Survival Themed Video Games and Cultural Constructs of Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of the relationship between games and culture have often considered the empowering effect of games on the player. Studies have related this empowerment to individual character growth as well as broader geopolitical action (e.g., the conquering of nations). Few studies, however, have considered the emergent and increasingly popular survival genre of video games. In the current inquiry, through an analysis of past and current examples of games in this genre, we explore how survival games disempower players and discuss the potential implications for this shift in terms of cultural attitudes toward the current state of the world, individual prospects, and optimism/pessimism about the future. The goal of this piece is to explore and converse with the existing state of the literature and exemplars from the survival genre, creating a typological framework for future empirical and theoretical development in the area of games, culture, and (dis)empowerment dynamics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".