Bibliographic record
Abstract
Service Games: Rise and Fall of SEGA Sam Pettus CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. Acknowledgements, images. 396 pp. $17.99 paper. ISBN: 9781463578473The History of Sonic the Hedgehog Pix'n'Love Ontario, Canada: UDON Entertainment Corp., 2012. Images, bibliography. 297 pp. $49.99 cloth. ISBN: 9781926778563By now, the ty pical digital gamer has become so familiar with the words con- sole war that he or she scarcely bats an eye when someone invokes them. Still, in the aftermath of the 2013 Electronic Enter- tainment Expo and the ongoing struggles between console manufacturers to capture consumer dollars and loyalty, we should remember how the competition evolved over more than thirty years of video game marketing. As we rapidly approach the eighth generation of the home-console war, and current titans Sony and Microsoft vie for attention, reviewing the landscape is both interesting and illuminating. Sam Petus's Service Games: Rise and Fall of SEGA offer a history lesson from a for- mer console contender about the way the world of digital games has changed.SEGA (a n acronym for Ser v ice Games) remains a household name in the gaming industry, although the company is less prominent than in the past. Once an industry standard for home gaming hardware, SEGA now focuses primarily on software production for multiple hard- ware platforms. Pettus's book serves an in-depth introduction to the SEGA Cor- poration, offering chapter-length descrip- tions organized chronologically for each individual generation of console hard- ware. Each chapter offers less a focused argument than a detailed account of hardware components and technical specs. But the work also explores the relationship between title licensing and the successful generation of a marketable public image.I find compelling the attention the book pays to the culture of the advertising of each generation, sporadic as that atten- tion is. Petus focuses on the frequently euphemistic rhetoric in advertisements such as The more you play with it the harder it gets! (pp. 66-67) and offers an analysis of SEGA as growing an anti- establishment image that better resonates with younger Western gamers. He outlines how other companies and console manu- facturers have ultimately used this strategy since to displace SEGA and capture mar- ket shares. Here, perhaps the book shines most, looking closely at both the advertis- ing of games and consoles and the specific titles that hardware systems offer to com- mand attention or generate a marketable rebel image. reader quickly draws parallels to the current game market, and the advertising rhetoric used to distinguish console manufacturers into the buyable- identity commodities of fan culture.Pix'n'Love's History of Sonic the Hedgehog also attempts to characterize the growth and popularity of the SEGA brand but does so by focusing on the evolution of its highly popular mascot. From an organi- zational perspective, the attempt to chron- icle the history of a character as prolific as Sonic is complicated. Rather than sticking to a strict chronology, the editors instead frame the story as an evolution of the char- acter from a technology demo in 1990 (p. 35) to Sonic's current game stardom across multiple consoles. Doing so allows them to consider the development of the SEGA console hardware and to discuss the need for the emerging game company to estab- lish a rival for Nintendo's Mario character. …
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.008 |
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".