Video Game Series (was VideoGame Proposal)

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.

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

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

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 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.

[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
>