Linking In-Game Events and Entities to Social Data on the Web

Linking In-Game Events and Entities to Social Data on the Web

Owen Sacco^, Maciej Dabrowski^ and John G. Breslin*^

* Electrical & Electronic Engineering, NUI Galway

^ Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway

School of Engineering and Informatics

Aims of Games2Web / G2W

• Build a set of terms commonly found in games to be used on the Web, and to list suitable Web information sources that could be used to enhance in-game play

• Produce a structured RDF games ontology (Games2Web / G2W) describing game types, features, events and character profiles

• Describe how this ontology could be linked to existing Semantic Web vocabularies for describing social data on the Web, including FOAF and SIOC


• World’s largest Semantic Web institute

John and games

• It’s been a while since I played multiplayer Quake but here’s the evidence from 1998

• Made a few Quake and Doom levels:– Including one of our

Nun’s Island building called “Guns Island”


The Social Web is made up of data silos

image from pidgintech.com

Many isolated communities of users and their data


Need ways to connect these islands


Allowing users to easily travel from one to another


Enabling users to easily bring their data with them


• Much game data is locked into platforms

• Some aspects can be shared on the Web:

– But still isolated within a game and its associated site

• Lack of an open data format for interoperability between gaming platforms / networks and gaming websites

• Vast amounts of shared items and profiles remain disconnected

Parallels in games

The Semantic What?

What’s in a page? And in a link?

?

?

?


Semantics

What is FOAF?

• An ontology for describing people (profiles) and the relationships (social networks) that exist between them:– John (a foaf:Person) foaf:knows David (a foaf:Person)– http://foaf-project.org/

• FOAF on the Web:– LiveJournal, MyOpera, identi.ca, MyBlogLog, hi5,

Fotothing, Videntity, FriendFeed, Ecademy, Typepad• Also emerging is schema.org’s vocabulary (Google, Bing,

Yahoo!) for describing many things including people


http://foaf-project.org/

What is SIOC?

• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

• Enables interoperability and exchange of social content:

– (Micro)blogs, forums, wikis, etc.


Connect a Games2Web (G2W) ontology to FOAF and SIOC

• Main classes (concepts) in G2W:

– Persona, In-Game_Event, Session, Achievement, Game and Transaction

• Various relationships between these things:

– e.g. a Persona carried_out an In-Game_Event

that In-Game_Event occurred_in a Session

and that Session was played_on a Level


G2W

Uses of the G2W model

• Define meta-structures for characterising and representing game play abstractly that could then be re-used on the Web

• Integrate real-time events or other information from the Web within games


After a game, what can we do with the data on the Web?

(Token cat picture)

Data from games web

• Interlink information about a gamer from one platform with that from another (cross-platform portability):

– Keep track of achievements across systems

• Link achievements or session in a game to contextual data about the level, map, rules etc. on the Web

• Recommend players that may be on different (previously disconnected) servers

• Publish in-game public chats using sioc:Post and connect to other social discussions on Fb/Tw


And when you’re back in the game…

Data from web games

• Include digital real-world data in games, or Social Web data in games:

– Real-time sensor information from LSM (lsm.deri.ie)

– Recent news updates as sioc:Post(s)

– Import information on historical events for suitable games from Wikipedia

– Integrate game guides from Wikia pages

– Bring in status updates / microblog posts via SIOC


Restrict or grant access in this semantically-interlinked online gaming community SIOgC

• Can use the Privacy Preference Ontology and Manager:

– Create privacy preferences for gaming data at different levels, from full sets of data to class types to individual “triples”

• For example:

– “Grant read access to a particular game achievement only to those who are playing the same game”, or

– “Grant read access to my gaming profile only to gamers having a similar or higher ranking”


Thanks for listening! Any questions?

[email protected] / @johnbreslin

Technology

Linking In-Game Events and Entities to Social Data on the Web