Grouvee already does best, and give us all an easier way to share the site with friends.

Lists are something that get recommended around here to bring parity between Grouvee and sites like Letterboxd, and most of the time people point out we already have shelves as a perfectly good alternative to Lists. But let me explain how they are distinct and why they’re important.

Grouvee is already about cataloguing and organizing, Lists make those elements of Grouvee more social.

Shelves are personal, mostly private, ways of organizing games; Lists are a a social act like Reviews or Activities that would have likes and comment sections to encourage discoverability and discussion. Lists would also have description sections to get across ideas that can’t be precisely explained with just a title. Lists get across concise ideas and can lead to discovering new games more than even many reviews do. When you see a list of “The best heart wrenching games of the 2010’s” and you recognize a few games in the preview, it encourages users interested in that list to explore the other entries. Reviews and ratings are the next step for people to explore games after that point to determine if its worth their time.

For Lists to be successful, it’s important that they contain a visual preview before clicking a link. This preview window would show box art for the first few items, catching users eyes and allowing them to scan the preview for anything they recognize and entries they don’t.

You can find game reviews all across the internet in almost any format. Part of what makes Grouvee great is the ability to catalogue and collect our games from the database. By creating a proper ‘List’ feature, users on Grouvee could be more encouraged to share their creative Lists with each other and on other social media sites, which could get more traffic and user interaction back to Grouvee. I can share my thoughts on a game through any medium, but Grouvee’s database integration means it’s the only place I can so easily group games together.

One final anecdote: I know Grouvee is not simply Letterboxd for games, but let me tell you this thing I’ve done with friends over quarantine. My friends and I have spent multiple nights starting a video call, opening up a new list on Letterboxd, and spending the following few hours discussing and collaborating on some very arbitrary or particular List idea while we share our feelings and opinions on film. “Films that will change your life if you’re a teenager”, “Films that aren’t musicals but still have really important musical sequences”, “Films with Mundanity as a Virtue”. Imagine all of the curated and collaborative lists that people could put together on this site to share new and interesting games with each other. “Games where the protagonist has a physical disability”, “Games to play on party night”, “Games that are just as fun to watch as they are to play”, all of these lists would be 30 minute YouTube videos, but instead we could have thousands right here on Grouvee.

I know this whole site is made by one very hard working dude, but I think above many other features, this is the one thing that I would love to see introduced at some point.

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Wow bizarre, i was just going to suggest a “collections” function and/or forum category (which would be easy to add). For one thing, it would be really helpful to be able to group games that were in bundles together. Plus people could use it for favourites or for “more games like this” kinda lists.

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Psst @peter, can we please have a Collections forum? :slightly_smiling_face:

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So you kind of want a temporary fix where you’d have a forum thread/wiki where you could make lists/collections of games?

The answer to the main question here is most definitely a yes. I think people should be able to just make basic ordered lists, but I also was thinking about how to make community lists like you’re kind of talking about. It would be cool if someone could make a list that was the community Free Epic Games list, or the community top 100 JRPGs of all time. It would be awesome if other people could add to the list, or vote on games in certain positions to move them up/down the list, etc.

I guess the first thing would be to create the basic list and kind of go from there.

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So you kind of want a temporary fix where you’d have a forum thread/wiki where you could make lists/collections of games?

Just a separate forum category specifically for collections would be great. I already have a shelf with all free Epic games but there isn’t really a dedicated place to share these kind of things. Plus you can do stuff like make posts for specific bundles to make it easier for people to add those to their shelves.

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Yeah, I can make one. I think ultimately the community lists thing is how I’d like to handle it. That way a list could be cloned onto a shelf, or people could see what games they already have, etc.

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Very cool Peter, and with your plan to add the filter option to not display games that already exist on another shelf, we could look at “The Top 100 JRPGs of All Time” and only display the games that you don’t have on your “Played” shelf.

If you did the thing where a community or public list could be cloned to your shelves, do you think you’d have it so the DYNAMIC list was cloned, or just the SNAPSHOT? SO in other words, if I clone the top 100 JRPG’s list to my shelves, then tomorrow someone add Final Fantasy 8 Remake on there, would that edit transfer over? I think having an option for either would be best.

Or maybe community lists go in their own section so they remain dynamic, but snapshots go on your shelves because you’re saving the list as you liked it in that moment and you’re free to add or remove any selections without affecting the community list.

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There’s a collections forum now:

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@peter did this idea end up getting up, or on your roadmap? I ask because I came across this page and was trying to figure out if this is a hidden feature currently?

The best use of this feature I think is to document established lists like these:

The “Top 250” feature on the site is a great start, I use it a lot already. I wouldn’t expect the site to maintain these, but badging “official” ones could be cool, in lieu of that, users voting/liking lists would get the well maintained ones visible pretty quickly

Another idea - and this one could be delegated to someone to make a userscript for even - is to fade / hide / filter lists like Trakt. This is the IMDb top 250 with movies I’ve seen faded. Great for completionists! (And yes, I’m getting to ‘The Godfather’ eventually :joy:)

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