Shoulder-to-Shoulder: How Pinball Supports Men's Wellbeing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When facing mental health concerns, men seek help less, confront greater stigma in accessing treatment, and experience more severe consequences. Interventions targeted at men are often grounded in activity and situated in appealing contexts, such as sporting or gaming spaces. In this paper, we question how pinball---a social tangible and digital leisure activity---can support men's mental health and wellbeing, through thematic analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews (n=15) with male pinball enthusiasts. Our contribution is threefold: first, we evidence pinball as a context that provides incidental benefits to mental health directly, and indirectly through social connectedness; second, that enthusiasts actively enhance their social lives and resulting wellbeing via pinball; and third, that pinball contexts are suited for designing interventions that provide mental health supports within subcultures that appeal to men. We situate our findings in theories of wellbeing, activity-based communication, shoulder-to shoulder self-disclosure, and the importance of third-spaces for social wellness.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".