Anti-Games, Fantasy Consoles, and the Rise of Speculative Game Development on Itch.io
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amid the ongoing escalation of anti-worker and anti-player practices across the game industry, the creative practices of developers are shifting: jammers, students, hobbyists, fangamers, and other digital game “zinesters” [3] seek to reclaim game design as a personal art form. This paper examines the emergence and rise of speculative game design communities on itch.io—sites of ongoing creative resistance to corporate encroachment and exclusionary game culture. Specifically, the study documents the activities of “anti-game” jammers and fantasy console development communities on itch.io—two groups that create speculative games (that is, projects that are conceptual, arbitrary, and materially or procedurally unrealizable) to make space for personal play that is divested from mainstream engines, markets, and pretenses of game commodity: 1) Firstly, “anti-game” designers use game jams, zines, and Discord servers to develop and circulate not-games, games that refuse play, and games that cannot be played. These makers create provocative thought experiments, poems, manifestos, and other “unplayable” works that resist hyper-capitalist investment in bigger, longer, more graphically precise, live-service, metaversal, forever-games. 2) Simultaneously, developers on itch build projects for fantasy consoles—such as PICO-8 and Bitsy—and imagine hardware that is mutually-constituted, rooted in community, and decommodified. Ultimately, this paper argues that speculative design practices divest from concerns of “playability,” center unencumbered participation, and allow developers to envision and participate in a post-capitalist imaginary of hardware, software, and play.
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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".