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Record W13335017 · doi:10.15173/mjc.v7i0.253

Video Games as Change Agents -- The Case of Homeless: It's No Game

2011· article· en· W13335017 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Terry Lavender

Bibliographic record

VenueThe McMaster Journal of Communication · 2011
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicImpact of Technology on Adolescents
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVideo gameSociologyPsychologyComputer scienceMultimedia

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In recent years, with the coming of age of a new generation of social activists raised on video games and the release of new tools that make video game development easier for individuals and small groups, many activists have begun to release video games designed to further their cause. However, there is little evidence as to the effectiveness of video games in changing attitudes. The video game, Homeless: It’s No Game was developed to determine whether people could be persuaded to become more sympathetic to the plight of the homeless by playing the role of a homeless woman in a video game and whether this persuasive effect could be measured. Volunteers were recruited to answer a survey of attitudes towards the homeless and were then assigned to either play the game, read a short story about homelessness, or to be part of a control group, after which the survey was re-administered. Results were mixed, with some indicators showing an increase in sympathy towards the homeless and others showing no significant effect. There were also some indications that playing the video game led to a strengthened belief in the effectiveness of video games in raising awareness of social issues. The results indicate that games can help reinforce a social activist message, especially if their audiences consider them realistic.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.026

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0090.011
Scholarly communication0.0070.006
Open science0.0010.005
Research integrity0.0060.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.103
GPT teacher head0.349
Teacher spread0.247 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations10
Published2011
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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Same venueThe McMaster Journal of CommunicationSame topicImpact of Technology on AdolescentsFrench-language works237,207