How do players understand video game hardware: Tactility or tech-speak?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how video game players talk about the technological hardware they use to play games. The games industry is known for deploying often confusing and unclear ‘tech-speak’ terminology to convey the supposed value of new gaming hardware, drawing on tropes of numerical objectivity, ‘upgrade culture’ and the implicit obsolescence of previous technological iterations. However, we show a divide between supposedly objective tech-speak penned by the industry and the subjective experiences of users. Gamers rarely understand their gaming hardware through these marketing and advertising discourses despite their high visibility, instead framing the technology they engage with in intimately tactile, and more broadly contextual, terms. This highlights a significant disjuncture between the industrial and their perception of their audience, with implications for our understanding of ‘tech-speak’, its limitations, the video games sector and the consumers who purchase its products.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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".