Don’t Let an Algorithm Pick Your Next Game For You

By Bee Wertheimer | September 15, 2025 | 9:30am

Video Games Features Gaming Recommendations

Don’t Let an Algorithm Pick Your Next Game For You

When searching for a new game to play, one of the most straightforward ways to determine whether you may be interested in a given title is by looking at its genre. The interactive nature of the video game medium makes gameplay experiences drastically different across genres; if, for instance, you really appreciate the meditative quality of a strategy game, you’ll be hard-pressed to find that specific emotional experience in, say, a platformer. All that said, we’re engaging with art here, not shopping for groceries, and the gaming industry’s severe overemphasis on genre serves to harm players and developers alike.

While categorization is a useful shorthand for conveying a title’s gameplay, genre fixation has led to many experiences being reduced to their core mechanics, particularly in the small-budget games space (I say “small-budget” rather than “indie” because the latter has become more of an aesthetic quality and esoteric vibe than an actual word with meaning). Game trends are entirely genre-driven, from soulslikes to cozy games to the infamous friendslop, and when a game doesn’t have a marketing budget, its success is dependent on its conforming to these trends or, at the very least, to algorithms.

The development of tailored algorithmic feeds has marked the death of the Internet as a place worth visiting, and its consequences reverberate into nearly every facet of modern life. Social media is designed to keep you scrolling for as long as possible by serving you content it thinks will interest you based on your engagement history, and game marketing works the same way. Steam, the largest gaming platform in the world, features a personalized Discovery Queue that presents you with games within your previously played genres in the hopes of predicting your next purchase. This cultural expectation of instant gratification is antithetical to art itself and actively prevents players from encountering meaningful experiences outside of arbitrary genre definitions.

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On the design side, genre is a beast that must be fended off at every stage of development. When starting a new game, genres serve as predefined avenues for a developer to follow, which leads to a plethora of games marketed—and perhaps even conceived—as, “What if [insert genre elements here] had [insert different genre element here]?” As both a developer and player, this presentation is unbearable. Nobody in their right mind would ever explain The Incredibles to someone who’s never heard of it before as The Avengers meets Toy Story. And the problem with game genres—as opposed to genres in film or literature—is that game genres are explicitly based on, and sometimes even named after, the games that innovated or popularized them. From roguelikes to soulslikes to (shudder) metroidvanias, naming a genre after a specific game sets every subsequent game in that genre up to be compared to the original, which is not always a productive way to engage with a piece.

In my experience making games, the pressure of adhering to and/or avoiding genres has been debilitating, and I find my personal design process is best conducted without considering genre at all, or at least avoiding it to the best of my ability. But even if a developer manages to design a game without being bogged down by genre influences, as soon as that game is exposed to oxygen the developer will be bombarded with questions attempting to define the work. From playtesting to pitching to marketing, small-budget developers are pressured to contort their games into digestible buzzwords. But why must art be easily understood?

If you are a victim of algorithms—that is to say, a being of flesh and blood—and want to step outside of your gaming comfort zone, take the power from the machines and let real people recommend your next game. Ask your friends what they’re playing; read a feature on Endless Mode; if you live somewhere with a games scene, go to a playtest or a curated exhibition. If you don’t want to risk wasting money on something you don’t like, browse Itch.io or get your hands on cheap, older games from thrift stores (or other means). But don’t shy away from games that make you uncomfortable, or games that seem catered to a demographic you’re not a part of. The worst thing that can happen is you play a game you don’t like, and identifying why you don’t enjoy a work of art is as worthwhile an experience as any other.

Bee Wertheimer is a games writer based in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their website at beewertheimer.com.