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I have a web application hosted on a URL. It basically hosts games that students use in school. There are some 100,000 games on it.

Is it ok to have the following markup on the game page, for reference by machines and humans alike (but of course mostly machines i.e. search bots)? This would mean one per game.

Does it help or hurt any? I'm mostly interested if it can hurt the site in rankings, in case I will not use it. If so, please describe your reasoning for why it would hurt since it's basically an accurate meta description of the page and its content. Also I have omitted the (by Google structured meta tool) "offering" tag since these games are free and it really doesn't apply. 

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebApplication",
  "browserRequirements": "Requires HTML5 support",
  "applicationCategory": "Game",
  "applicationSubCategory": "Quiz",
  "name": "[the name of the quiz]",
  "image": "http://the.url/images/game-image.gif",
  "about": "This is a game called [the name of the quiz] and was created by member [member name].",
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": "4.6062",
    "reviewCount": "1483"
  },
  "creator": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "[member name]",
    "url": "http://the.url/profile/14834893"
  },
  "url": "http://the.url/game/the-specific-game-url",
  "operatingSystem": "Any. It is a Web Application"
}
</script>
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Providing data using the Schema.org vocabulary typically has no effect on the ranking.

Yes, each of your Web-based games can be represented by a WebApplication. You could also use VideoGame. Or both.

Instead of using about, description seems to be more appropriate for that content.

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    Thanks but do you have any sources that support your statement? The fact that it doesn't effect ranking is fine but is it considered bad practice to use it the way I'm doing? Thanks still for the effort, much appreciated.
    – Adergaard
    Commented Jul 5, 2015 at 18:27
  • @Adergaard: Why should it be a bad practice? Do you have something specific in mind that could be regarded as bad here? You are providing structured data, which is good for all consumers that make use of it, and all other consumers wouldn’t care either way.
    – unor
    Commented Jul 5, 2015 at 19:13
  • Bad practice because the object definition seem to be more suited for a "description" of a web application, not the application itself. Take a restaurant for example. The schema.org definition of Thing > Place > LocalBusiness > FoodEstablishment > Restaurant is really a description of it, not the restaurant itself. It may be far fetched, I know, but it felt a bit weird to use it on the games since the schema seemed more appropriate if I was a store, selling games and then having this schema to describe them. The mandatory "offering" attribute points in that direction as well.
    – Adergaard
    Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 11:09
  • 1
    @Adergaard: If you use a type from Schema.org (or any other vocabulary), the entity with this type represents the actual thing. So if you use schema:Person, it represents an actual person and not a document about this person; and a schema:Restaurant is the actual, physical, real-world restaurant. If you want to state something about a webpage (which may be about a restaurant), you would use schema:WebPage (and its about and/or mainEntity property, to reference the actual thing, i.e., the schema:Restaurant, which this page is about).
    – unor
    Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 11:23
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    @Adergaard: "The mandatory "offering" attribute points in that direction as well." -- Note that Schema.org defines no mandatory properties. Consumers (like Google) have their own rules: which properties they need to have in order to do something with your data. But this does not mean that you should not use the type just because you can’t provide all properties one consumer would like to see; it just means that this consumer probably wouldn’t make use of your data.
    – unor
    Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 11:25

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