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 th...

While the metaverse is often marketed as a future utopia, the vision of the metaverse represents an attempt for private corporations to control the code of the real. In the hands of companies that established and maintain the surveillance capitalism model, the ability to build a persistent, all-compassing environment means all activity in that world can be metricized and commodified, making the metaverse worthy of critical examination.Significant parts of life are already conducted...

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.The ubiquity of digital media correlates with a mounting body of work that considers the part digital technologies, such as video games, play in the lives of children. Consequently, commentators have deliberated the effects of rising levels of screen time and the association of...

This book extends current understandings of the effects of using locative social media on spatiality, the experience of time and identity. This is a pertinent and timely topic given the increase in opportunities people now have to explicitly and implicitly share their location through digital and mobile technologies. There is a growing body of research on locative media, much of this literature has concentrated on spatial issues. Research here has explored how locative media and location-b...

The odyssey of a group of “refugees” from a closed-down online game and an exploration of emergent fan cultures in virtual worlds.Play communities existed long before massively multiplayer online games; they have ranged from bridge clubs to sports leagues, from tabletop role-playing games to Civil War reenactments. With the emergence of digital networks, however, new varieties of adult play communities have appeared, most notably within online games and virtual wor...

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the...

In the few decades since they first blipped their way onto television screens, videogames have become one of the most culturally, socially and economically significant media forms. Newman’s volume considers how we might approach videogames as media texts to be read, experiences to be played and played with, systems and simulations to be decoded and interrogated, and performances to be captured, codified and preserved.The updated second edition examines the emergence of new platform...

This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume.Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Gensh...

What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book:Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbo...

An Introduction to Game Studies is the first introductory textbook for students of game studies. It provides a conceptual overview of the cultural, social and economic significance of computer and video games and traces the history of game culture and the emergence of game studies as a field of research.Key concepts and theories are illustrated with discussion of games taken from different historical phases of game culture. Progressing from the simple, yet engaging gameplay of Pong...

Video games are becoming culturally dominant. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life.Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. Drawing on new and original empirical data – inc...

The discipline of fan studies is famously undisciplined. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t structured. This is the first comprehensive primer for classroom use that shows students how to do fan studies in practical terms. With contributions from a range of established and emerging scholars, coeditors Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams pull together case studies that demonstrate the wide array of methodologies available to fan studies scholars, such as auto/ethnography, immersion, interv...