MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4324072013 · doi:10.1145/3582931

The Sociality of Video Games: Embracing Games as Social Infrastructure

2023· article· en· W4324072013 on OpenAlexaff
Kimberly Voll

Bibliographic record

VenueGames Research and Practice · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDigital Games and Media
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSocialityVideo gameSociologyInternet privacyComputer scienceMultimediaEcology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Modern society is mediated by social infrastructure.Basketball hoops tender play as social lubricant, playgrounds afford the respite of adult conversation among parents, while a park bench makes possible chance encounters.Eric Klinenburg in his book Palaces for the People defines "social infrastructure" as "the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact" [Klinenburg 2018, p. 5].Alongside our mores, social infrastructure not only supports our need to connect but inspires us to do so, providing a blueprint that helps shape the worlds we inhabit while shaping the people that we become within them.The advent of modern video games in the '70s and '80s created new avenues for play-infused infrastructure.Video arcades cultivated bonding and relationship building, giving rise to their own social norms and rites of inclusion.Though entertaining on their own, video games served as a "social MacGuffin" in the nexus of these arcades; like board games, they provided a reason to not just gather but linger.As a testament to this, one of the earliest home consoles, the Magnavox Odyssey, was envisioned partly as a board game, including a playmat and tokens along with the hardware.This early history helps highlight a critical transformation as we have moved online and increased the fidelity of gaming experiences.Today video games transcend physical distance, drawing people together around the promise of play and providing a shared purpose that helps in fostering bonds across cultures.Where once video games merely served as the toys of our social parlours, today these digital worlds now function directly as habitable infrastructure.In short, video games have become the very social parlour itself.The concept of video games as social infrastructure is profound.The shift necessitates a fundamental change in how we think about games as a society.It befits us to take greater responsibility in the games we create and their impact on players and communities.Building a game that others

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.014
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.032

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.014
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.035
Scholarly communication0.0160.015
Open science0.0020.008
Research integrity0.0030.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.090
GPT teacher head0.465
Teacher spread0.375 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueGames Research and PracticeSame topicDigital Games and MediaFrench-language works237,207