Lichenthropy: Possibility Space and the Chthulucene in <i>The Last of Us</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Traditionally, ecoGothic narratives have ended with “man” overthrowing the environment and securing his position as the dominant species. However, American zombie video games, such as The Last of Us, have challenged this outcome, collapsing distinctions between humans and the environment. This collapse engenders what Donna Haraway has called “response-ability.” Response-ability, however, requires a shift from Anthropic thinking to Chthulucentric living, and for fungal zombie video games, this takes the form of lichenthropy. Lichenthropy proposes a multispecies form of ecological being by way of Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene in place of the Anthropocene to argue that the environmental storytelling potential of ecoGothic video games, through their interactivity, can efface the button-pushing harmful effects of climate change. Possibility space in The Last of Us can enhance the lichenthropic potential of the video game, but in many ways, it also limits it, suggesting that American citizens may not be ready to accept response-ability for their contributions to contemporary climate issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".