This article helps to understand how HandheldEmpire works by describing the structure behind the scenes. No technical knowledge required to understand.

The three main objects in the system are:

• Member: A person who interested about hand-held games. To become a member people may log in with their existing facebook or google account or create a HandheldEmpire account by a usual registration process.
• Game: A game represents a 'general' hand-held game. A game has many attributes like color, release year, screen type, shape, model, etc... Members may upload images or manuaals, put it in their whishlist, write comments (kind of a forum thread per game), edit description (kind of wiki), rate by certain aspects.
• Game instance: A game instance is a relation between a game and a member. It represents a real world game which is a property of a member. Obviously, a member may have any amount of game instance. It has some attributes which are independent from the game object like bought date, whether it is available for sale, serial number. Other attributes are depends on game. For example a game has a 'has battery cover' attribute. Some games have no battery cover because they doesn't requre battery (eg. solar games) others hide them behind back cover without battery cover. If a game has battery cover than the game instance inherits a 'battery cover score' attribute which may be set by a 0-5 range score by the owner.
  The owner may upload images for the game instance, they will also appears on the page of the game.

Game relations
Relations among games makes it possible to categorize games and also suggests other games for visitors to surf to. Unlike most hand-held game sites, HandheldEmpire relies on relational database and game pages generated on the fly. It makes possible both distributed management and easy modifications without having to deal with editing hundreds of static web pages. Setting a relation attribute in one game will affect all other games involved without editing those ones.
Relations:

• Manufacturer
  The most obvious relation is the manufacturer of the game. Most website use it as a primary category. Unfortunatelly current databases handle this information lazily, they doesn't differntiate among publishers just select one of them and ignore the others or just simple mention them as 'foreign version' or such. The name 'manufacturer' is a bit misleading, it should be renamed to 'publisher' in the future.
• Series
  Most manufacturer line games into series. These usualy has the same form factor. Many series span across more publishers. Some of them licensed by many publisher so a certain game has different versions (like this), others licensed excusively so a part of the series belongs to one publisher and the other part belongs to another publisher see this example.
• Licensee
  Licensee is a kind of relation that most peaple would say 'these are the same games but different label'. They always has the same form factor and size but usually released (licensed) by different publisher, they might have different name or different color. We don't record which is the original game and which is the licensed one.
  It has a special meaning in aspect of series. If a collector want to gather a series he/she might not really interested about collecting them from the same publisher. Licensee games shown in the same row in the series view, see this example.
  Casio: Western Bar and Liwaco: Western Saloon are licensees of each other.
• Clone
  A clone is a 'copy' of a game but has bigger difference than we discuss in the licensee section, usually they have different size but still exactly the same game.
  Casio: Western Bar and Casio: Super Western Bar are clones of each other.
• Gameplay
  Gameplay relation means: if you played one, you played all. They have exactly the same rules but might have different sprites and different form factor.
  Casio: Western Bar and Casio: Super Shooting Fight are in gameplay relation of each other.

Manufacturer and Series are named relations, they may be set in the game editing form by selecting its name like 'Casio' or 'Nintendo - wide screen'.
On the other hand, Licensee, Clone and Gameplay are unnamed relations, they can be set in the game editing form by saying 'A' is a licensee of 'B'. Supposing that 'C' is licensee of 'D', then set a new licensee relation between 'B' and 'C' obviously means that 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D' are all licensee of each other. The same apply to Clone and Gameplay.