Gameplay.Science vs Thusfar

Gameplay.Science is an open-source web platform for independent research on video games using behavior data donated by players. It is designed to support studies without requiring direct participation from game platforms. Players can contribute digital trace data through Steam or Discord connections, account integrations such as Steam or Xbox, or GDPR requests. Account linking lets a participant sign in and authorize automatic access to gameplay data. UK and EU players can request data held by a gaming company under GDPR and share it with researchers. The project aims to cover how long people play, what they do in games, and who they interact with. A study using the platform describes Steam authentication through OpenID, public Steam gameplay details, and hourly collection of each game’s incremental playtime. That study says data was stored on encrypted servers accessible only to the research team. Steam and Xbox are listed as supported ecosystems.

Thusfar is a free, open-source Windows tray app for remembering where you stopped in a game. It reads the local Steam library, detects installed Steam games across drives, and watches for sessions to end. After a session longer than 10 minutes, it offers a skip option, a one-line note, or three prompts about location, what comes next, and what to remember. Sessions shorter than 10 minutes are recorded without that prompt. The app provides a game library and per-game recaps containing notes, playtime, last-played information, and session history. Steam games are detected automatically; console, emulator, and non-Steam sessions can be logged manually, including games from Epic or GOG in the first version. Data is stored locally in SQLite. Optional IGDB cover art needs free Twitch developer credentials; without them, placeholder art is used. The portable release is a ZIP archive requiring Windows 10 or 11 x64 and Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime. It has no installer, and its unsigned release may trigger Windows SmartScreen.