Rationalizing Play: A Critical Theory of Digital Gaming
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Full frame distilled prediction
Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
- Candidate categories
- none
- Consensus categories
- none
- Domain
- Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
- Study design
- Candidate signal: Not applicableConsensus signal: none
- Genre
- Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: none
- Teacher disagreement score
- 0.971
- Threshold uncertainty score
- 0.150
- Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated·codex-gemma-dda1882f352a
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
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.
- Teacher spread
- 0.284 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
This article constructs a new framework for the study of games as sites of social rationalization, applying Feenberg's critical theory of technology. We begin by making the case for a consideration of games as systems of social rationality, akin to other modern systems such as capitalist markets and bureaucratic organizations. We then present a conceptualization of play as a process through which the player focuses attention away from the undifferentiated action of everyday life toward a differentiated sphere of playful activity. This approach reveals how the experience of play changes as it becomes rationalized through the technological mediation and widespread standardization that occurs as games become large-scale social practices. We propose a theory of the rationalization of play (ludification), which outlines the key components of socially rationalized games, which we then apply to the specific example of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).
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.
The record
- Venue
- The Information Society
- Topic
- Digital Games and Media
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- Simon Fraser University
- Funders
- not available
- Keywords
- Rationalization (economics)ConceptualizationSociologyRationalityCritical theoryBureaucracyAction (physics)EpistemologyEveryday lifeComputer sciencePoliticsPolitical science
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes