16-bit dissensus: post-retro aesthetics, hauntology, and the emergency in video games
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Santiago Zabala reveals a crisis in modern society that perceives a world dominated by oppressive neoliberal ideology as acceptable and unproblematic. He claims that today’s greatest emergency is that we fail to notice other emergencies in society. To break out of this state, we need an aesthetic force to shock individuals into a new awareness. Unfortunately, while many social and global issues have recently come to widespread attention, the emergency still prevails in many forms of media. For example, the emergency in AAA video games appears in their continual push for higher resolution graphics, hyper-detail, verisimilitude, and intricate gameplay, perpetuating a hegemonic ideology. Exploitative labor practices, lack of representation beyond hetero-sexual, cis-gendered and neurotypical, and capitalist ideals are perpetuated in popular games in service of a hyper-real, high-fidelity aesthetic. One force that combats this emergency is pixel graphics and simplified gameplay, or post-retro aesthetics. While tied to the past, these aesthetics are not nostalgic but transgressively hauntological. To explore this claim, I discuss Dys4ia and Undertale as key post-retro games and reach beyond commercial indie gaming to point to hauntological work being done through DIY game making platformers such as Bitsy.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".