Log 2024-05

Sometimes, things don’t move as quick as one wishes them to do. That is ok. Breath in, count to 3, 5 or 8, pause, breath out and count, pause. Rinse, repeat.

• I was able to import developers to the Ludens Wikidata corpus in week 2024-03. In the Wikidata Video Games Project schema, developers is the “person or organisation that developed this item”. I use this field to indicate the studio if present. In some cases, a game was just developed by one person without a moniker. Here I’ll use the name of the person. In cases of several people working on a game, but without a moniker, I leave the field empty for now – otherwise we might get a false ascription.
• This week I added the publishers to the Wikidata Corporus. The process can sometimes be quite lengthy. Sometimes I need to check where information is coming from to make sure not to import bad data into Wikidata. I also got stuck again with the import and figured out, that OpenRefine hangs itself when trying to import rows without any data to process, ie the schema has only a publisher statement but nothing in the cell. I assumed it skips those…
• In many cases, Wikidata is quite sufficient to capture a clean state of a game. In others, I would see potential for a Records in Context test run. Games that have been ported, either between systems, or in some cases even by other developers in other countries. For example, Samo Jordan (http://www.sam-jordan.ch/) ported Wipeout2097 from the Playstation to the Amiga/PowerPC in 1999. Definitely not a Swiss game, but definitely a relevant case. Afterwards he studied quantum physics, which was probably about as hard as the port … RiC could probably address the question of what constitutes a Swiss game and shift the perspective by modelling the complexity of a possible answer.
• Expanded the notes on Wikidata, OpenRefine, and video-game-metadata-and-ontologies.
• Continued again with the article on intersecting digital humanities and video game studies. Restarting from scratch was a good idea. I’m closing in on the expected word count and I still miss two parts of the text.
• Thinking about the Ludens Bern workshop 2025. Lausanne did oral history, Zürich will probably go into design and development practices – why not add dealing with historical perspectives to that? ie Assembling Auras, Moving on from the Original Experience or that research on gender is not just adding women to the stats. Historical source criticism.
• Clown-o-Mania (1989)).html) was developed for Amiga (1989) and ported to Atari (1990). The two releases had completely different staff and it’s difficult to capture that in Wikidata.

A log like this can always and ever only be partial. There are always work/research-related things that will not be included but still take time. Reflecting helps to normalize being human, being limited.