I was thinking about what Valve could do to improve visibility and the the usability of their store...
A long time ago (I'm pretty sure the website doesn't even exist anymore) I had an account on a music torrent tracker (what.cd) that had a very cool feature... basically, on every band page there was a graph with the band represented as a node; each edge represented a connection to another band (shown as other nodes)... People could freely upvote/downvote the strength of the connection (represented by the edge's thickness).
I mean, I could see a system that allows you to do the same thing with games. Sometimes tags are way too restrictive... For example a walking simulator often gets lumped together with Myst-likes which, despite sharing some similarities (first-person view, environmental puzzles, little to no action,..), are considerably different experiences.
Here's a leet PowerPoint-powered mock-up:
To make the link between games more explicit, it would be cool if one could upvote/downvote each separate tag and freely select a subset of the available ones to create a "composite tag", which then would be used to select the nodes and display the graph.
Something like this:
The number of games displayed and the "distance" from the target game (i.e. similarity) would depend on which games you own. If, like me, you own most well known and highly-rated Myst-likes, the selection of nodes would propagate further and suggest less obvious titles.
What do you guys think?