The Programmer as Player: Uncovering Latent Forms of Digital Play Using Structuration and Actor-Network Theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is programming a game considered play? Normally we would say that it is not; play happens when a game is consumed, not when it is produced. But by adopting this perspective we are falling into the trap that popular culture and mass media set when they categorize games as just another entertainment product. What, then, is the true purpose of this division between programming and play? Why do we seem them as different? In this article, I will explore the early history of computer gaming to show how this dichotomy came about. As it turns out, the computer engineers who worked with the earliest computer systems must shoulder much of the blame. Those programmers who created games such as Spacewar identified themselves as proto-hackers, standing a distance apart from those engaged in more serious computer work. Engineers such as Douglas Engebart, meanwhile, were thinking about the computer as a tool to solve problems, not a platform for artistic endeavour. These two forces enabled outsiders to consider gaming and programming to be wholly separate activities. For the purposes of this work, both structuration theory and actor-network theory are employed. I found that each methdology offered fresh insights into these issues, which could then be merged to provide a complete picture of this early era in digital computing.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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)
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 it