Wikidata
I am constantly adding metadata for our video games corpus to Wikidata. The relevant queries can be found on my Wikidata profile under User:Thgiex - Wikidata.
Attribution of nationality
Often, Wikidata is quite sufficient to capture a descriptive state of a game. In others, I’d need to be able to better contextualize it. I find the the attribute country of origin, which is at the heart of Ludens, especially difficult. There are usually several attributes related to place:
- developer studio
- publisher (often several)
- staff, such as programmers, game artists, producers, and others
- place of publication
With smaller productions, amateur- or indie-games, country of origin can easily be ascribed to a country, when the staff has Swiss citizenship and worked on the game in Switzerland. In others, the concept of Helvetica is a better approach. The Swiss National Library defines Helvetica as:
a. published in Switzerland; b. relates to Switzerland or to people with Swiss citizenship or domicile; or c. created or co-created by Swiss authors or authors associated with Switzerland.
I’d expand this definition by companies, whose head office is registered in Switzerland.
Releases and Ports
Another aspect that is only partially satisfiable with Wikidata is the capturing of Releases and Ports. There are quite a handful of these in the Ludens corpus. There are several ways of doing so:
- create several pages for different releases and link them through attributes, but “part of series” or “follows/followed by” are not really meant for releases or ports of the same game
- releases can be noted through qualifiers on the publication date
- ports can be noted through qualifiers on developer studio or staff
Jean-Fred commented on the latter two approaches in Multiplatform_items. That is the approach that I chose to map and query.
See also
TABLE WITHOUT ID
link(file.link, title) AS "Title",
join( map( filter(tags, (t) => t != "Wikidata") , (t) => "#" + t) ) as "Tags"
WHERE contains(tags, "Wikidata")
SORT file.name