Board Games and the Construction of Cultural Memory
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
Although much has been written about the potential of games for historical representation and their status as historical texts, there is little research placing games into a broader “cultural memory” framework. In this article, I argue that one unique way games as a medium can participate in constructing cultural memory is by simulating historically situated structural metaphors. To do so, I first introduce the concept of cultural memory and link it to material culture studies. I argue that games can be cultural memory “objectivations,” but in order to fully analyze them in this respect insights from game studies, namely, the meaning potential of rules, need to be applied as well. I then discuss how three board games, 1830: Railways and Robber Barons , Age of Steam, and Empire Builder simulate the structural metaphors identified by Wolfgang Schivelbusch that were used by contemporary observers to understand the experiential changes wrought by the railroad. I close by arguing that this type of research is valuable in that it opens up new understandings of how games influence the way a culture thinks about and remembers its past.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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