Chapter I: Embodied Metaphor, Embodied Simulation, and Mapping Typologies Mapping Typologies
2. Background
3.3. Embodied Simulation
3.3.5. Co-occurrence-based-mapping typology and Embodied Simulation Simulation
“people” is used 1402 times in Steam and 10467 times in Ummah. Our selection from the Ummah forum is much bigger than from Steam, so we definitely need to normalize the frequencies to compare them. “people” has a normalized frequency of 0.367 in Steam and 0.452 in Ummah, which makes the difference less dramatic, so how often the word “people”
is used in an arbitrary excerpt in Steam is not really so different from an arbitrary excerpt with the same length in Ummah.
In the list of words that are in both Steam (f1) and Ummah (f2) with an order sorted in descending order by the f1/f2 NGTF ratio, many of the words on the top are associated with the contents and technique of the computer game “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive”
(CS:GO). f1/f2 NGTF ratios are mentioned in parentheses after every following mentioning of word from a forum.
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“players” (630.4), “competitive” (480.3), “rounds” (160.9), “clan” (152.4), “game” (122.4),
“shots” (78.3), “tutorial” (38.6) are examples of game-content related words. The f1/f2 NGTF ratios are very exaggerated (they become much larger) compared to the f1/f2 GTF ratios because the selection from the Ummah (f2) forum is much larger than from the Steam forum (f1). Players are very essential for a game, especially a multiplayer game, and this game seems to be of the competitive kind. Players cooperate in teams and compete against other teams. “clan” refers in f1 to small player teams, while it refers to different kinds of larger groups of people in f2.
Table 17: Words in Steam (f1) and Ummah (f2) with 30 highest f1/f2 NGTF ratios
Word
“('Steam', '9_t29_p1', 'CS:GO Clan League', 'Hello, I am a frequent player and user of the CS:GO community, and I have a small clan of 6 people that I belong too. We
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(AVLNCANADA) were thinking about a concept of a small-league competitive mode. You sign up with your clan, and have games with other clans that register. The map is picked for you, and it plays like any other competitive match, except that you can track your progress, schedule games, and challenge other clans. No money rewards, just fun. Leaderboards, ranks, all that good stuff. What do you guys think? Thanks Chrome', 'ChromeXu', '19 hours ago')”
“clan” is here even used more than once in the same message, also as the plural “clans”, which is not counted as “clan” in our statistics, but as an own word, since we have not implemented stemming or lemmatizing.
“CS:GO” is a shooting game, as we can see from the use of “shots”. Of course no one is hurt or killed for real in a computer game. It is another story with the extremist forum, where the discussed shots appear to be real. The gamers seem to be preoccupied by “score” in the game than the extremists (f1/f2 NGTF ratio: 42.86).
When we look at more technical terms, we see that “mac” has 112.8 times higher normalized frequency in f1 than in f2 (in reality used 18.6 times more). In the game forum, “mac” refers to Apple’s computer brand Mac(intosh), while in the extreme Islamist forum it is the
company Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation with the nickname “Freddie Mac”, Mac trucks, MAC address in a computer network, and sometimes also Apple’s computer brand Mac. Other technical terms which are much more used in f1 are “auto” (which refers to some kind of automatic functionality), “mouse” (computer mouse), “hardware”, “controller”,
“crashes”/”crashing”, and “isp” (Internet Service Provider).
The abbreviation “thx” for “thanks” has a 78.2 higher NGTF value in Steam, and is in reality used 12.9 times more. The probable reason is that the latter group does not have so many situations in its forums where thanking for an answer fits to the context. There may be more questions about how things work in Steam, while there are more utterings of personal meanings in Ummah. Hence, there are not so many suitable situations for thanking in the latter forum.
Noteworthy is that the word “complains” has a f1/f2 NGTF ratio of 64.8. “ban” has a corresponding value of 33.5. The plural “bans” is a unique word for Steam. Actually, there seems to be some kind of connection between “complains” and “bans” like in the following excerpts from a forum thread:
Line 66171:
“('Steam', '12_t11_p1', 'I hate this bans system', 'GOD WHY ?! Valve make somthing', 'damQworld', '3 hours ago')”
Line 66172:
“('Steam', '12_t11_p1', 'Comment', 'IT WORKS FINE. Please stop all the complains about bans.', 'Toraqi', '2 hours ago ')”
Line 66173:
“('Steam', '12_t11_p1', 'Comment', 'the only people who hate it are the ones getting bans', 'generatedname', '2 hours ago ')”
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Here “complains” is a misspelling of “complaints”, which shows that one cannot trust that forum authors always write correctly.
When we sort the words by f2/f1 NGTF, we find the words “life” (NGTF ratio 8.4, GTF ratio: 51.1), “www” (7.94, 48.2), “brother” (6.2, 37.3), “book” (6, 36.2), “god” (4.9, 29.5),
“wife” (5.1), “country” (2.4, 14.7), “eat” (2.4, 14.7), “happy” (2.5, 15.1), “friends” (1.9, 11.8).
Table 18: Words in Steam (f1) and Ummah (f2) with 30 highest f2/f1 NGTF ratios
Word
GTF ratio (f2/f1)
NGTF ratio (f2/f1)
NGTF-IDF ratio (f2/f1)
life 51.1 8.4 4.9
www 48.2 7.9 4.5
brother 37.3 6.2 3.5
book 36.2 6.0 4.6
forum 32.4 5.3 3.2
day 31.5 5.2 2.9
wife 30.8 5.1 3.3
god 29.5 4.9 3.8
look 27.1 4.5 2.9
person 26.9 4.4 2.7
world 25.5 4.2 3.0
posted 21.0 3.5 1.3
originally 20.3 3.3 1.3
mercy 19.2 3.2 2.5
mind 17.6 2.9 2.1
month 17.2 2.8 2.3
learn 16.7 2.8 2.0
course 16.0 2.6 1.9
happy 15.1 2.5 1.9
power 15.0 2.5 2.1
little 14.7 2.4 1.8
country 14.7 2.4 2.0
eat 14.6 2.4 2.0
sent 13.5 2.2 1.8
act 12.9 2.1 1.8
killed 12.3 2.0 1.9
giving 12.2 2.0 1.5
head 12.2 2.0 1.7
friends 11.8 1.9 1.6
goes 11.7 1.9 1.5
For the forums Steam (f1) and Ummah (f2), the f2/f1 NGTF ratio values are understated because f2 is much bigger than f1. One can notice that many of the words are from daily life.
The Steam forum is only centred around the game “CS:GO”, and nothing (or very little) from
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the gamers’ life outside the game is mentioned. At the same time, the messages in Ummah may have a lot of sometimes hidden references to their ideology, but the visible content still can sometimes be related to daily life situations. In the following example, the chase for making a career and trying to become wealthy is accused of being the reason that people give up values like (religious) faith, family, and friends (example from line 83211):
“('Ummah', '160947-it-s-almost-mother-s-day-O-what-should-i-buy-my-mummy', 'it''s almost mother''s day :O what should i buy my mummy??', 'We live in a world full of people
struggling to improve their lifestyle. A world filled with greed, selfishness, and conceit, where every man is more than willing to give up all his values, faith, family and friends to acquire wealth. We find ourselves lost and stuck in the midst of people unable to comprehend death, let alone life after death. To whom success is that of this world, where there is no creator to answer to nor lifestyle to adopt. A life similar to that of a dark road leading nowhere. Allah (SWT) has blessed us with the light of iman and the lifestyle of Rasulullah sallahu alaihi wasallam as the road to success. A life of tranquility, simplicity and preparation for the never-ending life. (…)', 'MMS', '23-02-08, 04:01 PM')”
The words “please”, “post”, “hour”, “account”, “sign”, “care”, “follow”, “page”,
“download”, “discussion” have approximately 1 as NGTF ratio, so they are equally significant in both forums.
These words seem to be mainly related to normal usage of an online forum.
When we look at which words that make Ummah different from Steam (Ummah words that are not in Steam), we find many religious words such as “allah”, “prophet”, “muslim”, but we also find some everyday words like “night”, “knowledge”, “woman”, “marriage, “wrong”,
“word”, “husband”, and so on.
Our analysis program could not find any words that make Steam (CS:GO) differ from Ummah.