Checking in to Gamemood used to start with a question:
I want to… wind down / get energised / cheer up / switch off / get absorbed
Pick one, then log your session. Every public number in the app was then grouped by that pick. "Games people wind down with" meant games people said they were about to wind down with.
Nothing ever went back and checked.
So a game you reach for when you want to relax, that reliably winds you up instead, ranked as a relaxing game. Forever. The more people picked it hoping, the higher it ranked — the ranking was measuring the hope.
The measurement was already there
A session has always recorded mood and energy twice: once before you play, once
after. The aggregates have always returned mood_delta and energy_delta. The
declared goal was a filter sitting on top of numbers that already knew better.
So it is gone. Check-in is now two readings, a game, and optional context — nothing to declare, one screen shorter. What a session did is derived from the difference between its two readings, which means it only exists once you have checked out, and nobody can state it.
Five names, over the same two axes the readings already use:
- lifted — mood up, energy up
- unwound — mood up, energy not
- pumped up — energy up, mood not
- steady — neither moved
- drained — something fell and nothing rose
steady earns its place by being the difference between "this did nothing to
me" and "this took something out of me". Four cells would have quietly filed the
first as the second, and a game that leaves you exactly as it found you is not
the same as one that drains you.
The part that was tempting to skip
drained is computed, stored, and shown on a game's own page. A game whose
sessions mostly end with both numbers down says so.
It is not offered as a filter — nobody opens an app looking for something to drain them. But a breakdown that silently omits its worst cell is a breakdown that always flatters, and the whole point of measuring the after-reading was to stop the app telling people what they wanted to hear.
Curated picks moved to the same vocabulary. They still carry no rate — the only difference you see between a curated row and a measured one is that the curated one has a sentence where the other has a number.