New Sincerity, the Weird, and the post-ironic turn in contemporary indie video games
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines how contemporary indie video games use elements of the Weird as part of a post-ironic, New Sincerity aesthetic. By comparing three contemporary indie games against earlier cinema and television texts, I argue that over the past decade of the 2010s indie games boom video games emerged as an important medium in the post-ironic turn associated with New Sincerity. In the first chapter, I compare Braid (2008) with the original two seasons of Twin Peaks (1990–1991) to examine how both texts use ironic parody to draw the player / viewer in and then use the Weird to distort their parody and invert their ironic affect to produce sincerity-in-irony. In the second chapter, I compare The Beginner's Guide (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007) to look at how the ironic distancing of metafiction and the complicating of authorship via narration combine to reveal sincerity amidst the irony of textual hyperreflexivity and to position sincerity as an escape from the metaphorical prison of cultural irony. Finally, in the third chapter, I compare Kentucky Route Zero (2013–2020) and Lost Highway (1997) to put the alienation of cultural irony into the context of late capitalism and to show that both texts use weird transformation of characters as a way to transform their ironic affect into sincerity. Through these readings, I show how the Weird's breaking down of boundaries and crossing of thresholds enables New Sincerity's breaking down of the boundaries between irony and sincerity and briefly look at the influence of these three games on subsequent indie video games developed over the past decade.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".