Re: Video Game Series (was VideoGame Proposal)

Okay, I'll bite.

On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 2:42 PM, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com> wrote:

> Starting a new thread as just to separate the issue of video game series
> from the main VideoGame proposal thread, to avoid non-series issues that
> are being raised from being buried in the series discussion.
>
> Thanks for your responses Yuliya - and your English is light years ahead
> of my Russian!  And thanks to you, Dan and everyone else for weighing in so
> quickly and comprehensively on the issue of video game series.  Again, I'm
> passionate about this issue because series are critical entities in the
> video game industry, and the lack of well-defined type for a video games
> series in schema.org will critically blunt the effectiveness of the
> much-needed VideoGame type.
>

Series are critical entities for most creative works, but that didn't stop
the launch of Book or Movie, and it seems like those have been reasonably
effective. Getting Series right is important. Rushing a VideoGameSeries
type out that repeats or builds on some of the mistakes of TVSeries /
RadioSeries would not be a good thing.


> In any case, I appreciate the loop back to schema.org/Series as Dan,
> Yuliya, and Vicki have discussed, and ultimately I think this is the most
> fecund route to pursue.
>
> This would entail:
> 1.  A new type, VideoGameSeries, which is a more specific type of Series.
> 2.  A single new property for VideoGameSeries, videoGame, with the
> expected value VideoGame.
>

Why would this property not simply be the existing http://schema.org/hasPart
?


> 3.  The types on which the existing property, partOfSeries (or the
> re-engineered partOf), can be used would be extended to inclue VideoGame.
>

http://schema.org/isPartOf, please, which already has a range of
CreativeWork and thus can handle the subtype Series (or a new
VideoGameSeries) without needing to be changed.


> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoGame">
>   <span itemprop="name">Battlefield Hardline</span>
>   The latest <span itemprop="partOfSeries" itemscope itemtype="
> http://schema.org">
>

I guess that's supposed to be itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoGameSeries",
but Series would work just as well for the markup. Also, "isPartOf" would
be perfectly appropriate for the property.


>   <span itemprop="name">Battlefield</span></span> game from EA.
> </div>
>
> (Thad, with that and inheritance from CreativeWork and Series, I think all
> your proposed properties would be handled covered aside from seriesSpinOff.)
>
> As Yuliya has pointed out this results in some seemingly inappropriate
> properties available to VideoGameSeries via inheritance from Series, but as
> per Dan's exercise, they're not *wildly* inappropriate, and it's hardly
> unknown in schema.org to have very specific item types where some
> parental properties are not appropriate.
>
> @Karen Doyle - +1 to leveraging descriptions.  All in all I don't think
> the issue of using Series properties for VideoGameSeries is intractable.
>
> > Every video game is effectively part of a series when it is launched;
> market conditions usually determine whether that series gets more than a
> one-off entry (e.g. "Mass Effect" went from being a one-off game to a
> series only when "Mass Effect 2" is launched).
> > Therefore, I would prefer your second option...
>
> @Dan Scott I think by pursuing this route we risk conflating processes
> with things.  The sequence in which a video game is or becomes a video game
> series doesn't change the fact that they are separate classes of things
> (for the record I disagree that a video game becomes part of a series when
> it is launched, as if no further titles are published that franchise isn't
> a franchise, it's just a video game).
>

That seems like an over-simplification to me, but ultimately we're arguing
about what reality is or isn't, which probably isn't going to be fruitful,
so let's not.


> A VideoGame can't tap the property isPartOf because the answer to "part of
> what?" isn't VideoGame (just as "The Sopranos Season 2, Episode Six" isn't
> part of the television show "The Sopranos" - precisely why Series/TVSeries
> were required).
>

I'm not sure I follow. Do you mean that the answer isn't VideoGame because
schema:isPartOf has a range of CreativeWork? I'm not sure if you feel the
property schema:isPartOf isn't sufficient, or if the type VideoGame (or
CreativeWork) isn't sufficient to reflect the relationships between the
works.


> I see your point about series and sequential vs. non-sequential, but I
> don't think it's a major issue.  I think "Series" is a good-enough
> designation for the, well, series "American Horror Story" even though the
> sequence of seasons is only relevant in terms of production dates and not
> in terms of the show's essence, as each season is self-contained (for those
> of you not familiar with the show, check out the Wikipedia entry [1] which
> indeed describes it as a series, and like a video game that only becomes a
> series when more are made, it too only became a series once a second season
> was produced - the subtitle "Murder House" added retroactively to the first
> season!).
>
> > I'd love to advocate going with a multi-type entity approach to avoid
> the need for spawning BookSeries, MovieSeries, ComicBookSeries,
> ActionFigureSeries, etc types, as @typeof="VideoGame Series" would allow
> producers to signify a strong expectation for the types of entities
> contained in the series... but that would be incorrect because the series
> is not also a video game.
>
> I'm conflicted too, but IMO I think we must ultimately make the vocabulary
> work for entities found in the real world, even if they inconviently
> deviate slightly from set types, causing the need to spawn subtypes. :)
>  LocalBusiness has 27 main sub-types and a multitude of sub-sub-types - but
> it's useful to be able to declare a hospital as a Hospital.
>

Believe it or not, I too am trying to make the vocabulary work for entities
found in the real world. There are multiple ways of doing so. Our task is
to try and choose the way that works with the best ratio of satisfying
publisher capabilities and consumer needs (which we used to try to capture
in http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals but not so much
lately), and that means exploring those options.

schema.org's process of evolving is evolving. The simplest possible way of
handling Sports would have been to mint thousands of new types for Sports
and Athlete positions, and that might have happened were it two or three
years ago, but instead Role emerged as a more nuanced way of handling that
flexibility. It may be the case that Series would benefit from a similar
look, thus my wondering if a Series property with an enumeration, or even a
simple Text value, that expresses the type of series (if any) would work to
handle the broader use case.

So here's a simple alternative that only adds one property to schema.org,
"seriesType":

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoGame">
  <span itemprop="name">Battlefield Hardline</span>
  The latest <span itemprop="isPartOf" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org
/Series">
  <meta itemprop="seriesType" content="VideoGame">
  <span itemprop="name">Battlefield</span></span> game from EA.
</div>

Flipped around to prioritize the series and list the parts, that would be:

<div>The latest
  <span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Series">
    <meta itemprop="seriesType" content="VideoGame" />
    <span itemprop="name">Battlefield</span> game from EA is
    <span itemprop="hasPart" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoGame
">
      <span itemprop="name">Battlefield Hardline</span>
    </span>
  </span>
</div>

That's not so bad, right? Surely consumers could say "Give me all Series
that have a seriesType of 'VideoGame'" for their underlying queries, in
whatever sort of store they're using. And we can easily add Book and Movie
and the other creative works that want to reflect their participation in a
series without having to mint new types.

Dan

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Horror_Story
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Dan Scott <dan@coffeecode.net> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Yuliya Tikhokhod <tilid@yandex-team.ru>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree that re-engineer Series is a good idea. Not only for video
>>> games, but for many others type of creative work (books, articles, etc)
>>> But should it be obstacle for shipping VideoGame into schema.org?
>>> I see two options:1) as Viki said create a VideoGameSeries (like a
>>> subtype of Series or for example Intangible) for now and than re-engineer
>>> Series 2) using hasPart and partOf properties without specific type for
>>> Series, re-engineer Series and create specific type
>>> What do you think which way is better?
>>>
>>
>> Every video game is effectively part of a series when it is launched;
>> market conditions usually determine whether that series gets more than a
>> one-off entry (e.g. "Mass Effect" went from being a one-off game to a
>> series only when "Mass Effect 2" is launched).
>>
>> Therefore, I would prefer your second option: let VideoGame go ahead
>> as-is (with the minor convention fixes that have been suggested), and for
>> now providers can use http://schema.org/hasPart,
>> http://schema.org/isPartOf, http://schema.org/exampleOfWork and
>> http://schema.org/workExample to relate the individual games to a larger
>> _conceptual_ body of work that is not necessarily sequential in nature--see
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sim_video_games for examples of
>> games that are all part of the Sims universe (including games missing from
>> http://www.freebase.com/m/03mh0vs such as "The Sims Online" and "The
>> Sims Social") but which are not strictly sequential.
>>
>> As that larger body of work could also include books, movies, action
>> figures, comic books, etc, then perhaps, as Jerome suggested CreativeWork
>> would be the right parent type to signify the conceptual/collection aspect
>> and differentiate a more concrete instance of a VideoGame ("Mass Effect"
>> the first game in the series) from the conceptual body of work ("Mass
>> Effect" the series of games). It would be trivial for a consumer to see the
>> CreativeWork - hasPart - VideoGame relationship and enumerate the games in
>> the collection based on their types.
>>
>> In the slightly longer run, rehabilitating Series to be less TV/Radio
>> focused would also enable us to use it more effectively with other types.
>> I'm a bit conflicted; I'd love to advocate going with a multi-type entity
>> approach to avoid the need for spawning BookSeries, MovieSeries,
>> ComicBookSeries, ActionFigureSeries, etc types, as @typeof="VideoGame
>> Series" would allow producers to signify a strong expectation for the types
>> of entities contained in the series... but that would be incorrect because
>> the series is not also a video game. Perhaps Series gets a property that
>> takes an enumeration value, with the allowable values generated
>> automatically from the various children of CreativeWork?
>>
>> In addition to looking at what Freebase does for video game series, we
>> should also investigate what Wikipedia does with their infoboxes (another
>> form of structured data) such as
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_video_game_series
>>
>
>