Outing Ourselves in Outer Space: Canadian Identity Performances in BioWare’s <i>Mass Effect</i> Trilogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Throughout BioWare’s Mass Effect 3, players confront a vast array of unexpected Canadian content in narrative dialogue, settings, and identity development choices. This article examines the overall effects of Canadian content in this immersive video game series. Beginning in Vancouver and ending in London, England, Mass Effect 3 immerses players in world-ending conflicts linked with historical Canadian wartime experiences, which are creatively disguised through inventive science fiction. This game evokes ideas of colonial duty and personal self-sacrifice; players also confront cultural eugenics similar to social Darwinism during World War II. Canadian and queer identities develop in tandem as players consider humanitarian and inclusive possibilities, performing with outer space races in conflict. Players can even personalize their own Commander Shepard by customizing his/her gender, race, and sexuality. During the game, players may pursue intimate relationships with other men, women, or alien non-player characters; these choices are developed as moments of “coming out” that parallel the Canadian content revelations in the game. All of these contemporary identity negotiations create a vastly complex system of video game user-generated performances as players help their Canadian Commander Shepard reshape the universe.
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 imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".