The virtual census 2.0: A continued investigation on the representations of gender, race, and age in videogames
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study revisits the original four research questions of Williams et al.’s “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games” to investigate if mainstream videogame representations have changed over time. In addition, this study expands on the original by including a fifth question examining the intersection of representations within videogames. Using a sample of the top 100 best-selling boxed videogames of 2017 from four console platforms, this study compares its findings to the 2017 US Census demographic estimates as well as to findings of the original study. The results of the study are similar to those of the original, but the intersectional analysis shows an over-representation of white adult male characters, specifically, and an under-representation of Black female characters of any age group. This study discusses potential reasons for the slow progress made in videogame representations and the need for more intersectional analyses on videogames.
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 | 0.008 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".