=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2532/paper8
|storemode=property
|title=Developing a Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2532/paper8.pdf
|volume=Vol-2532
|authors=Tracy Hoffmann
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/rodbh/Hoffmann19
}}
==Developing a Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2532/paper8.pdf
T. Riechert, F. Beretta, G. Bruseker (Ed.) RODBH 2019,
26 Proceedings of the Doctoral Symposium on Research on Online Databases in History 2019
Developing a Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research
Tracy Hoffmann1
Abstract: This paper presents a data-based approach to video game research and discusses its
potentials and limitations. It introduces how the combination of several data sources, containing
metadata describing the games, can be made productive for reconstructing the release history of video
games. For this purpose, a mediated vocabulary is developed which can act as basis for the data
integration process.
Keywords: Video Games; Release History; Vocabulary; Data Integration
1 Introduction
Compared to other media, video games have a comparatively short history. The earliest
digital games were created in research institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology during the 1960s. In the 1970s commercial digital arcade games began
to appear. Not much later, the home video game systems (console) market emerged (cf.
[Lo09], [Ki06], [Ju13]). Since then, a wide range of game systems and many thousand video
games have been released. New forms of play (mobile games, online games) and methods
of distribution (digital platforms, „Games-as-a-Service“, micro-transactions) have been
introduced. Throughout their history, video game contents and their character as products
have been subject to fast and constant change.
Publications and initiatives from historians are showing a growing interest in the subject
of video games (cf. Arbeitskreis Geschichtswissenschaft und Digital Spiele2, [NGL19],
[Ch16a], [Gi10], [WW16], [An15]). Like other popular mass-media e.g. music, film and
literature, video games can be expressions for how a society sees itself and reflects its
history. Therefore, video games can be approached within historical research from different
points of views. For example video games with historical setting are used as case studies to
explore the handling of historical themes in popular culture [Ch16a], [Gi10] or their usage
in history eductaion [An15].
However, the role of video games in culture, still provides further oppertunities for research.
They „represent culturally situated conceptions and ideas“[WW16]. By considering the
1 Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Digitale Dienste, Beethovenstraße 6, 04107 Leipzig, Germany tracy.hoffmann@
uni-leipzig.de
2 https://gespielt.hypotheses.org/
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). c b
A Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research 27
history of the medium itself, we can reflect history in a specific phase in a specific
cultural or national context[An15]. For this, Webber sees a need to explore a „variety of
cultural experiences of, and contexts for, the production, consumption and circulation of
games.“[WW16]
Despite the growing academic interest and the cultural and economic impact, academic
research data regarding the historical development of video games is still very limited. For
questions like „The presentation of World War II in the genre of First-Person-Shooter in US-
American productions in the first decade of the 21. century“[An15, pp. 399] it is necessary
to identify the research subject in time and space and attribute it to the responsible actors.
Additionally the spatial context in which the actor is situated (US-American production) is
of importance. The metadata which is needed to define the scope of research is manifold.
For instance, release dates, editions, responsible developers, genres or the relation of a
game to a franchise. Presently, the only way to collect all information about one game3 or
a series of interest is to manually collect data from multiple sites. As Lee et. al mention,
this struggle is the same for gamers and library catalogers: „As a result, users often have to
jump to multiple places to find and cross-check different types of information from these
multiple sites.“[Le13]
To support video game research, the diggr (Databased Infrastructure for Global Game
Culture Research)4 project aims to integrate and interlink datasets to construct an extensible
knowledge graph for video games. This paper focuses on the conceptual issues and proposes
a mediated vocabulary which can act as basis for the data integration process of online
video game datasets. After discussing related work, we will present three video game
datasets, which provide comprehensive game information for the knowledge graph. Then,
we will discuss the video game vocabulary and show how it can be aligned with established
upper-ontologies and finally point to future research possibilities.
2 Related Work
Linking heterogeneous databases is a common task and field of interest in many research
domains. Depending on the domain and the specific data, different strategies are used. An
approach with an aim similar to ours has been taken by Gawriljuk, Gleb et al. They build a
comprehensive knowledge graph of artist information „from data spread over multiple data
sources“[Ga16] to provide an integrated view on the data. To solve this task they are using
specific linking techniques and align the data to a domain ontology.
Such a domain ontology is an important starting step in building a knowledge base. In
the video game research domain, previous proposals for video game data models discuss
the use of standards out of the archive, museum and library domain. Cultural heritage
institutions have been dealing with video game collections for years and impressive
3 e.g. see the release history and introduction of Silent Hill 2 [Ne10, pp. 15-19]
4 https://diggr.link
28 Tracy Hoffmann
collections are gathered in places all over the world5. However, there is no commonly
accepted metadata standard to describe video games. Recent studies have focused on
developing data models for a particular part of video game culture or use context, such
as bibliographic information [Le13][Je16][Gr15][FM18], preservation [Mc11][Wi11] or
in-game events (see http://vocab.linkeddata.es/vgo/).
Fukuda points out that „especially the FRBR model is the axis of these researches.“[FM18]
The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and now its successor IFLA
Library Reference Model (LRM), is the most referred model when it comes to development
of a video game data model. It is based on an entity relationship model and provides a
conceptual model for the bibliographic universe. However, when it comes to domain-specific
needs for video games, FRBR seems not adequate for all in this field. Jett et. al argues that
FRBR is not suitable for video games „because video games arguably do not belong to
a bibliographic universe“[Je16]. In conclusion, we cannot reuse an existing ontology for
our use case because the modelling of video game data is still under development and no
approach fulfills our requirements but we can reuse definitions.
3 Mediating Heterogeneous Data Models/Concept Spaces
The use of Linked Data provides a flexible technique to create a vocabulary, which integrates
different concepts of a domain. It has the advantage of being open to future extensions
with other concepts (e.g. game content actions, reception of games,). In addition, the use of
the Resource Description Framework (RDF) helps to deal with inconsistency in data (e.g.
naming and dates).
To build a vocabulary for our domain, we follow a bottom-up approach which is presented
in figure 1. We first investigate the data structure and the overall concepts of the source
databases. To work with the concepts of the source databases we create proxy vocabularies
that reflect the data models. A proxy vocabulary consists of terms identified by proxy URIs6
for each concept in the data source. Following this, we create a domain vocabulary that
reflects the common concept space of our domain as found in the source databases. This
domain vocabulary reuses existing terms from related work as much as possible and makes
adjustments where necessary. In a third step we integrate the proxy vocabularies by aligning
them with our mediated domain vocabulary. Finally, the mediated vocabulary is aligned
with an upper-ontology to provide relations to more abstract concepts. During the alignment
process between the proxy and the mediated vocabulary, we have discovered biases and
inconsistencies which will be discussed in the following sections.
5 Strong Museum of Play, Rochester, NY, USA;
Computerspielemuseum, Berlin, D;
National Videogame Arcade, Sheffield, UK
6 http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/proxy-uris.html
A Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research 29
Fig. 1: The bottom-up strategy extracts the sources’ data models as proxy vocabularies and aligns them
with a mediated domain vocabulary. The mediated domain vocabulary is established by harmonizing
the concepts from the proxy vocabularies and related work and is aligned with an upper-ontology.
4 Data Sources
First we had to identify suitable data sources. Nowadays, video game researchers can find
an impressive amount of digital databases about video games. Some are very specific,
some very broad, and some focus on specific areas of gaming culture. On one side, there
are authoritative sources from cultural heritage institutions or age rating agencies, like
Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK) in Germany. Such institutions, though, only
provide data since their inception (1994 for USK, 2002 for CERO) and only for their specific
region. They do not provide information about earlier video game history or the global
distribution of games.
On the other side, there are fan-based databases, which provide much more detailed and
specialized data about video games than the authoritative ones. However, none of the
fan-based databases cover all release information. They neither provide a comprehensive
view, which might be very important for researchers depending on the research question.
In our research we focus on three video game databases which are promising in terms of
covering most of the video game releases in question:
• Mobygames was founded in 1999 and grew to one of the biggest collections of video
game data, and is supported by an active community. As Mobygames describe in their
instructions: „Basically we’re documenting how you can obtain a game [...]“7 they
provide single data entries for each edition of a game (e.g. collector’s edition, red
edition).8
7 https://www.mobygames.com/info/standards#New_Entry
8 Not mentioned here: DLCs are also separate records in Mobygames
30 Tracy Hoffmann
• The GameFAQs Website provides „game information, codes, walkthroughs, hints,
message boards, save games files, and of course, FAQs“, on a platform level which
means the information are separated between different hard or software platform
versions of a game.
• The Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan operates the Media Art Database. It is the
only one comprehensive database including bibliographic records of video games in
Japan and provides almost 100% coverage of all console game releases published in
Japan since the 1980s. The Media Art DB uses the term game package and defines
each entry as follows: „The download version and package version, budget version
(The Best version etc.) and standard platform etc. are each allocated different GPIrs,
and handled as separate titles“9. In conclusion this database lists every Japanese
release as a single entry.
5 Mediated Vocabulary
As the short descriptions above indicate, each database has a different concept for their
game records. Furthermore, a single game (e.g. Dark Souls, Metal Gear Solid V) is not
only expressed differently in each database, relevant information can also be spread across
multiple entries, without any clear indication of their relationship (different releases, or
versions, of the same game). The mediated vocabulary must be capable of defining these
relationships between them.
The mediated vocabulary is defined by four main classes:
Games The term game is one of the most abstract terms when we talk about video
games. It can be compared with the entity work in IFLA LRM, which „is perceived
through the identification of the commonality of content between and among various
expressions“[RLBŽ17]. The class Game comprises „characteristics that are typically
recognized by users when they say ’we played the same game’ “[Je16] or „X is a
remake of this game“.
All three data sources claim that they list video games but all provide different
conceptual access points. As a result, we can not align any instance of the data sources
to the game class. We have to construct an instance which represents this abstract
class. By using other data sources we can provide instances of this class in the future
or have to reconstruct one from the aggregated data.
Platform Realizations Many popular video games are developed for more than one
platform (e.g. Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo Switch). To provide access via the
technical perspective to a game, like GameFAQs do, we define a Platform Realization
9 https://mediaarts-db.bunka.go.jp/help/gm/help.html
A Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research 31
class which is the technical realization of a game for a specific hard or software
platform. Each instance of this class has a relation to Platform.
Because GameFAQs describes their data on this level, each GameFAQs Data is also
a subclass of Platform Realization (see figure 2).
Editions For marketing reasons, video games are often published in different editions
(collectors edition, gold edition, etc.). Such editions do not differ with regard to the
actual game, but they include additional merchandise items. Other editions include
already published material like Add-ons, Downloadable Contents (DLCs) or other
updates. A popular distribution strategy are Re-releases, Remastered editions or HD
Editions for newer platforms which are revised or redesigned versions of a game.
Generic Edition is implemented as a superclass for grouping several creative or
economic variations of a game together. Because of the aforementioned marketing
strategies subclasses of the Generic Edition are Special Editions, e.g. Day One Edition
or Gold Edition. With RDF, extensions are easy as we don’t know what kind of
specialized editions of games are created in the future. Nevertheless, Edition is a
difficult term and complicated concept to comprehend.
As a result, instances of the class Mobygames Games has also have one of the Edition
classes (see figure 2).
Local Releases Depending on video games success and fan-base, developers and publishers
of video games follow different publishing strategies. For instance, many games have
been released only in one country or region. Some are localized elsewhere only after
years and with various changes in title, numbering, or even content. Local Releases
are often edited to fit for a specific region or market. Jett et al. define a Local Release
as an edition of a video game which is made „available and accessible in a particular
region and in a particular language“[Je16]. We see Local Releases as a grouping class
which incorporates a specific Edition (Generic or Special) and a specific Platform
Realization and is published in a particular region and with particular language
options.
By this definition, all instances of the Media Art Databases are Local Releases. This
results in a subclass of the Local Release class (see figure 2).
Our vocabulary expands the entities of Jett et al. by adding the concept of Platform
Realization. With this step the hardware platform is no longer just a property. The platform
has a huge impact on the representation, gameplay and reception of a game. This is especially
true for old games. Use cases for this are mainly described in the field of game preservation,
e.g. by Helen Stucky [St14] and James Newman [Ne12]. For our research it is also important
to differentiate between Platform Realizations since this practice can lead us to different
responsible actors. By adding the Platform Realization the Local Release needs a relation
to this class and to Edition as well.
32 Tracy Hoffmann
Fig. 2: The mediated vocabulary defines four main classes (Game, Generic Edition, Platform
Realization and Local Release). The relation with the proxy vocabulary is provided by the use of
rdfs:subClassOf.
6 Alignment with upper-ontologies
The alignment with an upper-ontology or top-level ontology can provide connectivity to
other kinds of video game research or even other domains. They provide more general or
abstract categories and concepts and increase the data interoperability.
As mentioned before, FRBR is the most frequently referenced conceptual model in related
work. From a bibliographic point of view, it might be enough to use an entity relationship
data model because it is adequate for static information. However, video games are not
„static, ever-existing things that come from nowhere.“[Ch16b] Video games are results
of mass production processes but also refer to immaterial content, in-game events and
cultural artifacts like music and art. They incorporate many works from different actors,
which can also be published and consumed outside the video game itself. Against this
background, it appears sensible to align our video game vocabulary also with an ontology
beyond bibliographic information.
The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is used in the museum domain and
increasingly in other contexts, especially as a way of modeling knowledge and resources in
research projects. It is an object-oriented model and has an event based character. It works
as a high-level ontology and is complex and abstract. With domain specific extensions
with respect to the underlying concepts of CIDOC CRM, it is possible to provide an
interchangeable model with the aim of facilitating widespread usage. An example for this
approach is the symogih.org ontology[BR16] that emerged in the historical research domain.
The focus on events is useable for the domain of video games. A lot of video game related
information is event-based, for instance, a release or the announcement of a game for
a specific platform in a specific country on a specific date. Gameplay and narrative are
also rich in events (see [CY08]). Based on these considerations, we could use the best
A Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research 33
of both worlds. We use FRBR, respectively its successor IFLA LRM with the focus on
published material and CIDOC CRM with its event-based character and its openness for
a wider historical view. FRBRoo is an object-oriented Model of FRBR resulting from a
harmonization with CIDOC CRM. Currently, we suggest an alignment of the top concepts:
Game to F15 Complex Work, Platform Realization to F22 Self-Contained Expression,
Generic Edition to F24 Publication Expression and Local Release to F3 Manifestation
Product Type. This approach needs additional research and evaluation, since the complex
nature of video games and FRBRoo would lead us fast to potential mapping issues. We are
also aware of LRMoo, the successor of FRBRoo, which we will take into account in the
future.
7 Conclusion
In this article we have proposed an approach to a video game vocabulary capable of
describing video games sufficiently for multiple contexts, and of integrating heterogeneous
video game databases. Our vocabulary allows us to integrate complementary information
on specific video games from multiple sources, thus expanding the contextual information
available to researchers substantially. As soon as we are interested in the differences between
releases, editions, platform realizations, or want to gain an overview of the release histories
of multiple titles or specific genres, the various online databases and their complementary
information become pivotal resources. Our vocabulary provides a way of accessing and
combining these resources, thus opening new paths for video game research.
The example in figure 3 shows an excerpt of the release information from the video game
Dark Souls aligned with our conceptual approach. Dark Souls provides an example for a
game which has been released on different platforms in several editions, also with additional
content over time. Recently a remastered edition years after the original game was released.
The main developer, the Japanese company FromSoftware, has launched a successful series
with this game, which has led to a genre-defining (Souls-like) work. In this case, GameFAQs
provide the most accurate release information about Dark Souls but don’t provide much
further data, for instance data about companies involved in production of the game. By
combining this source with data from Mobygames and Media Art Database, we get an almost
comprehensive view about the production, distribution and release history of the game.
By investigating the series, we can recognize a constant internationalization of involved
companies over time which shows expressions for modern production and distribution
practices.
34 Tracy Hoffmann
Fig. 3: After applying the conceptual approach to the release information about the video game Dark
Souls across the three data sources, we can see the conceptual differences of the distribution.
There are many challenges to be considered, for instance dealing with duplicated or
contradicting data (different release information on different platforms). Future research
must also consider other concepts not mentioned in this paper like series or franchise. As
described above, the alignment to upper-ontologies must be evaluated and further developed
as well.
Nonetheless, we hope this approach contributes fruitfully to the ongoing discussion regarding
video game data. The mediated vocabulary, called diggr Video Game Vocabulary10,
currently comprises 12 classes and 27 properties. It is published on Github under CC011
in order to facilitate collaborative development opportunities. We also have released a
human-friendly documentation under https://diggr.github.io/diggr-video-game-
vocabulary/. Likewise, the proxy vocabularies are published on Github, one vocabulary
per source.
Doing so, we hope to contribute to an ontology of video games which can be extended
with other concepts of different video game research domains, and to building a knowledge
graph for the history of video games in a structured and semantic way.
10 https://github.com/diggr/diggr-video-game-vocabulary
11 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
A Mediated Vocabulary for Video Game Research 35
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