This paper presents the Video Games Dialogue Corpus, the first large-scale, consistently coded, open source corpus of dialogue from video games. It contains over 6.2 million words of dialogue from 50 video games in the Role Playing Game (RPG) genre. This includes: games produced between 1985 and 2020; rated for children, teenagers, and adults; and in both “Western” and “Japanese” subgenres. The corpus design is described, including custom data formats for representing branching dialogue. We demonstrate the use of the corpus by comparing the dialogue of female and male characters, where we find reflections of gendered language in other media as well as patterns that seem specific to video games. We provide the source code for a “self-inflating corpus”: a pipeline that obtains the data then processes and parses it into a standard format. This makes the corpus available for teaching and research purposes, providing the first such resource for empirical analysis of video game dialogue.
This paper outlines a new method for identifying folk intuitions to complement armchair intuiting and experimental philosophy (X-Phi), and thereby enrich the philosopher’s toolkit. This new approach—trope analysis—depends not on what people report their intuitions to be but rather on what they have made and engaged with; I propose that tropes in fiction (‘you can’t change the past’, ‘a foreknown future isn’t free’ and so forth) reveal which theories, concepts and ideas we find intuitive, repeatedly and en masse. Imagination plays a dual role in both existing methods and this new approach: it enables us to create the scenarios that elicit our intuitions, and also to mentally represent them. The method I propose allows us to leverage the imagination of the many rather than the few on both counts—scenarios are both created and consumed by the folk themselves.
Causal loops are a recurring feature in the philosophy of time travel, where it is generally agreed that they are logically possible but may come with a theoretical cost. This paper introduces an unfamiliar set of causal loop cases involving knowledge or beliefs about the future: self-fulfilling prophecy loops (SFP loops). I show how and when such loops arise and consider their relationship to more familiar causal loops
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