The 4th IEEE International Games Innovation Conference / Strong Museum of Play, Rochester, NY, USA / 7th September 2012

1. Linking In-Game Events and
Entities to Social Data on the Web
Owen Sacco^, MaciejDabrowski^ and John G. Breslin*^
* Electrical & Electronic Engineering, NUI Galway
^ Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway
School of Engineering and Informatics

2. 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
School of Engineering and Informatics

3. • World’s largest Semantic Web institute

4. 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”
School of Engineering and Informatics

5. The Social Web is made up of data silos
image from pidgintech.com

6. Many isolated communities of users and
their data
image from pidgintech.com

7. Need ways to connect these islands
image from pidgintech.com

8. Allowing users to easily travel from one to
another
image from pidgintech.com

9. Enabling users to easily bring their data with
them
image from pidgintech.com

10. Parallels in games
• 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

11. The Semantic What?

12. What’s in a page? And in a link?
?
?
?
School of Engineering and Informatics

14. Semantics

15. 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, Fotot
hing, Videntity, FriendFeed, Ecademy, Typepad
• Also emerging is schema.org’s vocabulary
(Google, Bing, Yahoo!) for describing many things
including people
School of Engineering and Informatics

16. What is SIOC?
• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
• Enables interoperability and exchange of social content:
– (Micro)blogs, forums, wikis, etc.
School of Engineering and Informatics

17. 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
School of Engineering and Informatics

18. G2W

19. 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
School of Engineering and Informatics

20. After a game, what can we do with the data
on the Web?
(Token cat picture)

21. 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
School of Engineering and Informatics

22. And when you’re back in the game…

23. 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
School of Engineering and Informatics

24. 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”
School of Engineering and Informatics

25. Thanks for listening! Any questions?
john.breslin@nuigalway.ie / @johnbreslin