Discovery

Timeline Playback

The timeline scrubber sits at the bottom of the screen. Drag it to filter the graph by release year. Games outside the selected range fade out. Games inside appear as glowing nodes. The effect is like watching the medium grow: start in the 1970s with a handful of nodes and watch the galaxy fill in decade by decade.

Playback mode automates the scrubber. Hit play and the timeline advances automatically, revealing games in chronological order. Each era gets a label. The camera can follow the action in cinematic mode, drifting through the galaxy as new nodes appear. It works as both a research tool and a screensaver.

Scrub through 50 years of game history. Watch the graph fill in from Pong to Elden Ring. Each era has its own color. Hover over a node to see what it is. Hit play and let it run as a miniature version of the real thing.

The Pathfinder

The namesake feature. Pick any two games and the pathfinder finds the shortest chain of relationships between them. How many hops from Pac-Man to Elden Ring? From Tetris to The Witcher 3? The algorithm walks the graph using breadth-first search, respecting relationship types and edge weights.

The visual result highlights the path through the galaxy: a glowing chain of nodes and edges connecting your two selections. Every intermediate game is a discovery. You might not have expected Pac-Man and Elden Ring to connect through a particular sequence of influence and shared mechanics, but the path reveals connections that are individually obvious but collectively surprising.

Influence Web

Select any game and switch to Influence Web mode. The view reconfigures to show only that game's influence lineage: everything that influenced it, everything it influenced, and the transitive connections between them. The rest of the galaxy fades away.

This mode answers a specific question: where did this game come from, and what did it spawn? For well-connected games like Doom, Half-Life, or Dark Souls, the influence web reveals an entire ecosystem of related titles stretching decades in both directions. For obscure games, the web might be sparse, which is itself an interesting signal.

Steam Library Import

Connect your Steam account and Six Degrees imports your owned games. Your library appears as highlighted nodes on the galaxy. Suddenly the graph is personal. You can see which clusters you gravitate toward, which genres you've explored, which influential games you've missed.

The Steam integration uses OpenID for account linking and the Steam Web API for fetching owned games. Matching Steam titles to the IGDB dataset is nontrivial (title formatting, regional differences, platform-specific editions), so the system supports per-user manual mappings for games that don't auto-match.

Collections and Personalization

Beyond Steam import, authenticated users can create custom collections. Bookmark games. Build themed lists. A "Favorites" collection is created automatically. Collections act as filters: select a collection and only those games are highlighted in the galaxy.

The combination of Steam import, collections, and the influence web turns Six Degrees from a reference tool into a discovery tool. It's not just about understanding game history in the abstract. It's about understanding your own relationship to the medium. Where your taste comes from. What you might explore next. The connective tissue between the games that shaped you.