Digital Game Elements Ontology
Digeo is an Ontology that identifies in an abstract manner elements that make up digital games from a developer perspective. The primary goal of this ontology is to identify game-related elements in order to enable the understanding of how a digital game works to the masses.
As a result of its existence, a common vocabulary may raise and a practical application of game elements become more intelligible to all individuals who have an interest to the area.
DIGEO leverages a descriptive top-down method, it distinguishes the generic classification first, and then specialise in accordance with the characteristics and applications of these relationships, in our case this means "to define digital game by listing and relating its elements", ideally in all these elements would be classes of the DIGEO Ontology and no other elements would be added, at most some new properties.
No. There are plenty of other Ontologies out there (see the references) that try to define Games, but few are the ones who are describing Games as they're made or thought.
There's one specific Ontology that was used as DIGEO's inspiration: Game Ontology Project (GOP) . GOP is a really broad Ontology which approachs a description method bottom-top - new classes are added in order to describe new game titles. The classes are organised hierarchically by being instances of a class, the objects will (necessarily), by definition, be instances of classes in the parent hierarchy.
In order to validate and enunciate more clearly and specifies the proposed ontology the DML was created.
Here is an example:
<entity id="entityP1">
<hit id="hitPlayer1Bounds" input="#room">
<move target="#entityP1" invert="true" />
</hit>
</entity>
To prove its use in professional or educational world a Prototype Game Engine was created in order to interpret DML. The Multi-genre Game Engine (Muge) provides to programmers, game designers and tinkerers the creation of digital games in a without the need a extra programming skills.
A Node based Software is planned make DIGEO even more accessible to ordinary people and to make it more fun.
This project/theses was mainly developed with the Brazilian Portuguese Language and it's in a process of translation. So do not wonder if you at some point some phases in some other language appears. For now use google translate please. Be patience. Thanks.
If you have interest in the project please enter in contact with me via GitHub.