I just wanted to see what it looked like
I wondered what a map of game influences would look like, and then almost twenty years went by with nothing happening, because I had the idea and no way to build it.
There was no grand plan here.
It started a long time ago with one of those music influence maps, the kind where you trace how one artist fed into another. I was enjoying it more than I had any right to, and at some point I thought: these are neat to play with, I wonder what a map of game influences would look like. I knew the one thing I wanted out of it, which was to grab a game and drag it and have everything connected come drifting loosely along behind, like the links had a little weight to them. That was about it. Nothing more designed than that.
Then almost twenty years went by and nothing happened.
I never lost interest. Having an idea and being able to build it are just two different things, and I had the first without the second. I could see it clear as day. I had no clue how to stand up a real database, a 3D view, the physics, any of it. It is frustrating to have an idea and no way to bring it into reality, and that is where it sat.
What changed was AI tools. I could hand the parts I didn’t know how to hook up to an AI buddy and have it walk me through them, or just do them while I steered. That is the honest version. The gap wasn’t me finally learning all of it.
Once I could actually build, the method was simple. Make the simplest form of the idea, then play with it and see what questions come out of the play. Drag a node, see what happens, let that ask the next question. What if I add more games? What if studios are connections? The whole project is that loop over and over.
The name is a straight play on six degrees of separation, the old Kevin Bacon game. I never measured whether it was actually six. It just felt right for games and it stuck.
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