To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Games are possibility spaces and the experiential circumstances generated by the execution of digital game code are paratextual thresholds of transition and transaction. If games are paratexts, game design is a form of modeling; game-playing is a form of transactional mapping; and the critical engagement with games is best approached via a modified version of “deep mapping,” a digital humanities process indebted to textual studies approaches. This paper will explore the paratextual idea of deep mapping in relation to Hello Games’ constantly evolving No Man's Sky, and The C64, a full-sized reissue of Commodore 64 hardware by Retro Games Ltd. Overall, the use of deep mapping to comprehend the paratextual thresholds of games validates the importance of textual studies approaches, acknowledging the complex relationship between physicality and virtuality while also reconfirming that games require methodologies that move beyond reading paradigms and the exclusive framework of textuality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".