Games

Six Degrees of Steve

I'm guessing we've all played the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", why not challenge yourself to do the same with Steve Buscemi?

I started this project back in 2012 when I was tinkering between start-ups. The progress I can report having made between 2012 and 2020: purchasing the domain sixdegreesofsteve.com and finding a dozen ways NOT to buld the game.

There are all sorts of interesting challenges to building what appears to be such a simple game. "Simple, not easy!", as one of my coaches says. Here are a few of the challenges I faced:

• Where to get a comprehensive actor/movie database?
• How to make practical use of datasets like IMDb?
• What to do about typos & misspellings?
• When do I want users to play?
• Who will even play?
• Why will users come back?

Flash forward to 2025 and many of these questions now have clearer answers. I now have a daily ritual of playing a host of games from the NYT every morning while I have my coffee: Wordle, Mini Crossword, Connections, Strands, HashTag Wordle, to name a few. It's a fun way to jump start my brain for the day ahead.

Humanity has also developed Large Language Models (LLM) that help with many of the complex implementation details.

So go ahead and give it a try! SixDegreesOfSteve.com