Playing House in a World of Night: Discursive Trajectories of Masculinity in a Tabletop Role-playing Game
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study uses excerpts from the transcript of a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) session to examine how male players enact ideas about masculinity. The game is a non-traditional, small-press “indie” game called Ganakagok designed by the author; in the game, the characters are men and women from a quasi-Inuit culture living on an island of ice in a world lit only by starlight. As the game begins, the imminent arrival of the Sun is announced, and game-play is about how the people of this culture deal with the approaching dawn. In one such game, the players of three male characters went through interesting character arcs in their interactions with each other and with female players; those arcs seemed to depict movement among different models of masculine identity. One implication of the study is that RPGs afford a fruitful site for reflecting upon ideas in discourse, and so it is possible for role-playing to serve as an aesthetic as well as an expressive medium—as art as well as play, in other words.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".