Flash Game: Video Store Clerk (dot com) harvests real movie scores and gameplay to make a more accurate ratings system

'Video Store Clerk' is an online Flash game in which you pretend to be a smirking, bespectacled movie hipster — at least that's how I played it — who suggests movies to customers based on their previous ratings of real movies. The cool thing is all the scores are being harvested by the game makers in an attempt to build a more accurate real-life movie recommendation system.

David wrote us:

Movie recommendations by crowd wisdom. My friends Jay and Andy have written an on-line game called "Video Store Clerk." By playing the game, people can help build a better on-line movie recommendation system.

It's funny how you're not just guessing the what they'd like, but how much of the five-star rating system they actually might use. The people who just five-star everything are easy!

He explains more on the theory behind the game on Ironic Sans.

Play the game [VideoStoreClerk.com]

[#1 posted by mdhatter , April 14, 2008 6:35 PM]

That's more fun than it looks.

[#2 posted by dculberson , April 14, 2008 7:40 PM]

685! Yeah, it's way more fun than it has any right to be. At least for a movie and stats geek.