Lifebar.io - Your gaming life visualized

Hey bombers!

Today, myself and fellow bomber @rewphus are launching a new web app called Lifebar.io in to alpha.

Lifebar is a web app that represents your life playing and watching video games. With Lifebar you will be able to discover new games, share your experiences and visualize a lifetime of gaming. We are massive fans of the GB crew's video content and one of the original sparks for Lifebar was the desire to capture our thoughts about a game after watching a quick look, play date or endurance run. All of your experiences, whether they were watched or played factor into your personal profile and lifebar.

Lifebar is a work in progress, we are proud of what we have built so far, but we know there is so much more that could be done. We are looking for feedback, so please join our alpha and let us know what you think!

Thanks for posting @ka_tet19. It's exciting to finally share this with the GB community, considering this is where much of the inspiration came from, not to mention the wealth of helpful info from the wiki. Hopefully we can provide something useful in return with the feedback we receive.

"Watch the numbers go up!"

I just signed up. Seems good so far, though it's hard to say if I'll stick with it.

This seems like a neat little thing. I know a lot of people have shared their experiences in keeping spreadsheets to track their gaming history and what not, so this might be helpful for them. I might set up an account and try it out. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the feedback.

Any idea what would make you possibly stick with it?

I'll check it out when I get home from work later today. It seems like something that could be useful to me.

I'll be signing up and dicking around with this later today most likely, but I'd like to quickly drop a note and say HOLY SHIT this is so well designed! Great job, the presentation is extremely impressive.

This seems like a neat idea and maybe this speaks of what technology has done to us, but the idea of having to manually input all that data and then keep it up to date is somewhat daunting. Things like Last.fm mostly worked well because it automatically pulled info from usage.

Great to hear! Let us know what you think after you take a look.

Glad you like it! we worked hard to make something that looked solid. Props to @rewphus for the design.

That is always the main barrier for me with neat looking services like this, whether it be backlogggery, raptr, howlongtobeat.com etc.

If i have to do persistent data entry to keep it up to date I don't stick with it, I might as well just use Excel etc.

I don't have a good answer for that as I know many of platforms don't make it easy at all for a third party company to get that info.

@humanity said:

I couldn't agree more @humanity, building functionality like that (to pull in data automatically) is something we have our eye on. We needed a solid foundation before we could build that kind of integration into lifebar. It's a difficult uphill battle. If you have heard the GB crew talk about the reasons for dropping the trophy/achievements systems from GB, you will know that most attempts to get that data are less than ideal and are fragile at best. That doesn't mean we won't try though, just that it's a bigger challenge.

@ka_tet19: Oh I know it's nigh impossible to do this with gaming data. I'm simply sharing a potential point of view. I looked at the site, and thought it all looked really neat, but I just don't need another login and another place to start writing about games at the moment.

Maybe the ability to login with your Twitter handle would help if thats not terribly difficult to integrate? I know it would certainly get me past the front step. I'm already signed up for so many things I have a physical piece of paper with usernames and passwords on it - don't really want to sign up for another "thing."

Visually though it all looks pretty clean, from what I could see anyway.

@rewphus: Mostly making it easy to use. I like how it suggests other games you may have played, that really helps. I really like the idea and design of the site, but entering the data for each game I've played would take me forever.

I've played around with it a bit more and I have two thoughts:

1. The tiers seem inconsistently displayed. I assume tier 1 is the best and tier 5 is the worst, and that goes top to bottom when entering your data (which is good). However, when you look at the graph on your profile page it shows tier 1 games on the right and tier 5 games on the left. That makes me think tier 5 games are the best, and tier 1 games are the worst.

2. I play some games for more than one quarter. When entering data for Fallout and Skyrim, I wanted to select multiple quarters, and even multiple years, but I can't. Episodic games, like Life is Strange, also aren't easy to categorize because I played them over many quarters.

I hope that doesn't sound too critical, these are both very minor things overall and I'm very impressed with the usability in general.

@ka_tet19 are critic's profiles made themselves or did the staff all put those together?

@humanity: Great feedback. Adding login integration is near the top of our list.

I think Twitter is a given. If anyone has any preferences I would love to hear what people want to login with.

Google? Facebook?... Steam?

@redsoundwaves: Critic profiles are "curated" by us at Lifebar. Every game that is on a critic's profile was added by us, based on a published review. So for example, Brad's profile on Lifebar is comprised of every game he has reviewed (from Gamespot through GiantBomb). We link back to the original review for each game and take a quote from the review that we think summarizes his thoughts best. Every critic has been handled in this way.

@ka_tet19: So if a critic wanted to make their own profile how would they go about connecting all of that? For instance, I write for a couple of sites and I would like to have a review connected to a game I played instead of writing my thoughts about it all over again (not that 140 characters is really a big deal at the end of the day), is that something you guys are looking into doing or are you going to stick to a closed-door policy?

Maaaaan. I kinda want to see all of these graphs and shit of my gaming life. But jesus christ I've played waaaaay too many games. And having to write a little blurb for all of them is taking way more time. Adding all this is way too much of a pain at the moment...

Also any chance you guys could add in more of a listing/library function? If I'm gonna do a bunch database work, then it'd be nice to get some more out of it. Just an alphabetical list. Also the selection of what quarter you played something in feels a little off. Doesn't really seem like it needs to be there.

I'll save this for a rainy day or something.

EDIT: WAY

Very good points. Reversing the order for the tier graph on the profile page would make perfect sense. Just to clarify, you are talking about this graph, correct?

It would make more logical sense to have it go from Tier 5 to Tier 1. One concern we have is that users will automatically associate the tiers to a review system, but we want to figure out ways to present them as more of a relational group of experiences that can change over time.

For your second point, that is something we recognize that we are lacking right now. We currently ask that you enter the last experience that you had with a game. As you update your experience we are working on ways to display that so you can see the progression that has been made, but right now we are really just working on the core mechanics of entering one experience at a time.

@redsoundwaves: The short answer is, yes we want critics to take ownership of their profile if they are interested. I will send you a PM and we can talk about how that would work.

If you had any idea how many times @ka_tet19 and I have butted heads regarding that blurb, you would know that I feel your pain. It is definitely something that we are considering to make as optional in the future, but there is just too much depending on it right now. It is an essential part of the initial vision for the site, but we are more than willing to change that direction if we continue to get similar feedback.

We actually had more of a listing/library function early on, but it got lost in the shuffle many iterations later. That should not be something hard to add back in, however.

The quarter you played/watched also ties in to functionality/views that we had earlier. We had a pretty sophisticated timeline view that we put on the back burner because it wasn't where we wanted it to be, but I agree with you, entering what quarter you played a game in 1992 is a difficult and needless task, to say the least.

@tobbrobb: I am curious, are you just looking to simply add the games to a list of ones you have played/watched without having to enter all of the details of your experience, or do you simply feel that removing the blurb and possibly quarter requirement would be enough for you to continue to add to your profile without feeling too overwhelmed?

All very good feedback and something we will make sure to document and prioritize.

The Tier graph has been flipped. Thanks for the feedback!

@rewphus: Yes, that's the one. I really like the relational idea instead of review scores. Is there somewhere on the site that explains that after the initial welcome page?

I thought of one other question. When rating something we've watched, are we rating the game or the video we watched? For example, I have no interest in playing Until Dawn because I don't like horror games, so I wouldn't rate it at all. However, the GBE playdate videos of until dawn were some of my favourites from last year, so the videos would be tier 1. That's my only experience with the game, but it feels weird putting it as a tier 1 since it definitely wouldn't be if I played it.

You hit the nail right on the head! That is EXACTLY why we are trying to step away from review scores as much it might seem superficial on the surface. We weren't comfortable giving something that we only watched a review score, and we also didn't want the score to be in direct relation to the quality of the game. We probably have to do a better job of explaining it, but our ultimate goal is that you simply assign your experience, not the game, a tier relative to the rest of your experiences. That means if you really enjoyed watching Vinny give all the wrong advice during their play-through of Until Dawn, then you put that experience in a high tier. I am not sure if this approach will ultimately be too confusing for users, but it is what we are striving for. That is another reason why your tier shows up to other users as either an eye, as in watched, or a d-pad, for played.

If you can think of better ways we can display or explain that approach other than adding a simple FAQ, which we plan to do, we are all ears.

i like that all of the game info links back to giant bomb dot com

@tajasaurus: Thanks! We wanted to make sure it was easy to find out more about each game.

@rewphus: The blurb and the quarter is the only thing really soaking up time for me. Though I will admit, I would mostly do this for personal organizing and just looking at graphs, because I enjoy stuff like that. I'm not especially interested in any community aspects of the whole idea, so perhaps I'm just not the target audience to begin with. But yeah more or less, I'd prefer to only input minimal data at first as I build my huge-ass library, and if I want to write something up for the things I care most about I'd definitely go back and put some words down afterwards.

Another thing I thought of as well. If I'm going to pick a tier/rank for games in relation to other games in the same year, I'd rather have the compiled list first so I could think the ranks over. As it stands now I'm just applying guesstimated tiers to the games as I go. Which is perfectly fine, IF there is an easy way to reorganize the tiers afterwards. Perhaps a ranking chart/list per year where I can switch games up and down while keeping the whole picture clear and without having to go back to every individual game page.

This is a lot of criticism, but mostly because I care! I've been looking for a thing like this constantly. Gaming is my primary hobby, and it always felt weird I didn't have an equivalent to MyAnimeList or something for it.

EDIT: My issues largely stem from the sheer amount of games I'd personally have to enter. If I'd put myself in the shoes of more of a newcomer with only a handful of experiences, the site looks more than fine. Very nice clean look and practical interface. I definitely like the core you've built here.

EDIT2: Actually one last thing. Picking a completion for multiplayer only games makes zero sense. It'd be nice to have an either/or for completion vs hour count. I'd like to be able to say that I beat Dark Souls multiple times and add on the the hour count of 300h or whatever if I want to. And then when a MP only game like LoL or USF4 shows up, I could just add my hours played since there is no real reference for "completion".

All good points once again. One thing you can do for the time being is just add games to your library by using the following button:

The one problem is that we aren't currently utilizing or surfacing that list anywhere (oops). We could easily surface that in your profile in an alphabetical list as you were asking for before. It wouldn't, however, trigger similar games in your notifications, but I'm not sure if you care about that functionality.

You would still have to go in to each separate game page to add it to your list, which is not ideal, but we may be able to add it to the button that surfaces on various results pages, like what you see here.

Regarding the details for multiplayer only games, that is something we would like to get better about. We don't currently alter the experience options per game, but that is something I think we will need to do in the future.

Keep the criticism coming! We would MUCH rather have loads of criticism versus the sounds of crickets. The more feedback we get the more we know people are using it and care enough to leave a comment. I promise you we are soaking this all up and loving it.

I agree about being able to slide games into other tiers based on a more holistic view of that year. That is something we will definitely put on our list. I don't think there would be an easy way to solve the compiled list first issue, but being able to adjust it after the fact is an important workflow that we can solve.

Currently, when you enter new experiences, you can click on the bar graphs for each tier to see the list of games you have already placed in that tier. I know it's not quite what you are looking for, but it should help as you build upon your previous selections.

Just want to say you guys put an impressive amount of work into this. I am not sure if it's exactly something I would get in a habbit of using(I pretty much visit 3 websites, and rarely go to others), but I'll give it a shot. This would be really cool if it was integrated into Giantbomb. Having your own forums would help incentivize going there more, but I understand that's a big undertaking(and not one that would be an easy slumdunk; making a good community is hard).

Thanks for the kind words! We are continuing to look in to ways we can leverage the the extensive wiki and content here at Giant Bomb, so of you have any ideas we would be happy to hear them.

We actually do have a forum with a very small community that we are hoping to eventually integrate with Lifebar, but since it's essentially a stand alone site right now, we didn't list it with the OP. We wouldn't mind some feedback on that as well though if you wanted to check it out at Tidbits.io.

Sign up was smooth once I realized uBlock Origin (Which has been a pain in comparison to Adblock) wasn't allowing me to click the sign up button after I had filled out the form.

• With having to throw in a quick blurb, this will be a slower process for me as I go through all the games I've played.
• I like how you can click the bar thats next the tiers which shows what else you placed on that tier that year.
• I'm neutral atm about selecting a "Experienced Quarter."
• The site in general looks fairly slick

I need to poke around some more but those are some of initial thoughts from adding a couple games.

@instantryan: uBlock Origin, huh? That's a new one for us, we'll have to look in to that. You said it has been a pain, so I am guessing you have come across issues with other sites while using that?

@rewphus: I don't know if it's been fixed but one of the bigger issues was you couldn't watch videos on GB when it was turned on. It's nice but also a pain at the same time, but that's most ad blockers anyways.

This looks really nice and I'm liking it a lot. If I can make a suggestion, I think it would be better to have episodic games stated as fully released on the year the final episode is out. I just finished the entry for The Wolf Among Us, and I was sorta miffed at having to put it in a tier of experience with 2013 games when only the first episode was out that year. I imagine this will also be a problem with The Walking Dead: Season Two, which also had the first episode come out in 2013 when it finished in 2014.

This is interesting.

Gamification of something inherently gamified

Just signed up and it seems kind of neat? I'll have to check it out some more later.

Just a question though, have you considered adding more numbers that could get higher?

Maybe this is beyond the scope of the site but for example, it seems like I can add that I've watched the endurance run of Persona 4... that's cool, but what if I could add the hours and minutes watched and played for each game? Or maybe you can already do that...?

I also connected my steam account and kind of feel like stuff like games (and preferably hours played) should be imported to make things more convenient. I know other sites already do the hour thing but I don't think other sites let you add let's plays watched and such as well. Just some thoughts.

I might use it more if I didn't need to summarize my experience with every game. Maybe display a default summary based on assigned tier if nothing entered?

Yeah episodic games are an extra layer of complexity. That is a great suggestion though. We will look into seeing if there is way to modify the release to when the "season" was finished.

Is there a feature to help with the existential dread of seeing your gaming life laid out in front of you?

We would love to add more numbers that could get higher, but currently we just wanted to focus on a baseline that is the same for every game, and we can build out from there. We also didn't want to overwhelm users right away, which we may already be doing?

Importing Steam information is definitely in our queue. It is one of the easier services to work with in that regard, we just didn't have the time and resources to have it in place for this first launch. We will make sure to let you know when we do have it up and running though.

Yeah, we have definitely been getting that feedback, and we are working hard to figure out how we can lower that barrier to entry. A default summary is an interesting idea that we will have consider, I am just worried that might lead to too much repetition when browsing the site. We are currently leaning towards adding more functionality around saving a game to your profile without having to enter all of the XP details right away, and then maybe you can add to it as you see fit. Hopefully we will have more on that soon.

No.

@rewphus: Cool. I don't personally feel it's overwhelming but I'm pretty comfortable with these kind of sites. I just added my first game and I'll have to agree with a previous poster, the "summary" (while an interesting idea) kind of discourages adding stuff. I love that I got Atlus XP when I added the game, but I didn't receive any genre (role-playing etc.) or system (PS2) XP, which would be fun too.

Maybe consider making the summary optional? I think that would maybe also increase the quality of what people write in their summary?

Hello! I really like this.

I have a few comments. First, the search bar closes if you click on it while it is open. It's hard to break the habit of wanting to click in it. Additionally, I had several games that I have had multiple playthroughs in different years on different platforms. Currently, you only allow for us to list a single playthrough of the game (even if we can mark "multiple playthroughs"). For a game like Journey that I played on both PS3 and PS4 or Fez for XBox 360 and PS4, I'd like to see an option to mark each playthrough. Alternately for a game like Rocket League or TERA, where I have/will play for multiple years, an option to mark that would be appreciated (and additionally the percentage completed makes little sense for it).

Also because I'm a lazy ass an option to import play info from Steam, PSN, or XBox would be fantastic.

Is there a simple way to dismiss all notifications? I'm getting flooded with "have you experienced?".

Anyway, keep up the good work! This is a damn cool thing you've made.

Done, you should be able to now access it from your profile here:

It brings you to a list like so:

Is that something similar to what you were looking for? We realize that there currently is no letter selector, but we are working on adding that and more filters/sorting options to this view. We have also received a lot of feedback that users may want to export their results for personal use. Is that something you think would be useful down the line?

Really into this app. Could see myself digging in and really using this. On a personal, anecdotal note, the summary is the most exciting thing about the Lifebar application--I appreciate seeing a quick explanation of a person's thoughts over a simple grade system. But I understand that's currently an outlying opinion. And if the summary remains as a mandatory function you guys are likely to see some natural weeding of the userbase. Those who are really passionate about taking the time and doing the work will stick around, but it lacks the automatic gratification of a Last.fm Scrobbler.

I find myself confused by the "Active Personalities" tab. Those individuals--mostly established critics--aren't actually using the service, are they? You're just doing the work behind the scenes to input their comments into your program. On one hand I appreciate that in a sort of Rotten Tomatoes way, and Lifebar provides a link directly to the review in which their comment originated, but it also seems like it could use more direction.

I don't know how you would go about accomplishing this, mind, so the following suggestion could be complete lunacy. But if Lifebar is using a reviewer's comments verbatim, could Lifebar also associate their review with one of the five "Tiers" you have in place? You wouldn't have any sense of their play percentage or platform, unless noted, but you would at least have a sense of where it fell on their spectrum, from Loved It, Liked It, Eh, Disliked it, Hated It.

A step further, then: In repurposing those critical reviews, Lifebar could essentially become an OK Cupid-style bridge between its users and the critics whose tastes and insights line up with each other. After a user submits a certain number of reviews, suddenly there's a sidebar that pops with a list of critics whose scores closely match the user's own. Maybe it's a game of percentages. "You and Austin Walker rated 85% of games similarly--see more of Austin's reviews?" Some gateway that might introduce users to new writers based on what they like and dislike?

Again. Probably complete lunacy. And probably way off base with what Lifebar is looking to accomplish right now.

Either way, I'm into it. Can't promise I'll stick with it. For now, though, it's fun.

You are correct, "Active Personalities" and the "Critics" tab in the game page are pulled from a curated list of reviews that we are continually adding to the system. It is important to us that we aren't misleading users in anyway, so if you have any suggestions on how we could be more upfront about that, we would be happy to hear them.

Currently the main differentiators are that we try to always list the publication with the name if it is a curated entry. We also include the quote icon with the experience, instead of the played or watched icon that is associated with user entries. The profile for journalists/critics/personalities (we are trying to be careful about using the latter as I know @jeff is not a fan) is also slightly different since we don't have the same experience details as we would for a user.

In the database we have actually converted review scores to a tier, but we want to be very careful with how we display that information for curated reviews, since we don't see review scores as being in direct correlation to how we want tiers to be perceived.

If you are curious, the current conversion system we are using is this:

We understand there will be some disagreement with how we decided to convert reviews, but currently the only place that is being surfaced is with the color that is used next to the snippet from the review, as well as an Experience Curve that is shown in their profile. We intend for the Experience Curve to be looked at as abstractly as possible just to get an idea of what a tier represents in relation to all of the other games they have experienced.

Trust me, we want to take this as far as we can with the help of this community, but we also want to do our best in efforts to not take things out of context. I am already a little uncomfortable with some of the assumptions we are making, but they were necessary to establish a foundation to work from. Hopefully with continued feedback we can create a more intuitive system, and we can provide some of those more advanced analytics/suggestions that you mention.

@rewphus: Seems good! Thanks! I don't mind Ctrl-Fing my way around, so navigating isn't an issue. Exporting would mostly be useful if you guys for one reason or another think the data may be lost otherwise. Otherwise I don't feel any need to do so.

@inevpatoria:Thanks for the wonderful feedback! The summary for each game is something that I feel strongly about. Glad you feel it's important too.

Also, if you are crazy, then we are too, because the of idea of matching up critic's tastes with your own is one of the things we are building towards. It's why we are gathering a deep back catalog of reviews. For example, we actually went back and put every review from Gamespot into Lifebar (take a peek at Jeff's, Brad's and Alex's profile's). Then at the same time we are keeping current with new releases from some of the biggest sites. Putting in your thoughts about games is a great foundation and something I enjoy doing, but the potential of building off that foundation is what we are really excited for.

Sorry Panda, I don't know how I missed this post!

That's a good point about the search bar. We should put an X there instead of having it close on click. Sometimes clearly bad UX like that can be easy to overlook when you are so used to how things have always functioned, it's great to have a new set of eyes on it.

We have had a hard time tackling how to enter more than one played experience. We both have come across that same exact scenario where we have played games on multiple systems, and there currently is no easy way to track those experiences separately. We do allow you to select more than one platform when putting in your XP, but as you mentioned, all of the other stats that go along with that such as percentage played and timeframe are singular. Our original thought process is that we wanted for you to keep adding to your played experience so that we could easily see a progression from beginning to end, which is different than a watched experience where we allow you to enter as many as you like. For cases that you mention, however, that is not ideal. Hopefully we can take a more serious look at that sometime soon.

Importing data from Steam/PSN/Xbox is at the top of our list, but as @ka_tet19 mentioned earlier, those integrations were too volatile for us to count on for the first alpha launch of the site. We have hopes to have something in place in the near future, however.

I also complained about the notification fatigue and requested a dismiss all option, but we decided to move forward without it until we were able to get some solid user feedback. Now that we have that feedback, I'm sure it won't be too hard for me to convince @ka_tet19 to add that in. He's the brains behind the operation, I'm just the mouth.