Re: VideoGame proposal

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