214 research outputs found

    Performing Both Sides of the Glass: Videogame Affordances and Live Streaming on Twitch

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    This thesis examines the performative dimensions videogame affordances assume within online, live streaming environments. This approach considers how streamers configure their videogame play in terms of a potential audience, drawing on five semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Australian-based Twitch streamers to analyse how streamers leverage videogame affordances to produce “meaningful moments”. Guiding this thesis is the question of how the player-videogame relationship is maintained, fractured or altered within live-streaming environments such as Twitch

    Transgressive Positivity in Four Online Multiplayer Games

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    Online games have a reputation for toxicity. Forms of play that have been theorized as transgressive from the perspective of idealized play have become highly normalized within the toxic space of online gaming. In this context, positivity in online gaming takes on a transgressive quality that challenges the common behaviours, the norms of communication, and their underlying ideologies found within online gaming communities. Through an ethnography of four massively multiplayer online game spaces - DOTA 2, Lost Ark, Destiny 2, and World of Warcraft - this project examines the effects of positivity in play on others who share these game worlds to consider ways that positivity might be leveraged to impact gaming’s toxic culture. Positivity is approached through different scales, from smaller individual actions like friendly greetings and helpful gestures not often seen in these particular games, to larger community formations that promote positivity and inclusivity within these gaming communities. This study finds that positivity across these scales produces substantial and proportional resistance to positive deviations from the toxic norms within these games and their linked community sites. Players actively trying to resist toxicity through positivity add varying levels of labor to their leisure and are frequent targets for harassment, leading to burnout or self-exclusion from these online games. Transgressive positivity in online play can produce alternatives to self-exclusion from gaming by producing ephemeral connections and networks of support between players. Enclaves built on positivity can form, but they are always under threat when they intersect with the mainstream culture across each of these four games. Ultimately, there are severe systemic issues within these communities - reinforced by trends within the games industry and in online game design - that undercut player-led positivity initiatives. While positivity can be a useful strategy for some to connect with others and to persist in spite of these toxic environments, positivity’s transgressive quality in online play produces substantial vulnerability for those who actively pursue it as a strategy of resistance or cultural intervention

    Making friends with failure in STS

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    Preemie Care: A Co-designed Digital Tool to Improve Communication Between Health Personnel and Parents of Preterm Infants

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    Communication between parents and health providers is essential in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) settings to ensure both parties collaborate in infant care. However, in most NICUs, the interaction between parents and NICU staff is strained, thus hindering communication. These communication challenges are due to language, medical vocabulary and cultural barriers between NICU staff and mothers. These challenges create communication gaps, which disempower parents and frustrate health staff. To bridge NICU communication gaps, several researchers have deployed digital health interventions. However, although the existing NICU technologies have effectively improved NICU communication, most parents struggle to interact with these interventions because they do not fit parents' technical and literacy capabilities. These design gaps arise because parents were not fully included in the design process of the existing NICU digital interventions. In this research, we sought to address the communication gaps within the NICU environment by employing a co-design approach to develop a digital intervention that supports infant care journey in a low-resource NICU setting. The co-design process included six research phases that spanned over 32 months. We engaged mothers of premature infants and NICU staff throughout this process while focusing on identifying how best to involve NICU stakeholders in a codesign process to ensure that the final intervention was usable and useful. The co-design process led to the development of MoM connect workflow which was disqualified by mothers and NICU staff because it did not meet mothers' needs. We further engaged NICU stakeholders in the co-design process and agreed on developing Preemie Care (PMC) system, an educational resource tool that disseminated digital health videos in multiple languages and through multiple technologies to empower parents and NICU staff to work together and advocate for their preterm infants. PMC system was deployed at Groote Schuur NICU for eight months where we interacted with users and monitored it usage logs to evaluate its efficacy. Our empirical evidence revealed that access to health information improved parents and their social networks medical vocabulary, thus empowering them to engage with their peers and NICU staff. We also learned that sharing health information in multiple languages does not resolve the language barriers among multilingual NICU parents. Instead, our results show that bilingual parents prefer accessing health information in multiple languages to improve their medical vocabulary and understandability, thus empowering them to engage in their infants' health care and decision-making. Hence, this research provides the design mechanisms for a NICU intervention to bridge communication gaps between bilingual parents and NICU staff. This work contributes to the field of Human-Computer Interaction(HCI) by highlighting the ethical and methodological considerations to engage NICU stakeholders interacting in a sensitive NICU setting in a collaborative co-design process. We also contribute to HCI knowledge by providing design mechanisms for a NICU intervention meant to bridge communication gaps between bilingual parents and NICU staff in a low-resource setting and design features of a digital NICU intervention that enhance family-centred care in the NICU setting

    Coloring in the void: Absurdity and contemporary art

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    Boo Boo Bird is a song, or a poem perhaps, or a song and a poem, by the Scottish poet, songwriter and humorist Ivor Cutler. This wistful ballad describes the plight and flight of a mythical bird, the Boo Boo bird. What we discover through the song is that the Boo Boo bird has no defining features, in fact — it has no features at all. The Boo Boo bird is invisible and recognized only by its call: ‘boo boo, boo boo’. The repetition of the word is important, and the absurdity of the invisible bird is amplified by its childish double name; boo boo, like an infant’s first attempts at vocalization, or that informal way of referring to a failure, a mistake, a booboo. There is something haunting about the way Cutler sings to this impossible creature and it is this element which makes the work so compelling; that it can be simultaneously ridiculous and also very moving.1 It straddles a certain border between irony and sincerity. And it is this border, or rather the oscillation between the states of irony and sincerity and between falling and failing, that features in the works discussed within this chapter, tracing a line between things and what is at the outermost edge of things, namely, the void

    Towards Spatial Porosity: Revisiting the Contemporary American Campus Novel

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    Η παρούσα διατριβή αποτελεί μέρος ενός ανοιχτού διαλόγου στις Ανθρωπιστικές Επιστήμες για τη μελέτη του χώρου ως διεπιστημονικό ζήτημα. Συγκεκριμένα, το παρόν πόνημα ασχολείται με τη λογοτεχνική παρουσία του Αμερικανικού Ακαδημαϊκού Μυθιστορήματος στη σύγχρονη Αμερικανική Λογοτεχνία. Υποστηρίζω ότι η Αμερικανική Πανεπιστημιούπολη στα μυθιστορήματα που εξετάζω δε συνάδει με το στερεότυπο του αποκομμένου από την κοινωνική πραγματικότητα χώρου όπου η υψηλή διανόηση αρνείται να ανοίξει δίοδο επικοινωνίας με τον έξω κόσμο. Αντιθέτως, πιστεύω πως η Αμερικανική Πανεπιστημιούπολη παρουσιάζεται σαν ένα πορώδες οικοδόμημα το οποίο επιτρέπει την αλληλεπίδραση κοινωνίας-πανεπιστημίου και καταγράφει τις κοινωνικοπολιτικές εντάσεις κάθε ιστορικής περιόδου. Η αμερικανική πανεπιστημιούπολη, στα μυθιστορήματα αυτά, βρίσκεται σε συνεχή διαπραγμάτευση με τον κόσμο που βρίσκεται πέρα από τα τείχη της ακαδημαϊκής κοινότητας και χρησιμεύει ως φωλιά για νέες ιδέες που βρίσκουν το δρόμο τους πίσω στην κοινωνία. Η αναπαράσταση της αμερικανικής πανεπιστημιούπολης στη λογοτεχνία υπογραμμίζει το γεγονός ότι παρόλο που οι χωρικές πρακτικές της πανεπιστημιούπολης εμποτίζονται από την κυρίαρχη ιδεολογία, οι χαρακτήρες που κινούνται σε αυτόν τον χώρο γράφουν τις δικές τους ιστορίες στο χώρο, επιτρέποντας έτσι μια επανεξέταση της ακαδημαϊκής κοινότητας που απομακρύνεται από την στερεοτυπική της εικόνα. Αυτή η συνεχής αλληλεπίδραση του πανεπιστημιακού χώρου με την κοινωνία καθίσταται εφικτή μέσω της διαπερατότητας των πανεπιστημιακών τειχών, η οποία αναλύεται στην παρούσα διατριβή μέσω της αναλογίας της με τη διαπερατότητα της κυτταρικής μεμβράνης, μία αναλογία που ακολουθεί ο Richard Sennett για να μιλήσει για την ανοιχτή, πορώδη πόλη. Μεθοδολογικά η διατριβή κινείται στο χώρο της Λογοτεχνίας αλλά και της Αρχιτεκτονικής Θεωρίας. Ειδικότερα, εκτός από τη θεωρία του Sennett για την πορώδη πόλη μεταξύ άλλων χρησιμοποιώ τη θεωρία των Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau και Gaston Bachelard. Ο διεπιστημονικός χαρακτήρας αυτής της έρευνας υπογραμμίζει τη σχέση μεταξύ της λογοτεχνικής παραγωγής του Ακαδημαϊκού Μυθιστορήματος και ζητημάτων χωροταξίας και εξουσίας σε αυτό το εξαιρετικά ξεχωριστό αμερικανικό μέρος, την Πανεπιστημιούπολη.This dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the humanities concerning the study of space as an interdisciplinary endeavor. In particular, my work explores the literary presence of the American University Campus in contemporary American literature. Collectively, the novels in this study articulate the fact that the American Campus—its space, its architecture, the relationships developed within it but also those with the surrounding community—not only registers but also produces social dynamics. I contend that the American Campus in the novels examined is not an Ivory Tower that stands aside from society but a porous space that allows interaction with society and promptly registers the tensions that affect each era. In literature and architecture porosity in space has been likened to porosity in nature with many sociologists and architects borrowing from Biology and contending that porosity is a critical feature for the viability of an organism since it functions at once as a boundary that keeps the identity of the organism and as a sieve that helps in the interaction with the surrounding environment. Expanding on this analogy I will be analyzing the porous quality of campus space as it is represented in the contemporary American campus novel. The American campus is in constant negotiation with the world that lies beyond the walls of academia, and it serves as a nest for new ideas that find their way back to society. The representation of the American Campus in literature underlines the fact that even though campus spatial practices are imbued by the dominant ideology, the characters moving in this space write their own spatial stories, thus allowing for a reconsideration of academia that moves away from its traditional image of the unyielding Ivory Tower. Methodologically, Towards the Porous Campus: The Contemporary American Campus Novel moves through socio-spatial situations and fictional Campuses in an interdisciplinary manner borrowing from architecture and theories of space. More specifically among others I am using Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard and Richard Sennett’s theory of the porous city. The interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry highlights the interrelationship between the literary production of the Campus Novel and issues of spatiality and power in this highly distinctive American place, the Campus

    Level Up: Supporting In-Game Skill Development

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    Video games are challenging and complex. They require players to master a diverse set of skills to succeed. Through play, players acquire and eventually master these skills, transitioning from novice to expert through skill development. Making progress and performing well in a game is directly tied to a player's ability to master in-game skills, so players are strongly motivated to get better at the games they play. Games can do a good job of supporting a new player's learning, but too often they leave a player to work out for themselves how to improve and get better at the game. The problem is that game designers do not always know how to support skill development in their games. To solve this problem, we need to better understand how skill learning occurs in games, as well as explore specific new approaches for supporting skill learning in games. Games are not the only context in which skill development and high performance is important --- the field of human performance already explores this in detail and provides many theories to apply to this new domain. Inspired by these theories I explore different ways of supporting players’ learning at two different stages of skill development. First, I explore how early learning can be supported through the use of guidance and explore how later learning can be supported by modifying practice. Testing out the effects of guidance by providing new players with different levels of navigation guidance and evaluating how well they were able to learn the environment, I found that guidance improved a player's immediate performance and allowed them to complete tasks within the game more effectively. I evaluated the idea of modifying practice by applying spaced practice (having players take breaks when playing) in two different games, as well as by adding checkpoints to a side-scrolling platform game. I found that having players take breaks improved players' immediate performance and allowed them to make more progress within the game and that a variety of break lengths were effective. I found that checkpoints allowed players to make progress in the game and learn the game just as effectively as when checkpoints were not present. Overall, this research adds to our understanding of how skill development occurs in games and provides some concrete examples of how support methods used in other contexts (such as in sports) can be applied to digital gaming

    Walking away from VR as ‘empathy-machine’: peripatetic animations with 360-photogrammetry

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    My research partakes in an expanded documentary practice that weaves together walking, immersive technologies, and moving image. Two lines of enquiry motivate the research journey: the first responds to the trope of VR as 'empathy-machine' (Milk, 2015), often accompanied by the expression 'walking in someone else's shoes'. Within a research project that begins on foot, the idiom’s significance demands investigation. The second line of enquiry pursues a collaborative artistic practice informed by dialogue and poetry, where the bipedals of walking and the binaries of the digital are entwined by phenomenology, hauntology, performance, and the in-betweens of animation. My practice-as-research methodology involves desk study, experimentation with VR, AR, digital photogrammetry, and CGI animation. Central to my approach is the multifaceted notion of Peripatos ̶ as a school of philosophy, a stroll-like walk, and the path where the stroll takes place ̶ manifested both corporeally and as 'playful curiosity'. The thread that interweaves practice and theory has my body-moving in the centre; I call it the ‘camera-walk’: a processional shoot that documents a real place and the bodies that make it, while my hand holds high a camera-on-a-stick shooting 360-video. The resulting spherical video feeds into photogrammetric digital processing, and reassembles into digital 3D models that form the starting ground for still images, a site-specific installation, augmented reality (AR) exchanges, and short films. Because 360-video includes the body that carries the camera, the digital meshes produced by the ‘camera-walk’ also reveal the documentarian during the act of documenting. Departing from the pursuit of perfect replicas, my research articulates the iconic lineage of photogrammetry, embracing imperfections as integral. Despite the planned obsolescence of my digital instruments, I treat my 360-camera as a ‘dangerous tool’, uncovering (and inventing) its hidden virtualities, via Vilém Flusser. Against its formative intentions as an accessory for extreme sports, I focus on everyday life, and become inspired by Harun Farocki’s ‘another kind of empathy’. Within the collaborative projects presented within my thesis, I move away from the colonialist-inspired ideal of ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’, and ‘tread softly’ along the footsteps of my co-walkers
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