Re: VideoGame proposal

On Oct 16, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Aaron Bradley <aaranged@gmail.com> wrote:

> > characterAttribute seems to be something that describes the CreativeWork.character -- should the property live on the Person instead?  This would also make the link between the attribute and the person more explicit.
> 
> Dan Scott [1], I [2] and others have discussed variations on this theme.
> 
> At the end of the day it's kind of glaringly disengenous to have a "characterAttribute" character without a "character".  +1 to having this property live on Person ... but unless I'm missing something there's currently no Person property for the schema under which the property can live.

Last time this came up, I believe the conclusion was that we needed something like a Contribution class which could tie a Creative Work to an Actor and then describe the type of contribution to be something that could include the character played by the actor. We now have that in Role and various sub-types, specifically CharacterRole. Unfortunately, CharacterRole has the property characterName, which just takes Text.

Often you want to model more than just the name of a character, but to have a full Person-based entity to describe attributes of the character. We see something similar in adding namedPosition which is at least Text or URL. Ideally, these would all be Thing, which would allow a simple literal (Text) as a value using the same principles in schema.org that anything entity-valued property can take a simple string.

I think using a kind of Role to connect an actor to (in this case) a VideoGame makes sense, and that is where Character information should be attached.

Gregg

> > I don't think that using datePublished works very well for video games (because games are released at different times for different region / platforms).  What do you think about using example of work and releasedEvent (from proposal http://sdo-music.appspot.com/MusicAlbum)
> 
> I like where this is going, but that makes "The place *and* time the release was issued" (emphasis mine) expected by PublicationEvent problemantic in this context, as there may not be a place associated with a release (e.g. an Android video game made available internationally all at one go).  The Freebase "Intial Release Date" certainly seems more utilitarian here, but of course we don't want to overload CreativeWork with different date types.
> 
> >  I do think there's value either defining trailerVideoObject on CreativeWork...
> 
> +1.  Though I'd review that ion the context of Jarno's sensible proposal [3]...
> 
> > Might I suggest (again) we change the domain of associatedMedia to Thing?
> 
> And a late-in-the-game suggestion for an additional Game property from moi (I don't think I suggested this before, which is odd):
> 
> expansion
> An expansion, supplement, add-on or downloadable content that is an addition to an existing game.
> Expected type:
> Thing
> 
> "expansion" is deliberately generic, in preference to the (generally) more-specific "expansionPack" [4] so that it may reasonably include all sorts of "expansions" - expansion packs, add-ons, mods, DLCs and other terms with (generally) more specific meanings.
> 
> I've suggested a scope of "Game" because such items are very common for board games [5], card games [6] and - especially - video games.  The Xbox game store alone currently lists 12,049 game add-ons [7]!
> 
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014May/0150.html
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Jul/0027.html
> [3] https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/associatedMediaToThing
> [3 - discussion] https://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/associatedMediaToThing
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_pack
> [5] http://www.catan.com/board-games/variants-and-scenarios
> [6] http://www.amazon.ca/Apples-Trendy-Snack-Pack-Expansion/dp/B00CHOPEBW
> [7] http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/GameAddons
> 
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Jerome Mourits <jmourits@google.com> wrote:
> A couple question about other aspects of the proposal:
> 
> 
> 1.  characterAttribute seems to be something that describes the CreativeWork.character -- should the property live on the Person instead?  This would also make the link between the attribute and the person more explicit.
> 
> 
> 2.  translator seems like a arbitrary role to call out in video games -- there's a lot of different people involved and translator is likely not the most important (developers, designers, publishers, testers, etc...).  What about using contributor w/ a Role, something like:
> 
> "contributor": {	
>   "@type": "Role",
>   "roleName": "Translator",
>   "contributor": {
>      "@type":  "Organization",
>      "name": "Translation Corp",
>      "url": "www.translationcorp.com"
>   }
> }
> 
> 3.  I don't think that using datePublished works very well for video games (because games are released at different times for different region / platforms).  What do you think about using example of work and releasedEvent (from proposal  http://sdo-music.appspot.com/MusicAlbum) 
> 
> 4.  Is there value in having tips vs cheatCodes as separate properties?  I'm not sure they are different enough.
> 
> 5.  @Dan Brickley - I'm not sure that trailerVideoObject makes sense for the a video game series -- generally only the specific games have trailers.  I do think there's value either defining trailerVideoObject on CreativeWork or at least giving an example of the encouraged way of linking a video to the game:
> 
> {		
>   "@type":  "VideoObject",
>   "name":	"Heroes of the Storm™ Gameplay Sneak Peek"
>   "about":{	
>     "@type":  "VideoGame",
>     "name":  "Heroes of the Storm"
>     "url":  "http://www.battle.net/heroes" }
>   "genre":  "gameplay"
>   "url":  "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_fAkO3WOSY"
> }
> 
>  
> 
> 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
> 
>