OpenRating system for games

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 3:22 AM, Miriam Ruiz <little.miry at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Some time ago I started developing a game rating system [1] for Debian
>  games, based in DebTags. The facets and tag categories [2] are close
>  to be finished, and I really would love to have some feedback in case
>  someone was interested.

I'm a bit skeptical about rating:theme::breaks-social-values, there
are so many cultures around the world that almost every game could add
this. For example in some Australian Aboriginal societies, you cannot
show images of the recently (I think) deceased, nor use their names.
In the wider Australian society, these things are generally OK. Also,
taboos are different for men, women and children in many (all?)
Australian Aboriginal societies. So, it would have to have specifiers
for which social values are broken:

rating:theme::breaks-social-values:western
rating:theme::breaks-social-values:asian
rating:theme::breaks-social-values:spanish
rating:theme::breaks-social-values:australian-aboriginal
rating:theme::breaks-social-values:nyungar
rating:theme::breaks-social-values:nyungar:male
rating:theme::breaks-social-values:nyungar:female

I tend to think this tag is just too subjective to work though.

rating:language::bad-words is similarly culturally loaded, not sure
how best to specify these though.

I've a similar issue with the description of
rating:theme::health:drugs, the definition of "illegal drugs" varies
around the world.

I think maybe the drugs categories should be like this:

rating:theme::health:drugs:caffeine
rating:theme::health:drugs:alcohol
rating:theme::health:drugs:nicotine
rating:theme::health:drugs:other

I'm beginning to feel that we need some anthropologists/psychologists
to check this over :)

I also think OpenRating is more useful than just for restricting what
your kids get to see, some may want to prevent themselves from
installing wargames or sex or whatever.

>  I still have to develop a list of reference games for each tag, so
>  that it can be used more easily to tag the games, but anyway.

I'm sure that will be easy :)

>  The idea is not to add this tags to the debtags basic system, but to
>  have an extension package so that whoever wants to use them has them
>  available. GoPlay! already supports (in a very primitive stage yet)
>  these new tags.

Once the system is ready, it would be good to get them added to
packages.debian.org.

I also wonder if aptitude/synaptic/PackageKit/etc also support adding
new vocabularies?

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise