What does Oregami mean?

Oregami is an abbreviation of “Open Registry of Game Information”.

Behind the name is a new and open computer and video game database.

The world doesn’t need another video game database?

Oh yes, it does.

In our humble opinion, the existing projects are not able to document the history of computer and video games in a sustainable way.

On the one hand there is commercial projects which are bound to commercial success and, thus, are only reliable no longer than until the next crisis. On the other hand there is private projects which are racked with a chronic lack of resources, and are subject to all highs and lows of private life.

We aim for a new approach.

A new approach? What’s that supposed to mean?

The roots of all our thinking are a strong future proofness of our data, and a comprehensive documentation of all computer and video games, and the respective media.

In order to achieve these goals, Oregami will be, in many ways, substantially different from existing projects. Let’s take a look at the most important issues:

  1. Funding / Legal status

    To share the burden of funding a cultural hobby in Germany, there is exactly one suitable legal form: a non-profit association. Not without reason so many of these associations exist here.

    Thus, Oregami won’t be commercial or private, but non-profit. The groundwork for this has been already laid.

  2. Data Licensing

    Data which cannot be properly used and evaluated are useless, and the Oregami data shall be used extensively. Be it private or commercial Internet sites, emulator frontends or academic publications: in order to unite the community under one banner and, therefore, share the task of collecting the data amongst as many people as possible, it is very important to give back.

    In order to achieve this goal, Oregami will use a data licensing which will render the data as freely usable as possible, but will adhere to the given frame of copyright law at the same time.

    Furthermore, we will publish a simple-to-use application programming interface (API) for comfortable access to the data.

  3. Multilingualism / Internationality

    Those who want to comprehensively document the medium video game can only think within a global frame. Lacking the experts from the USA, the UK, from Japan, South Korea, from France, Russia, and so forth, such a project would be doomed to failure.

    Thus, multilingualism is part of the concept and the code to begin with at Oregami.

  4. Programming

    When programmers quit an Internet project, a dangerous coding jam can occur. In order to avoid this bottleneck our code is developed open source, and with the clear requirements of easy maintenance, easy extensibility, and good documentation.

    These requirements shall ensure that newly arriving hackers will find easy access to the existing code, and will become productive very fast.

    Furthermore, our open source code license “GNU General Public License 3 (GPL3)” allows people to reuse their code within other projects as they see fit.

Free and open is already out there - so why not just join Wikidata?

Wikimedia is a project that changed the world and continues to do so, no doubt about that. We stand in esteem looking at this accomplishment. So why then not just join the Wikidata video games project, instead of fiddling around with our own project?

The simple answer is notability. We want to document the whole universe of video game data, including indie games, user-created content, home-brew stuff. We are sure that some of this would be prohibited by Wikidata’s notability rules.

And we could not accept this limitation of scope.

And which data will be in the Oregami database?

All. At least all those relating to computer and video games.

Exemplary, besides the “typical” data found in every good gaming database there will be comprehensive information about print magazines / books, all the gaming hardware out there, or about the people behind our beloved hobby.

Furthermore, we can’t see anything wrong in energizing our database with user reviews, an online collection tracker for games and magazines, or similar features.

And who owns the data I contribute to your database?

Everyone.

Our current thinking is that we want to handle this important aspect similar to Wikipedia.

The users will contribute their data under a permissive license, say the GFDL / ODBL, or one of the completely free CC-Licenses. We will publish these data after approval under the chosen license, too, and will give them back to the community using an API.

However, the final legal review of this issue is a work in progress. Especially when it comes to cover scans and screen shots, there is complex copyright laws to evaluate.

Sounds very ambitious, a little too much actually?

Failure is a possibility.
Not trying it is not.

What does the roadmap look like?

We decided to use an agile approach to develop this project. Agile means that we’ll take rather smallish steps of development, and will regularly publish these.

As soon as possible we want to publish a base version of our database so that everybody can use it. The more people help us with that, the earlier we can reach this goal!

Where can I check out the current stage of development?

Interested hackers can have a look at our source code at github any time.

If you want to see the code in action, be sure to check out dev.oregami.org for the latest prototype.

Okay, you have me convinced. How can I help out?

The easiest entrance into the project may well be reading through our forums. You can drop us a quick note in the public board there, too. If you want to help out then, we will grant you write access for the developer boards, but reading those boards is possible without registration.

For more ways to participate in our project visit our community page.