On the Political Function of Triflers and Spoilsports in Game Studies
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conventional gameplay requires that players follow rules and aim for goals. Unconventional gameplay does not: cheats ignore rules, triflers ignore goals, and spoilsports ignore both. These unconventional modes of gameplay seem to be perennial preoccupations for those scholars concerned with the relationship between games and life, or with a political reading of games. Since the field’s inception, game studies scholars have conceived of these unconventional modes of play in metonymical or indexical terms, turning cheats, triflers, and spoilsports into different kinds of social actors who trouble the laws and conventions of society in different ways. Setting aside the comparatively straightforward rule breaking of the cheat, in this chapter I review four books – John Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper, James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory – that cast the trifler and spoilsport as complicated agents of social change. By demonstrating the affinity between these texts, I resituate the figures of the trifler and the spoilsport in the field of game studies and identify a normative and philosophical framework for thinking about games that is grounded in a radical critique of the present.
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 imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it