When paratexts become texts: de-centering the game-as-text
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
Most academic research on and discussions about paratexts define them as texts or artifacts that surround a central text, lending that central text meaning, framing and shaping how we understand it. Researchers who study games and game culture have examined how materials such as walkthroughs, game guides, and Let's Play videos function as paratexts to shape how we understand what a particular videogame might be like and how best to play it. Yet sometimes texts become paratexts themselves when the object of study shifts. In this short essay I explore situations where the (seemingly) central object becomes de-centered, where the game becomes the paratext for other texts. These cases demonstrate the danger in "fixing" some texts as central and others as peripheral. By discussing the worlds of game modding and professional streamers on Twitch.tv, I argue for flexibility in when a text might become a paratext and vice versa.
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 | 0.018 |
| 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 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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