Video Game Metadata and Ontologies
Reads: [@TheGameFavrArsena2015], [@ModelingTheViMartin], [@AnOntologyForParkki], [@WhatAmIFighWelhou2015], [@AuthorshipMetaChoH2021]
It seems that the Video Game Ontology (VGO), Digital Game Ontology (DGO), and Game Metadata and Citation Project (GAMECIP) are all concentrating on describing the contents of a game, and are mostly abandoned [@ModelingTheViMartin]. Interestingly, both the VGO and VideOWL try to be of benefits to the industry and game developers. In turn, I’m more interested in the historic contextualisation of video games and practices of video game development.
As complex creative works, video games are often the products of diffuse, distributed authorship. [@AuthorshipMetaChoH2021]
It seems that networked approaches to describing video games seem much more apt then a classic authorship mentality. Similar things have been said in marinoCriticalCodeStudies2020 approaches to model software through ANT.
VideOWL Ontology
- The Video Game Ontology
- I like the general fluid approach to classifying game, but some of the classes and class-organisations are just weird
- The visual aspects could use expansion, see FAVR
VideOWL […] aims to classify video games starting from their core features. This enables users to transcend the predefined categories imposed by marketing decisions, thus achieving a more comprehensive and nuanced categorisation of games. The primary goal of this ontology is to enhance the understanding and classification of games based on their intrinsic characteristics.
We think the real potential lies in addressing semantic questions: asking whether a game is an action game or a racing game is a semantic question, one that could be rephrased as “what allows us to say that a game falls into a given category of games?
Expanding the Understanding of Provenance
From RIC-CM 1.0
In recent decades, theorists and practitioners have intellectually and ethically challenged the traditional understanding of the Principle of Provenance. While accepting the traditional understanding of Respect des fonds, the intellectual criticism argues that a fuller understanding must include recognizing that provenance is much more complex, that the origins and history of records include not only the person or group that accumulated a body of records, but also other persons and groups directly related to the records, and the activities that were and are being performed in relation to the records. Ethically, the traditional understanding has been criticized because it privileges the accumulator of a body of records and thereby obscures or elides other persons and groups related to them, either actively participating in their creation or use, or as the subject of them. RiC-CM affirms both the enduring methodological soundness of the traditional understanding of provenance, while embracing at the same time both the intellectual and ethical criticisms. RiC-CM recognizes that provenance is much more complex, that records originate and continue to exist within a complex network of dynamic relations with other records, activities, persons, and groups.
It is within the context of this expanded understanding of provenance and the established and emerging communication technologies that RiC-CM has been developed. RiC-CM is intended to accommodate existing description practices and at the same time to acknowledge new understandings, and to position archives to take advantage of opportunities presented by new and emerging communication technologies. RiC-CM aspires to reflect both facets of the Principle of Provenance, as these have traditionally been understood and practiced, and recognize a more expansive and dynamic understanding of provenance. It is this more expansive understanding that is embodied in the word “contexts.” RiC-CM is intended to enable a fuller, if forever incomplete, description of the contexts in which records emerge and exist, in order to enable multiple perspectives and multiple avenues of access.
(Re)Contextualizing Video Games
What is important when contextualising a video game.
- public profile
- geographical, political and cultural context
- material aspects
- link to other interests
- evolution of a genre or mechanique
- the place in which the game was played
- how did the game landscape look like at the time of publishing
- distribution or aquiring method
- promoting language