Intergenerational Locative Play

Intergenerational Locative Play: Augmenting Family examines the social, spatial and physical impact of the hybrid reality game (HRG) Pokémon Go on the relationship between parents and their children.

This book explores how smart cities enable new and playful ways for citizens to experience, inhabit and socialise within urban environments. It examines how the functionality of digital technologies within municipal settings can extend beyond environmental pragmatism and socio-economic concerns, to include playful approaches to urban spaces that co-constitute and reinvigorate the experience of place through location-based applications and games. Chapters highlight the varied ways the city, as both a conceptual and lived space, is changing because of this confluence of technologies. The book also considers the extent to which these transformations form an armature upon which more playful approaches to the urban domain are emerging, while exploring what effect these ludic formations might have on related understandings of sociability. Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of information technology, urban planning and design, games and interactive media, human-centred and user-centred design, human centred interaction, digital geography and sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Behaviour & Information Technology.

This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to locative media, concentrating on specific authors and practitioners whose works exist in print and digital manifestations. The book shapes the discourse for an extensive theorization of locative media works from a narrative perspective. It investigates how different genres ⸺ print novels, fictional and non-fictional locative narratives, locative games, and audio texts ⸺ are affected by locative media practice. Part I examines print manifestations of locative media in William Gibson’s fiction. Part II discusses e-book and audio book locative narrative experimentations, suggesting ways to create and categorize locative texts. Drawing on hypertext theory, Part III views Niantic locative games as an instantiation of locative media storytelling practice that challenges digital narrativity. This study captures a transition from a print-based textuality to a digital locative textuality and culture, and proposes flexible innovative models of interpreting narrative textual forms emerging from the convergence of locative and narrative media. ​

The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts: Histories Approaches Thematic Considerations. The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social change, as well as production and access to information and knowledge. This volume considers new developments, and highlights the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the study of the human condition and the social processes in which media are entangled. This is an indispensable teaching resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and an essential text for scholars working across the areas that media anthropology engages with, including anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, internet and communication studies, and science and technology studies.

From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds analyzes the political economy of emerging tech with the mechanisms of identity and behavioral constraints involved to map what a metaverse might be like, whether it can happen, and just why some companies seem so determined to make it happen.

A collection of engaging essays on some of the most significant figures in cyberpunk culture, this outstanding guide charts the rich and varied landscape of cyberpunk from the 1970s to present day. The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of ‘Honorable Mentions’ to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk. This accessible guide will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, film studies, literature, media studies, as well as anyone with an interest in cyberpunk culture and science fiction.

Pokémon Go is not just play—the game has had an impact on public spaces, social circles and technology, suggesting new ways of experiencing our world. This collection of new essays explores what Pokémon Go can tell us about how and why we play. Covering a range of topics from mobile hardware and classroom applications to social conflict and urban planning, the contributors approach Pokémon Go from both practical and theoretical angles, anticipating the impact play will have on our digitally augmented world.

Smart Spaces combines the study of working or living spaces with computing, information equipment, and multimodal sensing devices, and with natural and convenient interactive interfaces to support how people can easily obtain services from computer systems. People's work and life in smart spaces use computer systems; it is a process of uninterrupted interaction between people and the computer system. In this process, the computer is no longer just an information processing tool that passively executes explicit human operation commands but a collaborator with people to complete tasks – a partner to human beings. International research on smart spaces is quite extensive, which shows the important role of smart spaces in ubiquitous computing research. Smart Spaces covers the latest research concepts and technologies of smart spaces, providing technical personnel engaged in smart space related research and industries a more in-depth understanding of smart spaces. This book can be used as a reference for practicing the emerging discipline of Smart Spaces, and will be useful for researchers, scientists, developers, practitioners, and graduate students working in the fields of smart spaces and artificial intelligence. Comprehensively introduces smart spaces, from basic concepts, core technologies, technical architecture, application scenarios, and other aspects Covers the latest cutting-edge application technology of smart spaces in various fields, providing relevant practitioners with ideas to solve problems and have a deeper understanding of smart spaces Serves as teaching material or as a reference for teachers and students of interaction design, internet of things, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and artificial intelligence Gives a detailed introduction to the theory of Smart Spaces and uses mathematical formulas