Review: Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification, a text focusing on the potential of games to "impact player subjectivity" (p.53), takes a unique standpoint compared to other design texts and game analyses.From the start, Jagoda clarifies his book's argument: "games, including video games, serve as a form for staging, encountering, processing, and testing experience and reality in the twenty-first century" (p.xi).He goes further with this argument, positing that games are an experimental medium that can be utilised for fundamental social change.The text examines how experimentation through games is an underused framework, mode of inquiry, and intervention within the context of neoliberalism.Jagoda recognises neoliberalism as a "polyvalent" term encompassing the "free market, individual entrepreneurship, private property rights, financialization, and practices of deregulation" (p.9).Aside from the rise of neoliberal values taking place concurrently with the rise of digital games, Jagoda makes a distinct connection between neoliberalism and games.According to him, "games simultaneously index and drive the development of neoliberalism.The competition, repetition, and quantified objectives that make up gamified designs, in both entertainment and applied games, correspond with some of the most pernicious aspects of advanced capitalism" (p.12).Thus, Jagoda asks: Can games be used to alter modern day mindsets?Experimental Games is divided into three parts.Part I, "Framework," comprises the introduction and two theoretical chapters, titled "Gamification" and "Experimentation."Part II, "Concepts," consists in four chapters: "Choice," "Control," "Difficulty," and "Failure."Lastly, Part III, "Design," includes the two chapters "Improvisation" and "Joy."Each chapter contains exemplary game analyses in which Jagoda further
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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 | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".