A few months ago I downloaded a program on Steam named Anarchy Arcade which allows you to design, create, decorate and populate a structure to display your Steam games, movies/pictures/music and now even comic books and manga. I've subscribed to user created maps based off of the Resident Evil mansion, the command deck of a Star Wars Star Destroyer and even a mansion behind the vault door from the Fallout series. I've also (contained in some map packages) subscribed to various furniture/add-one for different themed rooms.
Since owning this software, I've put more than 3 hours into it, most of which was today. Spawning items into your new arcade is as simple as clicking the middle mouse wheel (of course you can change your control configuration) and choosing what you plan on placing, whether it's a YouTube link, picture from your computer or a game. You then get to scroll the mouse wheel scrolling through cabinets, picture frames or displays that are available to you at that moment. The more items you spawn into your map, the more points you get which in turn gives you points and tickets (think of skeetball tickets from Chucky Cheese or carnivals) which you can then use to unlock different cabinets, light fixtures, consoles and more. I started by bringing out 4 Borderlands games, all next to each other looking rather nice with the colorful marquis displays and each in their own unique cabinet. There's even a nice picture of either gameplay or a screenshot on the screen of the cabinet. A single click on the cabinet will auto-play a trailer, double-click it will open the game where you can play it as if you're doing so from the Steam launcher. I rather liked the layout of my game room, so I went from just 4 games to roughly 40-45.
At that time, I needed a smoke break so I exited the game (every time I spawned something it 'saved'). I came back up a short time later and loaded my place back up. It loaded a fresh instance of the map. Rinse and repeat a couple more times until I actually figured it out...
Updated was the whole achievement thing. Prior to now, while playing a game from within Anarchy Arcade your achievements wouldn't get credited to your account. Today I acquired an achievement in Borderlands (through AA) and it did in fact show up on my profile. So that's a bonus indeed!!
The meat and potatoes of this whole thing is this. User created maps through the Workshop are nice. They offer things which I myself can not do, due to my innate inability to not being able to do diddly squat in any type of 3D program. Wondering if I worded that right.. I'll try again. I can't do shit in any type of graphics program. I could learn quickly, but if I don't keep at it at least every other day, I start forgetting stuff. However, moving on....
I have a large quantity of games (624). A large quantity of DLC (417) {which could get their own display}. If I wanted to have a playable cabinet for each of my games, I'd have to have one massive building to contain them. Also, if I wanted to make available the movies/music on my computer, the space would get even bigger....
My solution to this would be this. A program within Anarchy Arcade where you could tick a box in front of your games saying 'I want this one displayed'. Same thing with the media from your hard drive. With the games, the slave program would go through Steam and look at the top 4 tags of the games you chose and it would group games of the same genre into their own room. If the algorithm was unable to place with certainty, it could of course ask how to place it. After your games were chosen, the program would ask what type of building/area you'd like; probably offering a drop down menu with themes, settings and what-not(feudal Japan, Steampunk, Futuristic, etc..). It would then figure the size of the containment and create it custom to the amount of games you have. That would reduce the frustration of liking a map but not having enough room to put everything that you want out for display. Vise versa, it would also keep from having too much empty space left over. I am fully aware that this probably won't happen, but we can all dream.
Lastly, I felt rather foolish playing a game trying to design and layout a virtual place to play my games when I could have just been playing them through Steam as they just sat there waiting to be played.
