Search results for ""Author Leighton Evans""

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 trend with antisocial behaviour, mental health-related problems, and the interference of family life. Yet, recent studies have demonstrated that the intergenerational play of video games can in fact strengthen familial connections by facilitating communication between adults, and children, and allowing adolescents to experiment with a range of roles. Research on intergeneration play, however, has tended to focus on video games played within the domestic sphere. In contrast, Locative games, such as Pokémon Go involve players physically interacting and moving through their surroundings. Through an original study of Pokémon Go this book extends developing research on intergenerational play to the field of locative games.

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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 in a digital place that combines various aspects of digital culture. Likewise, digital worlds for socializing already exist, and in a form akin to the VR metaverse, just as VR worlds based on play now coexist with online worlds of user generated content. These discreet private “microverses”, as we refer to them, are spaces which can model the tensions that would be inherent in the metaverse. From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds examines the place attachments, world-feeling and dwelling of several “microverses” to assess the possibilities of the metaverse as a realistic proposition. Critically analyzing the phenomenological feeling of place, the political economy of emerging tech, the mechanisms of identity and self along with the behavioral constraints involved, the authors map what a metaverse might be like, whether it can happen, and just why some companies seem so determined to make it happen.

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