Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her essay "Reclaiming Animism" (2012), Isabelle Stengers writes that reclaiming "means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as 'not ours' but rather as 'animating' us, making us witness to what is not us." It is this notion of animation that mobilizes this paper on Jesse Ross's tabletop roleplaying game <em>Trophy Dark</em> (2021), and which informed my own experience as simultaneous game facilitator and game design instructor for a class of fifteen undergraduate students. With a group split roughly in half between students with varying levels of experience with <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em> (and solely <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em>) and students with no tabletop roleplaying experience whatsoever, <em>Trophy Dark</em>, and specifically Ross's incursion "Witchwood," made for a group exercise in this animative witness to the "not ours" and "not us" of which Stengers writes. Rather than adopting a rationalist, critical separation from the play experience, or a romantic, reflective immersion in the play experience, this particular group of students discovered in <em>Trophy Dark</em> a vehicle for the "active," "transformative," and indeed "metamorphic" experience that Stengers describes, using the chosen incursion as an instrument for the shared dramatic failure that is "playing to lose," as advocated in <em>Trophy Dark</em>'s player's guide. Stengers awakens her readers to a "rhizomatic" materialism, or a materialism of the "milieu," and together in the Witchwood we encountered the same. This paper charts the contours of our adventure.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.008 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".