MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2601916917 · doi:10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648

When paratexts become texts: de-centering the game-as-text

2017· article· en· W2601916917 on OpenAlexafffund
Mia Consalvo

Bibliographic record

VenueCritical Studies in Media Communication · 2017
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDigital Games and Media
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsSociologyFandomParatextMedia studiesAdvertisingLinguisticsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.033
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.020
Threshold uncertainty score0.051

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.033
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0110.063
Scholarly communication0.0200.037
Open science0.0020.013
Research integrity0.0040.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.124
GPT teacher head0.446
Teacher spread0.321 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations99
Published2017
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueCritical Studies in Media CommunicationSame topicDigital Games and MediaFrench-language works237,207