Detecting the exact components of a good book is as difficult as deducing a recipe from a finished dish. Unless, of course, you’re a machine.

A company called Novel Projects has built a business on its algorithm for book “recipes.”

Its assessment of A Game of Thrones, for instance, starts with a Medieval Weapons and Physical Injury base. George R.R. Martin mixes in horses, castles, and old city infrastructure, adds a bit of pain and fear, a dash of winter environments, and stirs until the lumps are gone.

This type of analysis, first conceived in 2003 as a research project at the University of Idaho, is useful to publishers who are tasked with picking and marketing the next Game of Thrones series. They use Novel Projects’s data services to understand which audiences a specific book might appeal to based on books like it.

Aaron Stanton

But recently, Novel Projects’ CEO Aaron Stanton had another idea for how the proprietary book-recipe tool could be used.

“It could create a scavenger-hunt mentality within the physical stacks of the library,” he tells Fast Company.

His plan is to make reading books a game. Using the data on about 100,000 partner publisher books, he’ll assign books fun badges. The “Clunky, but Cruising” badge, for instance, might reward someone for reading a book that contains both cars and knights in the same scene (a circumstance that most often occurs in museum scenes). The “Nerdy Vampire badge” would be assigned to the four books in Novel Projects’s catalog that combine science and vampires.