Contests for Meaning: Ableist Rhetoric in Video Games Backlash Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An increasing number of video games focus on empathetic identification across difference. Since the mid-2000s, games that encourage catharsis and immersive engagement with trauma range from the personal as in That Dragon, Cancer (2014), in which players experience what it is like to parent a terminally ill child to geopolitical struggles as in Peacemaker (2007) which encourages player empathy for both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. These games are rapidly gaining in popularity and commercial backing. As more games focus on issues of social justice, the backlash against these concerns among a vocal segment of the gaming community is increasing in frequency and intensity. A branch of the men's rights movement has focused on video games aimed at understanding difference, and has attracted attention suggesting that all those advocating for social justice in games (dubbed Social Justice Warriors) should be understood to have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). We argue that these claims to NPD need to be understood as a form of structural ableism mobilized by the men's rights movement. In doing so, we argue that by situating the mental health labels evoked by current men's rights' activist rhetoric about feminist anti-racist interventions in game culture is a new form of the old practice of attaching mental health labels to people challenging social norms underpinning the dominant culture.
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 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 | 0.002 |
| 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 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".