Zoekresultaten

Design Concepts for Empowerment through Urban Play

Playfulness intertwined with city-related themes, such as participatory planning and civic media are becoming more popular. In the last ten years, game designers have taken up the theme of play in relation to the urban environment. In this paper, we present a conceptual mapping of “urban play,” through the analysis of eight examples of urban games. Better conceptual tools are necessary to discuss and reflect on how games draw on, or deal with, urban issues. While urban games are diverse in medium, intent, and experience, across the spectrum analyzed in this paper, they hold the potential for various player experiences emerging through play that may be useful to designers. These are: a sense of agency and impact; feelings of relatedness and empathy; an awareness and understanding of complexity, perspective-taking and scenario-building, and either planning or taking action. The conceptual mapping offers scholars and practitioners a more nuanced vocabulary for designing games and playful interventions that might be used to tackle societal issues that either require or could benefit from genuine public involvement as engaged citizens.

Take root among the stars

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) have been available for several years now, but uptake has been slow so far. The objective of this study was to gain insight into preferences on anticipated use in the early phase of HMDs with augmented reality. A survey was conducted among Dutch students following a nursing or social work education (N=100). Results showed that almost nobody had ever used a HMD. The areas of high interest of anticipated use of HMDs lies especially in receiving information regarding emergencies via the HMD if something is happening close to people's physical location and news and general information about physical location. For potential use functionalities, the most interesting functions reported by respondents were using HMDs for hands-free calling and receiving information about their behavioral patterns with regard to movement. The attitudes towards receiving non-visible cues in social interaction such as detecting stress levels or mood were all reported with a negative attitude. More than half of the respondents reported to have an intention to use a HMD in the future.

The Book Fair Game: teaching international rights trading in a shared module

When preparing students for the industry’s global context, publishing degrees aim to provide them with experience of cooperating and doing business with colleagues internationally. In order to achieve this, Oxford Brookes University and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have designed a module on trading in translation rights that gives students both a theoretical framework and real-world insights into book fairs and intercultural collaboration.In this module, students of both universities work collaboratively in a game that simulates the trading of intellectual property rights at an international event designed to resemble a major book fair. They team up in international groups of five or six students that each represent a publishing company in order to prepare for and to participate in an event called the Oxdam Book Fair. Preparation for the fair involves the development of plans and appropriate materials to sell translation rights for the company’s titles and to buy rights to titles which fit the company’s profile and strategy. During the event students partake in several rounds of rights trading activities, including pitching, strategy meetings, making offers, and networking.In this proposed paper, that contributes to the best practices-strand of the conference, lecturers of Oxford Brookes University and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences will provide a ‘behind the scenes’-look at this collaborative module. They will talk about the simulation game that is the core of the module, provide background on the theoretical framework, address educational design challenges they encountered, and share outcomes of the collaborative module.

Critical meme reader II

The (political) power of memes has moved beyond virtual images. The distinction between the virtual and ‘real life’ no longer applies, or perhaps was never really there. Their effects (or should we say affects?) are moving through digital infrastructures, policy, regulations and bodies. If memes are used as a tool by the alt-right to mobilize people to storm the Capitol and play a substantial role in the Ukrainian war, can they also be used by the left to spark a revolution, as memetic warfare is more immediate and accessible than real-life demonstrations? What kind of labor would that require? What kind of tools and principles would we need? And what if memetic logics of spreading information were applied to spread progressive ideas for a possible future?

Games on Games. Game Design as Critical Reflexive Practice.

Business exist to help people flourish as human beings : Interview with Joe Pine about the rise of the transformation economy