Re: Debtags for defining the minimal age that a program can generally be used

2013/9/11 Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>

Hi Miriam,

Hi! Thanks for your comments :)

as I said I like your idea of age based debtags but it seems there is
not so much response. I admit I do not feel really competent here but
its a shame to leave you alone with a good idea.

Yup, I wonder why, if no one is interested, or if they feel it's not a good idea. I'll keep working on it at my pace, though.

On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 11:00:23PM +0200, Miriam Ruiz wrote:
> The first thing I would like to do is to classify the games that might be
> appropriate for kids of different ages, and based on that build the rest.

I think you should not "serialise" your plan that way. If you really
want to get this DebTags idea as "first thing" done and the support
would remain that way you might end up in a dead-end street.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Currently debtags are powerful enough to extract lists from the archive and work from there, so I think it would be a good way to automatize things.

> Of course there are many different criteria for doing that, some objective,

> some subjective. ...

As I said I I feel incompetent here but I would not try to apply
scientific criteria to strictly here. It seems different systems agreed
about four age groups with just different names and some slight
difference in the age. Since we are definitely not able to make the
distinction of age in our target packages / programs that sharp IMHO it
does not matter a lot what system we choose.

Yup. the problem here is that if we're dealing with developmental or physiological objective classification, that classification can be reasonably assumed to apply to kids throughout different cultures, whereas if we are also dealing with moral classification (violence, nudity, religion, profanity, whatever), that would not only depend on the culture, but also on the parent's values.

> Somehow it seems that a good level of granularity might be 3 years, with
> some approximate boundaries at 2/3, 6, 9, and 11/12 years. So my initial
> idea is to define a set of tags with some name I can't currently figure out
> year, that would be like:
> A) An average baby of 3 years old could use the program according to their
> cognitive, sensimotor and psychosocial stage of development.
> B) An average child of 6 years old could use the program according to their
> cognitive, sensimotor and psychosocial stage of development.
> C) An average kid of 9 years old could use the program according to their
> cognitive, sensimotor and psychosocial stage of development.
> D) An average pre-teen of 12 years old could use the program according to
> their cognitive, sensimotor and psychosocial stage of development.

Sounds reasonable.

> The best thing about such a simple system is that it's quite easy to know,
> whoever has kids around know which programs they are able to manage, in
> both aspects of cognitive development ("the way they think"), sensorimotor
> development ("how complex and quick the managing of the program might be"),
> etc.

Yes, please keep the system pretty simple.

Yes, that's why I thought omething like this could work, and I still do.

> One thing I would like to decide is whether an objective classification of
> this kind should be generic enough (and be allowed to, and under which
> conditons) to be put into the standard debtag set (other tags, mostly
> subjective or culturally dependent ones should have to go into their own
> package), which will definitely bring a lot of benefits.

I have the gut feeling that this could work out somehow.

I would like some input from Enrico or from people from the debtags mailing list too, to see what they might think about this, and if there's a possibility to make it work. That's essentially one of the things I was hoping as a feedback to my original email.

Greetings and thanks,

Miry