Designing for a playful future:a review of how humorous play within the urban realm can make adult play a part of everyday life

Abstract. Everybody plays. It is a behaviour that is common to all people and indeed most species. A person’s inclination to play is dependant, not only on his mental and emotional state, but also on his surroundings. Despite our physiological separation from the rest of the evolving natural kingdom, our brains have scarcely evolved further than those of our hunter-gatherer forefathers. So often the playful side of adults is forgotten, un-nurtured and neglected, much to the detriment of public physical and mental health. In this ever-changing and fast-paced human society, we are constantly trying to avoid or subdue our primal instincts because we believe we are somehow different... “We are not animals”. We make our primal desire to be free and rampant something to be ashamed of, afraid of and even embarrassed by. This thesis discusses the importance of play with regard to mental health and how urban environments can be and become conducive to play in adults. It poses some ideas about how designers can provide opportunities for both active and fantasy play in transitional urban spaces that we use on a regular basis. The thesis addresses the issue of ‘what is play?’ by establishing a working definition of play in terms of an individual adult player and their surroundings. This definition then serves as the basis for evaluating how contemporary urban design uses a wide array of techniques and strategies to incorporate adult play within everyday life through literature review and case studies. Moreover, it tackles the concept of humour and identifies the benefits to encouraging communication of the self through humour and freedom of expression within the urban realm. These observations provide the basic structure for developing some design parameters which an architect or urban designer might utilise in designing spaces and environments that facilitate play and designing humour for playable cities in order to attain the ‘playful’ city

Location-based Virtual Reality experiences for children: Japan-UK knowledge exchange network final project report

This is the final project report for an AHRC/ESRC funded Uk-Japan network looking at location-based VR experiences for children. Location-based VR are site specific experiences that aim to bring together materials beyond those in the virtual space to carefully curate an experience for an audience who are likely to use the content only once or a few times. As a result, location-based VR experiences are emerging predominately in two areas; gaming arcades and museums/art galleries. The overall intention of this knowledge exchange (KE) project was to bring together a network of academics and digital gaming industry partners in Japan and the UK to join up knowledge, begin researching the current state of VR experiences and technologies, and to understand the best methodologies for including children in the design of VR experiences for them. This was undertaken so that this knowledge can be applied to areas in which VR is evolving for children, such as entertainment, education and health care

Complementary Layered Learning

Layered learning is a machine learning paradigm used to develop autonomous robotic-based agents by decomposing a complex task into simpler subtasks and learns each sequentially. Although the paradigm continues to have success in multiple domains, performance can be unexpectedly unsatisfactory. Using Boolean-logic problems and autonomous agent navigation, we show poor performance is due to the learner forgetting how to perform earlier learned subtasks too quickly (favoring plasticity) or having difficulty learning new things (favoring stability). We demonstrate that this imbalance can hinder learning so that task performance is no better than that of a suboptimal learning technique, monolithic learning, which does not use decomposition. Through the resulting analyses, we have identified factors that can lead to imbalance and their negative effects, providing a deeper understanding of stability and plasticity in decomposition-based approaches, such as layered learning. To combat the negative effects of the imbalance, a complementary learning system is applied to layered learning. The new technique augments the original learning approach with dual storage region policies to preserve useful information from being removed from an agent’s policy prematurely. Through multi-agent experiments, a 28% task performance increase is obtained with the proposed augmentations over the original technique

Designing the Metaverse

The Metaverse, a term coined in science fiction, is now being discussed seriously as a new form of infrastructure. The Metaverse is intended to make possible thematically interconnected immersive experiences. In this paper, we conceptualize the Metaverse as a meta design space. Within this space, designers create various interconnected design spaces. We highlight how the key dimensions of human experience (time, space, actors, and artifacts) each introduce tensions for making decisions in those design spaces, and we highlight the transitions between design spaces. This conceptual language opens up this novel and emergent phenomenon both to those wishing to design new disruptive technolo-gies and those seeking to improve existing platform strategies. We conclude by highlighting how the Metaverse will not only comprise immersive virtual experiences but also transitions between physical and virtual experiences

Procedural content generation in gaming via evolutionary algorithms

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceThe aim of this thesis is to investigate the possibility of creating content using the Genetic Algorithms. To this end a simple system of interconnected algorithms were developed using concepts from Role Playing Games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons to create game content as characters, quests, and encounters. To be able to produce context, subsystems of map, character, quest, and encounter generators were created. These systems or engines not only define the game space to be populated, but they also provide each other input to create maps, quests, locations, animals, and events that are sensible and coherent. Randomness of the generation was essential as such a variety of noise maps and random number generation were added to every engine in the system. Layered or singular noise maps allowed for logical assumptions to be made, like seeing camels in a location with no rain and high temperatures. With the base truth coming from a random noise map such as danger, civilisation, faction etc., each system built on top of each other can get more complex. There are several Genetic Algorithms with custom operators within the system. These algorithms take their inputs and individuals from the respective engines and tie them all to each other through their physical coordinates in the gaming space. The most impactful part of these algorithms is the Fitness Functions defined with concepts from literature or CGI. The proposed system can populate a game space with elements of desired attributes given the constraints. The output produced consists of coherently tied story beats with some attributes already set. Even in this simple level, this can allow not only game designers but anyone who wants to build any kind of fictional work

Sugu mängudes – metodoloogia ja analüüs

Väitekirja elektrooniline versioon ei sisalda publikatsiooneIsegi tänapäeval peetakse mängimist sageli laste ja noormeeste nišitegevuseks. Samas on videomängudest saanud üks kasumlikemaid meelelahutusvorme: 2019. aastal mängis videomänge üle 2,5 miljardi inimese üle maailma. Kuigi videomänge käsitatakse peamiselt meeste hobina, on mängimine tegelikult pea sama atraktiivne nii mees- kui naismängurite jaoks. Kuna enamik inimesi on praeguseks osa mängukultuurist, isegi kui nad ei liigita end mängijateks, tõmbavad mängud üha rohkem teadlaste tähelepanu. Vaatamata suurenevale uurimistöö mahule on videomängude mängimine endiselt sageli häbimärgistatud. Mängukultuuri kritiseeritakse sageli sellele omistatud soolise kallutatuse, rassismi ja homofoobia pärast. Ka mänge endid ja nende kaudu edastatavaid soolisi suhteid peetakse sageli liialt pealispinnaliseks. Videomängud ei ole aga poliitiliselt neutraalsed artefaktid. Nad esitavad kultuurilisi väärtusi, norme ja tavasid, kuid ka panustavad nendesse. Teadlastel puuduvad aga endiselt metodoloogilised vahendid videomängude kui eraldiseisva meediumi analüüsimiseks ning viisid süstematiseerida, kuidas mängudes sugu esindatakse. Doktoritöö eesmärk ongi luua süsteemne metodoloogia soo uurimiseks mängudes, mis arvestaks videomängude kui mitmemõõtmelise meediumi eripärasid, kuid samas laenaks sisendit teiste meediumite uurimiseks loodud meetoditest. Selleks kombineerin humanitaarteaduste meetodeid (nt lähilugemine), sotsiaalteaduste, draamauuringute, soouuringute ning isegi majanduse ja õigusteaduse meetoditega. Viimased on aga kohandatud mängude tehniliste iseärasustega (reeglid, eesmärgid ja mehaanika). Selline mängude terviklik lugemine püüab ületada paljude varasemate mänguanalüüsi lähenemisviiside määramatust ja subjektiivsust. Doktoritöös võtan kasutusele termini „eelistatud mängimine“, mis on tugevalt mõjutatud Stuart Halli eelistatud lugemise ideest. Eelistatud mängimine tugineb vaikevalikutele ja muudele objektiivselt tuvastatavatele tunnustele, et tuvastada kõige tõenäolisem läbimängimisest tulenev tekst, mida saab sooliselt analüüsida. Kuigi kõnealune raamistik on mõeldud akadeemiliseks kasutamiseks, püüab see siiski mõjutada ka avalikku diskursust, pakkudes kolmemõõtmelist ülevaadet videomängudes esindatud soostEven today, gaming is often seen as a niche activity of children and young men. Video games, however, have become one of the most profitable entertainment media, with over 2.5 billion people worldwide playing video games in 2019. While deemed a predominantly male hobby, gaming is nearly equally attractive to female and male gamers. Most people are, by now, part of gaming culture, even if they would not classify themselves as gamers. This means that games are also attracting increasing scholarly attention. Despite the increasing research, video games still suffer from the stigma of being deemed “subcultural” and ultimately “not art”. Gaming culture is often criticized for its gender bias, racism and homophobia. Games themselves and the gender relations they communicate are also often perceived as lacking in depth. Video games, however, are not politically neutral artefacts. They present and contribute to the values, norms, and practices fostered by the culture they belong to. Researchers, however, still lack methodological approaches to analyze video games as a distinct medium and to systemize the ways in which games represent gender. This PhD thesis aims to create a holistic methodology to analyze gender in games that focuses on games as a uniquely multidimensional medium while building on the experience of other disciplines. I will combine humanities methods like close reading with methodologies from the social sciences, drama studies, gender studies and even economics and law. These are adapted to the technicalities and particularities of games, namely the fact that they have to be played and consist of game-specific rules, objectives and mechanics. This holistic reading of games tries to overcome the indeterminacy and subjectivity in many previous approaches to game analysis. I develop the term “preferred playing”, heavily influenced by Stuart Hall’s notion of preferred reading, that relies on default choices and other objectively identifiable features to identify the most likely text resulting from a playthrough, which in turn can then be analyzed in terms of gender. While this framework is intended for academic use, it also strives to influence public discourse by providing three-dimensional insights into gender in video games and betterhttps://www.ester.ee/record=b552405

Under the Hood: An (Auto) Ethnographic Study of How White Adolescent Males Critically Engage with Race in Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) is emblematic of the public controversies that associate video games with violence, misogyny, and damaging depictions of race and gender. However, it is also a layered referential and self-reflexive text that roundly critiques US culture, including the pernicious complicity of media on issues of identity. GTA V is the third best selling video game in history, and primarily targets white adolescent males, but its effects on the attitudes and behaviors of its chief consumers are virtually unstudied. Furthermore, the tendency for schools to keep controversial games at a distance may neglect a need to better equip adolescent boys with the tools to critically consume the complex media in which they are immersed. This doctoral dissertation employs a postcolonial lens and documents a month-long qualitative study where a high school class of ten white adolescent boys played GTA V while in a formal instructional context that encouraged them to critically reflect on their gameplay. Although they viewed the game through the lenses of gender, masculinities, violence, and hegemony, my research specifically reports on how they engaged with representations of race and racialized places in the elaborate urban simulation. The participants were positioned as co-researchers and trained in basic ethnographic methods, and the fieldnotes and filmed videos of their play were synthesized in autoethnographic accounts of their experiences. Data was also gathered from pre- and post-surveys, filmed classroom sessions, a private Facebook group, the counter-hegemonic media they produced, and their notes and videos. The investigation revealed that participants naturalized racial stereotypes and problematic connections of race and place. And, the instructional approach was found to provoke a greater awareness about discriminatory depictions of race in the game and, in some cases, media at large. Some also become aware of their own tendencies to appropriate commodified forms of blackness. Finally, their discourse and views were found to be largely shaped by media, highlighting the need for a greater emphasis on media literacy in schools