OpenRating: rating system for free games

[Miriam Ruiz]

Hi,

I'm developing a game rating system for Debian and Ubuntu using the
DebTags system [1]. Up to now I've been able to develop a basic set of
tags to classify the games [2], but before considering it finished and
started tagging the games, I want to get as much feedback as possible,
especially from teachers, educators, parents and in general people
that work with and study about children.

The idea is not to develop a fully exhaustive system with a thousand
tags. I believe that parents and tutors must check themselves the
games before letting their kids play with them, and supervise them
while they do if they're little. This does not try to be a replacement
for parents in this task, but a helper to let them have a rough idea
about where to look at the games in the repositories according to
their own priorities. So being exhaustive is not as a priority as
being easily managed to get a rough filter with them.

Right now some tags are already being used by GoPlay!, a system to
find games in Debian, but it a very alpha state. The purpose is to
make it configurable so that parents can decide which tags are
important for them.

I hope that the overall scheme can be understood, but I plan to write
a rationale about it as soon as I can, as well as develop some
examples so that they can be easily understood. Meanwhile, feel free
to ask me about any doubts you might have. I know that the tags might
be a bit subjective and probably a bit culturally biased. The former
is not avoidable, there will always be some kind of subjectivity in
these kind of classification, so I won't fight the impossible to
achieve absolute objectiveness, but on the other hand to make the
parents decide the subjectivity they want to have by selecting and
priorizing them.

About being multicultural, I cannot do that on my own, as I'm not
multicultural myself, so I won't try to invent what other cultures
might be worried about or not based on some fuzzy stereotypes I might
have about them, so I rely on other people from different cultures
help me to broaden the classification if they will.

Feedback is welcome and encouraged.

Greetings and thanks,
Miry

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/OpenRating
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/OpenRating/Categories