My first steps this week were to research and possibly contact the authors for the game ontology papers I identified last week:
Jose Zagal
Dr. Zagal is currently a professor at DePaul University teaching game design and ethics. I visited his website and was able to identify an additional piece entitiled Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis. In this paper, Zagal mentions that there are more than 150 elements in the Game Ontology Project. I sent him an email (via his updated email address on his website) describing my project and requesting the ontology.
Amy Bruckman
Dr. Bruckman is currently a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She was the coauthor of the Zagal paper, but based on her website it appears that she was more involved with the educational aspects of the paper, so I will not be emailing her.
Jupiter Chan
I was unable to find any additional information about this person, even through searching the Hong Kong Polytechnic University website. The only thing I was able to find was this paper entitled Personal and meta-gaming experience by using Digital Game Ontology and Gamer Profile System, written by the same authors. I sent an email to the address listed on the papers, but the email bounced back.
Wilson Yuen
I was able to find his description on one of the University's departmental websites which provided me with a little bit of his background but I was unable to ascertain if he still works there or not. I was also unable to find any further works by him. I sent an email to the address listed on the papers.
Dr. Bansal had requested that I do a little more work looking into the Steam API. On that note, I had a thought the other night. If there is an API for Steam then might there also be APIs for Xbox Live and Playstation Network? And the answer is yes. Which is awesome. We can literally have users input their user IDs for all three of these services and return lists of games the user has played along with their achievements, badges, etc. For both, there are multiple options available, each developed in open source by developers and not by the official companies. While this means that their user IDs cannot be validated, it also means that the code is available for adaptation if need be.
Now, I started looking into what would actually be required to use these APIs, and each have different requirements (like API keys). For Steam, I need to have a Steam account with purchased games... for security reasons. I started to use my boyfriend's account to request an API key, but I have to list which domain will be sending the requests. I do not have a domain, so I will need to ask Dr. Bansal if the school could perhaps provide one. For the Xbox Live API that I'm looking at (there is another paid for service available), I need to have empty Xbox Live accounts that will go crawl the system for me. For the Playstation Network API that I'm looking at, I need a valid Playstation Network account. I need to do more work looking into these.
As I will probably need a hosted website to begin playing around with all these things, I started a locally hosted website.
- Jose Zagal and Amy Bruckman, The Game Ontology Project: Supporting Learning While Contributing Authentically to Game Studies (paper)
- Jupiter Chan and Wilson Yuen, Digital Game Ontology: Semantic Web Approach on Enhancing Game Studies (paper)
Jose Zagal
Dr. Zagal is currently a professor at DePaul University teaching game design and ethics. I visited his website and was able to identify an additional piece entitiled Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis. In this paper, Zagal mentions that there are more than 150 elements in the Game Ontology Project. I sent him an email (via his updated email address on his website) describing my project and requesting the ontology.
Amy Bruckman
Dr. Bruckman is currently a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She was the coauthor of the Zagal paper, but based on her website it appears that she was more involved with the educational aspects of the paper, so I will not be emailing her.
Jupiter Chan
I was unable to find any additional information about this person, even through searching the Hong Kong Polytechnic University website. The only thing I was able to find was this paper entitled Personal and meta-gaming experience by using Digital Game Ontology and Gamer Profile System, written by the same authors. I sent an email to the address listed on the papers, but the email bounced back.
Wilson Yuen
I was able to find his description on one of the University's departmental websites which provided me with a little bit of his background but I was unable to ascertain if he still works there or not. I was also unable to find any further works by him. I sent an email to the address listed on the papers.
Dr. Bansal had requested that I do a little more work looking into the Steam API. On that note, I had a thought the other night. If there is an API for Steam then might there also be APIs for Xbox Live and Playstation Network? And the answer is yes. Which is awesome. We can literally have users input their user IDs for all three of these services and return lists of games the user has played along with their achievements, badges, etc. For both, there are multiple options available, each developed in open source by developers and not by the official companies. While this means that their user IDs cannot be validated, it also means that the code is available for adaptation if need be.
Now, I started looking into what would actually be required to use these APIs, and each have different requirements (like API keys). For Steam, I need to have a Steam account with purchased games... for security reasons. I started to use my boyfriend's account to request an API key, but I have to list which domain will be sending the requests. I do not have a domain, so I will need to ask Dr. Bansal if the school could perhaps provide one. For the Xbox Live API that I'm looking at (there is another paid for service available), I need to have empty Xbox Live accounts that will go crawl the system for me. For the Playstation Network API that I'm looking at, I need a valid Playstation Network account. I need to do more work looking into these.
As I will probably need a hosted website to begin playing around with all these things, I started a locally hosted website.