Feature suggestion: Gaming diary

irubataru · January 29, 2017, 10:41pm

This is sort of a big one, but it is based around how I would like to use Grouvee, rather than how I am using it now. I really like grouvee, and I use it similar to other media consumption tracking sites such as letterboxd.com (for movies), and goodreads.com (for books). However, with video games I quite seldom have to actually log anything to Grouvee. Either because I am simply playing an MMO that I already have hundreds of hours in, and therefore have nothing to add to Grouvee, or because I am in the middle of a 100+ hours RPG, and will not add it to Grouvee until I finish it. In short, if the only times I need to log a game is when I finish it, and when I start a new one, I end up updating Grouvee once every other week at most.

So my suggestion would be to have some sort of diary in which you can log your daily gaming activites. E.g. very simply just compiling a list of all the games you played today, but you could optionally log the hours spent on a game that day (although that would be less interesting for me personally), and maybe a category such as “Replaying”, “Messing around”, “Glitch hunting”, “Speedrunning”, “Socialising”, etc. And then at the end of the year, one could look through one’s log and get a good impression of what kept one busy over the year. I feel like there would be some potential in a feature like this, and there are obviously numerous additions that could be made depending on other people’s needs and preferences.

I understand that this is a huge feature, but I just thought I would throw it out there ^^

BMO · January 30, 2017, 12:05am

There is a tagging and search feature on the main site. If you use a hashtag on a status update you can later search using that hashtag to see only the entries tagged. You could create a hashtag #gamenamediary, for example. You could then search your status updates from your profile page and see only the entries you tagged with #gamenamediary. This would be one way to create, maintain and then view a game diary.

On another note you can view all past status updates for a game via the game page. I’ve been using that to view all my past posts, viewing them much like a diary. So if I visit the Grouvee page for Mass Effect Andromeda (i use this example because I’ve posted a number of updates for th game) is see every update I’ve made in reverse order. Much like a diary, I see a list of every post I’ve made for the game. If you post regular diary updates for a particular game you can always filter for those updates quickly and easily by visiting the game page.

Lastly, you can mark entries as private, which means you can maintain diary entries that only you can see (if that’s useful).

Does any of that functionality fit what you’re looking for?

irubataru · January 30, 2017, 12:19am

Well, yes, to some extent I guess it would be possible to hack together a diary function with the tagging system, but it is not exactly what I am looking for. I guess I’d be interested in a more full feature, something you could use to specifically keep track of what you are playing on a day by day basis. E.g. logging that today I played games X, Y and Z, and then have some way of easily displaying your diary later.

At the moment I am just interesting in gauging the interest for something like this. I am just a sucker for logging thing and displaying data. And as far as I see it Grouvee is great at logging gaming in general, but is harder to make work as a daily activity tracker (see e.g. logging sports activities etc.). This is partially due to the nature of the medium, but I believe it is possible to see gaming as an activity, and not simply as a single “accomplishment”.

It’s hard for me not to sound like a douchebag expecting too much, the service is already great

BMO · January 30, 2017, 1:00am

You don’t sound like a douchebag at all. It’s a solid request. I was just wondering if any of the existing tools and methods would work for you. I think the diary idea is interesting, and it seems like something people could and would use. I’ll tag the site creator @Peter into this conversation in case he has any thoughts on the idea.

Do you have any thoughts of how you’d like to see it implemented? How do you envision the interface? Would it be something your prompted to fill out each day on the main page, or profile page? I’m just trying to get a feel for how it would work.

irubataru · January 30, 2017, 1:15am

Good to hear that I don’t come of in the wrong way. I deliberately tagged it suggestion rather than request, as I wanted to know if others would be interested in something like this, or whether the way I envision using Grouvee is somewhat disconnected from how people use it themselves. For me it is all about trying to make the small stuff make up the whole. As the moment I finish a game might be everything from 5 hours to a year since I first started playing it, and thus I find the current way of logging games a bit overwhelming.

I guess the way I envision it at the moment is a simple click to add to diary for any game, and then you specify a date along with optional tagging (as mentioned in the first post), e.g. duration of play, and maybe comments. You could also boost the social aspect by being able to tag other grouvee users in your play session if you played a multiplayer game. The more important point would be how something like this is displayed. A good way of visualising data is always the most important aspect of any logging tool. On the one hand side one could have a simple diary list, where it displays the date, possibly with a separator between days, months, years, and the ability to scroll down your list, looking back in time. It would also be cool to have a diary summary, where you could e.g. get some statistics of the games you played within a start and end date. E.g. top 5 most logged game (in instances or hours if you log playtime), and so on.

I think probably the most important thing is that it is easy and quick to do. As I have mentioned before, I find tagging things, and updating my shelves on Grouvee somewhat daunting. E.g. when do you move a game to the “played” shelf? What about games you are playing, stop playing for a week or two, and then don’t know if you should move it to your backlog? I end up simply creating a large amount of shelves, but this still doesn’t really make it any easier. So I thought that having an option to simply log that you played these games today, it might be easier to create a whole out of all the smaller gaming sessions one has.

It would probably be possible to have auto-update rules that update your shelves depending on when you last added something to your diary, but that is beyond my suggestion at the current moment. I just believe it would help me keeping track of my fairly unstructured and sporadic gaming habits

GigaDeathNullGolem · January 30, 2017, 2:32am

I can understand your position. I think anyway you cut it backlogs are a problem for everyone XD. The diff gaming habits people have make me wonder what the best solution could be. The bread and butter of using this site is to go to the page of the game in question and making and edit. The game pages look great now too imo and it works a whole lot nicer with the recent updates, but you have to use those main pages. But yea what if you miss something? What if you forget to mark something? Some users who arent OCD, not mark things as finished, etc. might feel overwhelmed, especially if they play a bunch of stuff at once. playing several things at once sounds overwhelming. In any case…

30 day tracking that automatically puts small links to whatever you’ve done an activity in (for each game) on a side bar on the global page/main page where you could quickly swap shelves or go to those titles. IF you wanted you could also quickly start stop play times, or post statuses, with one less step, etc. since most of us are only going to be working with maybe at most 15-20 titles over a 30 day rolling period this seems like it could work and not look horrible. After 30 days of no activity, it could then have a pop up at the top of the feed or something, that you then tick away for you to make final changes (hey did you finish this or not, off to the backlog then? etc) or send an option to send out the monthly email survey that reminds you of what you’ve been doing with the last 30 days with some way to make several changes all at once in one shot. Not sure if i would like that feature myself or not, but I have missed ‘finishing’ games before by not clicking the calendar right or something. and a sidebar like thing could help and be a faster way of accessing relevant pages.

the 30 day tracking concept could exist in other forms. be a shelf, etc. it seems like a 30 day window would work for this. would also be more concise and cleaner than our own personal user page/profile.

peter · January 30, 2017, 3:07am

I really like this idea. Like you said, the trick is in displaying the data, but we can kind of figure that out as we go. If done correctly, this could be one of those features that gets people to come back on a regular basis vs. once a month, or however often “normal” people play games.

I’ll think about how this could work without cluttering up the site, but I really like the thought.

As the guy who built this site, I kind of struggle with this too. I don’t really think it’s got anything to do with how Grouvee works, it’s just how our brains work when it comes to how to categorize our games. I still have Final Fantasy XV on my playing shelf, but I haven’t turned it on in 2 weeks. Do I want to put it back on the Backlog shelf, or am I going to start it back up soon? I think when you make that transition is up to you. Make up your own rules, and stick to them. I don’t know if the diary entries would help too much with this other than it might make you realize how much you haven’t touched a certain game.

irubataru · January 30, 2017, 11:38am

Do any of you use Letterboxd? This is sort of how I envision it. Because it is very easy for me to open Letterboxd whenever I am done watching a movie, press the “Add A Film” button and then fill in the date, whether it is a rewatch and add additional tagging to it and a rating. While here that is only something I need to do every once in a while as I finish or start something, and thus I end up forgetting it. Obviously Letterboxd is structured somewhat differently, there, shelves aren’t as much of a thing, they have collections which you could use in a similar fashion, but they aren’t as full featured as the shelves are here. But for some reason I just like looking at my “Diary” on Letterboxd from time to time and think: “Oh yeah, I watched that movie as I was holed up in a hotel while apartment hunting in October”.

But yeah, being able to log gaming sessions would be easier than having to take a stand on how something fits on a shelf for you. For instance, I booted up Nom Nom Galaxy with a friend yesterday, and we played for a couple of hours. Still, I don’t feel like adding it to my playing shelf, because it might just be a one off thing, and there isn’t really anything else I could do with that activity on grouvee. I could write a status update, but then I feel like I would have to have something to write. So having a simple “Add to diary” where I could add e.g.:

Game: NomNom Galaxy
Date: 29/01/2017
(Time played: approx 2h)
Tags: Socialising, Coop
With: @Kuba
(Platform: PS4)

Then that would be an easy and quick way to add something of value (at least to me), to an archive that I can browse say either when looking back at the end of the year, or when talking to my friend about what we played together lately, checking which game I am most likely to play on a Saturday evening, etc.

But I feel like I am starting to repeat myself, so I’d very much like to hear other people’s views on it

BMO · January 30, 2017, 5:01pm

I am starting to understand what you would like. I do have Letterboxd, and I know what you mean. The add a film button is quick and handy. I can see how you would make use of a similar feature on Grouvee. It’s not a bad idea. A quick way to add an update to a game that isn’t necessarily part of your generic status updates.

peter · January 30, 2017, 7:58pm

I honestly think the regular status updates could be extended to support what you want pretty easily. I like to keep things simple, and having 2 different “statusy” type things isn’t exactly my style. However, I think extending the status to have those other fields could support what you’re wanting to do.

irubataru · January 30, 2017, 8:14pm

Yes, I also believe it could be implemented as a status update. The infrastructure for it is already very much there, it is more about making it easy to add a session log in such a way that one feels as if one can add as little or as much information to the status update as you want.

I guess you would also need additional metadata so that e.g. it increments some sort of counter on the your entry for a given game (so you can count sessions within a fixed period), that it is semi-private (so it doesn’t spam down the front page), and that you can view a chronological list of all your logged sessions in sort of a nice summary way. For instance date on the left, and then a list of games played on that date with small icons, then a separator, next date you logged something, and so on.

The biggest problem with using the status updates as is is mostly that displaying the data is not optimal. Specially if you want to log a session after the fact (i.e. a couple of days after it happened), and that you would have to basically just make a bunch of empty status updates, and say that an empty status update is what I consider a session log.

I guess it is a bit weird to request a feature that is more or less there already, it’s more about how the data is displayed more than the data itself.

GigaDeathNullGolem · February 2, 2017, 11:57pm

Status tags sounds cool. U could look at that data down the road later too maybe (not sure if i would actually use it/need it i’m quite happy with status+search tags) on something like a letterboxd type year in review or other visualization.

this might be a bit related i’ll put it in here. you know how when you click ‘playing’? What if that automatically started a playthought since you are basically telling grouvee ‘yes i’m playing it now’ then when you untick playing it completes the playthrough? (this is less clicks but for me it can resolve something getting not properly clicked’ and having an 'open end) i wonder if there are disadvantages to this, bugs, etc. (if we accidentally hit i’m playing and meant to do played it could record erroneous playthrough of a 1 min time)

If badges showed up on the main game page somehow, and were assigned a date. That’d be very diary-ish lol.

hyperjelly · February 6, 2017, 1:08pm

I know what you mean! The way I’ve dealt with this - for now - has been to create a shelf called ‘Started’ and a shelf called ‘Abandoned’. Not necessarily ideal, but it’s been an easier way to break things up so they’re not all under the generic ‘Played’ umbrella.

irubataru · March 17, 2018, 1:49pm

So I am going to shamelessly bump my own thread after about a year of testing my own implementation of this idea using the built in tools.

So I have been doing what @bmo suggested and basically adding status updates myself after every (well, I’ll get back to this) play session I do, my diary entries all look the same, basically:

Played: 01/01/18 Platform: Switch, #gamediary
… (additional notes)

and they are all marked as private so I don’t clutter the front page. In general I like this, because now I have a year of this data that I can easily scroll through by opening my status updates and searching for the tag #gamediary. And this is all really neat. It is an OK solution for one person. However, it is kind of tedious, and I do not do it as often as I wish I did basically due to the fact that it takes quite a few “clicks” to carry out:

Open grouvee
Go to my shelf
(optionally change shelves), Find the game
Scroll down to the status updates
Copy and paste my template from somewhere else
Change the necessary fields
(make sure I am consistent with what I fill in)
Make sure I remember to click private (I wish I could set status updates to be private by default for this)
Stress out over whether it is really set to private
Click “Post”

So yeah, this is basically why I do not do this every time I play something. However, it is nice to have the data there to read through as a sort of “Year in review” kinda thing.

Therefore, I ask again, is anyone else interested in something like that? To streamline it I’d mostly want an easily accessible form on the front page where you can fill in the data people feel should be in one of these diary entries and subsequently posts a status update for that game in a fixed format. Obviously, once the data is there it would be possible in the future to extend the status search functions to search for these entries specifically and let you filter things such as from date & to date, platform, game, etc. So that you could e.g. check how much you played your Nintendo Switch in November last year. Or how much you played Dark Souls in total over all platforms.

Anyway, I thought I’d share my experience doing this the manual way and see if anyone finds this interesting.

Osyx · March 22, 2018, 11:38am

I use Letterboxd a lot, so I would actually really like something like this.

GigaDeathNullGolem · March 23, 2018, 12:24am

On grouvee, I started doing ‘date started/finished’’ to track play sessions. I went back and looked at my raptr and some other things for stuff pre grouvee. and for older stuff/everything else pre-grouvee, I just ‘fed’ the database fake finished dates (release dates). Doing this will allow you to sort ‘played’ games that way using the widget, and ‘make this my manual sort’ if you fiddle with it, in addition to other filters (such as ‘platform’). Its not too much work to do with grouvee as you play games. Recommended. (I posted an example of this in the 2017 in review thread.)

There are some issues though: If you don’t ‘finish’ a game, and just leave it open it wont show up. Requires dilligence and practice, i’m finally in the habit of ‘finishing’ what i ‘start’ That is a mistake that you can however fix just by going to the end of the list and fixing it.

Another thing is ‘Backlog’ shelf also doesnt come up and it would be nice in some situations (like a 2017 game diary) to see both ‘played’ and ‘backlog’ show up.

also older games i have an annoying issue. If i filter down to a certain platform i see stuff on multiple platforms belonging to differnt shelves: example: i played tons of stuff on SNES but when looking at my genesis shelf i will see them there and i really shouldnt. this is the case if i tag ANY specific releases as ‘abandoned’ i will still see them as played if ANY version of the game is ‘played.’ It would be nice to see exactly how many SNES games I have told grouvee I have played, and I can’t tell that very easy from looking at my grouvee due to platform overlap amongst shelves!

Still, A minimal chronological arrangement of game cover art with title only works fine for me. If I am curious i can visit the game page to look at private status ‘notes’. I am happy with the way game pages currently work. But my habits are different than someone like irubataru, or someone who plays a certain MOBA game. I could see a more text oriented/inclusive version of a timeline/diary thing working well for others.

Also, here’s what my Launchbox looks like:

To go back a bit further in time to see how this works:

‘old’ games on certain consoles look nicer clustered together, so I gave a default of Last played 1995 for most SNES (it also is very quick to do!) but PC default is strictly by release year, since i play so many. older PC games database on LB is a bit incomplete, I have to manually create dummy shortcuts to add them to database

But this is pretty nice because I can have everything from itchi.io to HL Mods:

Note: this isn’t how LB works out of the box… Mirroring shelves in this way in LB is a lot of work. its also not really designed for PC games but obviously it works really well with it if you bother to set it up (and i know of a few who came to the program specifically for VR!) But I think it looks nice, and I got so accustomed to grouvee that I wanted to make it look the same. It’s also a nice way to keep track of stuff not on GB since you can just make any old entry for anything on the fly (including stuff that’s not even games)