So, I never really used them. Didn't understood the concept back then when it was introduced. Now I wanted to give them a chance. So I went to the catalogue page and looked over the mixes... "Games that everyone should experience" is a little meaningless title, and behind that the list consists of the usual suspects. Didn't help me a lot. But wait. Who would call a mix "Win a GOG game free"? And why is there the same text everywhere? Where is the damn dislike button, when you need it.

Okay, up for some useful mixes. "Learn how to sell your mother in four easy steps" catched my attention. After clicking on it it even made sense. Good trade simulations is the topic. But the introductionary text of each game and the total list is very short (and apparently limited by the function itself).

The Multilinguals, Works on Linux/Wine, Max, Espagnol, Italian, lists probably make sense. However I would solve this thing by user tagging the games with keywords. After all these are not matters of opinion.

Great cRPGs we have a lot of mixes but they are essentially equal. And there is no order within the lists. So no way to find out from all these mixes what are the 3 best cRPGs...

Next try, I go to a games page (Age of Wonders). I am looking for similar but better games and hope to get a hint for MoM or HoMM2/3.

I see the unfamous "Win a GOG game free" mix, the "working on netbooks" mix and the "here be dragons", "Juegos en Espagnol" mix. I find HoMM2/3. I don't find MoM.

I find them both in the "Customers who bought this game also bought..." section.

All in all I think that keyword tagging might be a better solution, when it's only about classification. Maybe a special tagging category (similar games).

So, are you using GOG mixes?

Do you think they are useful?

How could they be made more useful?

I don't find them very useful but only because there are so few titles on GOG. If I was looking for RPG's I can easily go through all the titles and read the reviews. It would be incredibly useful on a platform like Steam or Gamersgate which has thousands and thousands of games. In that case you would save tons of time finding games you didn't know about of a certain kind or in a certain genre. I've seen every single game on GOG so the only benefit I see right now is that it's sometimes interesting to see what someone thinks of a group of games and how they rate them.

Well, I have created 3 GOGmixes so far. I tried to make lists around a theme or information that you couldn't normally or easily find on GOG.

Blasts from the Past - Games from the 1980s
Collections and Compilations
Inspired by or Referencing H. P. Lovecraft

The last one is pretty short, but that's not only my fault.

You can search the contents of GOGmixes on the Games Catalogue page. If I remember right, this was unavailable when they were introduced. Searchability definitely makes them more useful. I don't think they are useless, but they have limited use. Plus, the GOGmix library could use a little house cleaning. A feature that would enable you to describe your GOGmix (e.g. a text field under the title) would be useful however.

I made 2 GOGmixes so far, I update them constantly and the first one is the most popular one

http://www.gog.com/en/mix/the_best_gog_can_offer_5_star_rated_games_only

http://www.gog.com/en/mix/big_guns_big_action_big_fun_gogmix

These three are not very useful to me personally, but I would not be so stupid as to completely disregard their usefulness to others:

Giochi in italiano
Jogos em Português Brasileiro (Games in PT-BR)
Juegos y traducciones en Español

(Additionally, if you know of other GOGMixes listing games available in a specific language, please inform me so I may add them to my Multilingual GOGs thread.)

"Win a GOG game free" gogmix was made as a part of competition. Hence votes.

I think some are useful (Itialian, Spanish).

I made only one - http://www.gog.com/en/mix/games_that_are_not_windows_7_compatibile_yet

So I listed all games that have no official support for Windows 7.

Very nice gogmix I found - http://www.gog.com/en/mix/10_ways_to_cast_a_decent_fireball

I'm surprised it has only 31 votes.

After all I think that GOGmixes didn't work.

I had not looked at mixes since they were first available so . . I gave them a "second look" a couple of months ago.

I believe the intent is to give ppl a way to build assorted lists, with interesting comments. I find the mixes to be like a "my favorite games" list with no value to me . . . about the same value as the wishlist. However, mixes may be useful for new community members so I wouldn't necessarily do away with them. It would never occur to me to look at the mixes for any reason . . . =)

What I would find useful would be the option to sort GOG games by the game tri-genre . . . which is not an option that I've found in the game catalog (sorry if I missed it) The tri-genre sort is most helpful when I am deciding which game I want to play next. Giving me a quick sort by tri-genre would be much more useful to me than the mixes.

I'm still mildly peeved the almost completely useless GOGmixes were implemented for good six months before a PM system, and more than a full year (and still counting) before user profiles and public wishlists. Even though they must have been more complicated to code than either of the two others.

I'm not using them for anything, as the catalogue simply isn't big enough to require it. By now everything I theoretically want I either have on my shelf or in my wishlist. It's different for the new users, I suppose, but it doesn't take much time to go through the genres that interest you even with some 400 titles or thereabouts total.

I like this idea. Something like a subtitle two lines long or so would be great. The current GOG mix titles are not very useful.

Basically I think that the purpose of the mixes should be clarified:

1.) Find similar games

Better solution: Tagging with tagword "Similar to XXX". Maybe voting on tags. Then intelligent autmatic creation of similarity lists.

2.) Find games with equal attribute (special language (italian, espagnol, ..), before 1990, running on Linux)

Better solution: As 1.) because these are exact attributes (maybe voting on tags). Then intelligent automatic creation of these lists. Maybe sorting of these lists

3.) Find games that are special in a complex, non-obvious sense.

These could remain the original GOG mixes or personal favorite lists or whatever.

So, I suggest a major reworking of this feature.

The advantage of the tagging approach:
- shared contributions, everybody can help with each tag
- searchable (selecting two tags only shows the games that fall in each category)
Disadvantages:
- no special comments why this game is tagged like this and in the list
(but we have reviews for this)

If I have time I can come up with a sketch...

So, here is my mock up of what I would like to have, partly replacing the current functionality of GOG mixes. I think that this is the cleaner approach for categorization and searching and also better on voting and searching (if you want to find out which games fall in two or more categories...).

Of course GOG mixes, aka favorite lists, can still be there.

Never really understood the point with these. Always click on the Genre/Developer

I agree that "community tagging" would work better for most purposes than the current GOGmixes do. GOGmixes are by design incomplete (they require a single person to collect the necessary information and update it regularly) and redundant (because many users have similar opinions and interests, and therefore end up creating very similar GOGmixes). There are some very narrow usecases where they make sense (because they allow specific comments for each included game, which can be used for specific instructions for how to achieve something that's the theme of the mix, like running the game in a certain language or on a certain OS), but personally I haven't found any reason to actually use them. usually I just browse through them and grow bored rather quickly, there's too much repetition between the mixes and there's not enough interesting information provided in the comments to make me want to read more of it.

A community tagging system would certainly be nice. However, it should be made clear that these are _community_ tags, not official information provided by GOG. GOG's support won't want to be flamed by new users who mistook outdated or subjective community tasks for official information. Also, the display should probably list only the highest ranking tags for each game (with an "more" link to access the full list), otherwise the info sheets will look untidy and confusing. But generally I like the idea. :)

I created a GOGMix to show the games that are compatible on my website Classic Gaming Arena

http://www.gog.com/en/mix/games_compatible_with_cga_classic_gaming_arena

I also used the games using DOSBox mix to determine which games I can support next on my site.

Of course they are useful especially when a newbie are stuck within GOG's catalogue that is getting more and more games. Some GOGmixes are extremely ridiculous and outdated. But still most of them are a good source of reference.