‘She’s a soldier, not a model’: Feminism, FemShep and the Mass Effect 3 vote
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the summer of 2011, Bioware held a Facebook vote to determine the ‘official’ face of Mass Effect 3’s female Commander Shepard, who was then to be featured in a game trailer and on the box art. It was presumably a feminist step forward for the Mass Effect franchise, which, although it allows gamers to play as either male or female, had always showcased a male Shepard in its advertisements and other marketing materials. The resulting ‘FemShep’ vote, however, created controversy in the gamer community. This article considers how FemShep’s distaff status affects her gender positioning, and further incorporates online articles and fan comments in arguing that Bioware’s vote positioned Shepard primarily (and predictably) as a sexual object for the pleasure of a straight male audience, thus corrupting Shepard’s already fragile status as a feminist lead.
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.
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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it