Investigating communication and social practices in real-time strategy games: are in-game tools sufficient to support the overall gaming experience?
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
This paper discusses the social and strategic communication patterns observed during gameplay of the real-time strategy game, StarCraft II. An observational study was conducted over three weeks during which approximately 26 game matches and the social procedures by which players organized themselves and selected game options were observed. Study participants were members of a pre-existing network of friends and had adopted the Skype voice communication tool to support the game client's built-in collaboration and social networking solutions. The players were observed playing in situations of varying levels of collaboration ranging from team matches to free-for-all matches, and many forms of communication, including both strategic and social, were observed. The study findings revealed that players prefer communication tools that provide both robustness and flexibility. Preferred tools increase ease of access to other players, introduce a measure of exception handling to unify the gameplay experience, and make use of the game as a virtual watercooler---a hub which can facilitate much off-topic, yet valued, conversation.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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