Just like What is a game page? and related, what information should be included for a series? For my purposes I’d almost always just use it as a taxonomy term to group related artifacts, primarily by their commercial relation.
I think of series as being distinct from settings and paracosms, each of which are separate from each other as well.
AS as a series contains games, movies, I presume comics and books and “collectibles”. The AS series contains many settings, one or two per game (if one counts the metaplot and tech settings). A setting describes a concrete place or character or idea (Ancient Greece, “home base”, a dream). A paracosm is a narrative container, but is like a soap bubble in a bucket, one can’t easily tell where one begins or another ends or a third comes crashing through.
Red Dwarf and Blade Runner are the same paracosm.
So, is a setting even worth tracking? Does this level of container have useful metadata to show?
Gut reaction: Possibly useful in the abstract, but I suspect finding a common set of metadata which would be meaningful would be difficult. Example: Star Trek / Discworld / Assasins Creed are all cross multimedia franchises which I would imagine are all equally deserving of series pages. However I don’t know I would slice and dice their metadata the same way at all.
Multimedia franchises are weird and diverse behemoths. It’s almost like one would need a new more fine grained vocabulary to group them into smaller chunks with commonalities.
That being said, I think their useful purely in terms of containers. It would be good when looking at a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” container / series page, to see all the books, radio dramas, and the iterations of the videogame.
It’s possible that other containers emerge where needed, and collecting too many generalized collections in “series” isn’t as useful. I mean, imagine the name clashes alone: I want to series all over the place!
For series quests I’ll be content to merely generate new quests that represent it.
