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Record W4396813394 · doi:10.7202/1111260ar

Thoughtful Snooping: Agency, Affect and the Walking Simulator

2024· article· en· W4396813394 on OpenAlex
Sarah MacKeil

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenueLoading · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDigital Games and Media
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAffect (linguistics)SimulationComputer scienceAgency (philosophy)PsychologyPhysical medicine and rehabilitationMedicineCommunicationSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

<p>In the past decade, “walking simulator” has evolved from an insult to a critically and commercially successful genre of games. Through subversive mechanics and an emphasis on immersive, affective storytelling, these games are well-situated to explore LGBTQ+ narratives and queer forms of play (Ruberg, 2019). This paper unpacks the affective implications of games that urge the player to “snoop around” personal spaces, including Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013), What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017), and A Normal Lost Phone (Accidental Queens, 2017). After a broad overview of the genre and relevant scholarship, the author examines the emotional impact of ludic “snooping”. Specifically, the author considers how games centring this mechanic simulate intimacy (while problematizing consent), engage agency through interaction and movement, and harness a disorienting atmosphere in their storytelling. Finally, the paper reflects on how character identification can be understood in the context of “games for change”, so-called empathy games, and the need to move towards a more thoughtful engagement with queer affect. This paper touches on each of these issues with a broad, interdisciplinary approach rooted in rhetoric, close reading, and queer theory.</p>

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.988
Threshold uncertainty score0.381

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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 head0.021
GPT teacher head0.316
Teacher spread0.296 · 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