Transmediating <i>Bildung</i> : Video Games as Life Formation Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of Bildung (life formation) in relation to video games. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement. We argue that Joseph Campbell’s monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development in games, which restrains rather than stimulates the kind of complexities, diversity, and fluidity of character psychology needed in contemporary video game ecology. The main part of this study is dedicated to a comparative analysis of three indie games that address the life formation theme through allegories of space-in-time. The main focal areas will be character and story patterns; chronotopic mappings onto developmental trajectories; the treatment of mastery, mentorship, and choice; and the spiritual and metacognitive alignment of extra and intradiegetic education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".