Video Games as Tools for Non-State Cultural Diplomacy: A Case Study of The Video Game Never Alone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With rapidly changing digital platforms and the impact of globalization on cultural diplomacy that has provoked the increasing mediatization of the field, non-state actors are now able to expand networks and gain legitimacy by addressing new publics using digital spaces. While the research about the use of social media as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy continues to increase, little work has been done reflecting on the potential of another digital medium: video games. This study intends to fill that gap by assessing video games’ potential to serve as tools for cultural engagement in cultural diplomacy programming. Using the video game <em>Never Alone</em> as a case study, this dissertation explores the opportunity to provide a digital third space where imagined contact can occur to foster cultural understanding. <em>Never Alone</em> is a puzzle platformer video game developed in collaboration with the Iñupiaq Alaska Natives to showcase their culture. The game’s inclusive development process also works to examine virtual third spaces as a site for decolonial action at the microlevel regarding the Iñupiaq and the video game industry and at the macrolevel regarding Inuit diplomacies. This research attempts to critically explore the possibility for non-state cultural diplomacy initiatives using video games as tools to shape perceptions about the world.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".