Revisiting the Twentieth Century Through the Lens of Generation X and Digital Games: A Scoping Review

Video games have been around since the 1960s and have impacted upon society in a myriad of different ways. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify existing literature within the domain of video games which recruited participants from the Generation X (1965–1980) cohort. Six databases were searched (ACM, CINHAL Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science) focusing on published journal papers between 1970 and 2000. Search results identified 3186 articles guided by the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR); 4 papers were irretrievable, 138 duplicated papers were removed, leaving 3048 were assessed for eligibility and 3026 were excluded. Articles (n = 22) were included into this review, with four papers primarily published in 1997 and in 1999. Thematic analysis identified five primary themes: purpose and objectives, respective authors’ reporting, technology, ethics and environment) and seven secondary themes: populations, type of participants (e.g. children, students), ethical approval, study design, reimbursement, language, type of assessments. This scoping review is distinctive because it primarily focuses on Generation X, who have experienced and grown-up with videogames, and contributes to several disciplines including: game studies, gerontology and health, and has wider implications from a societal, design and development perspective of video games

Sensory threads: perceiving the imperceptible

We perceive just a tiny proportion of the phenomena that surround us everyday. Sensory Threads is a technologically mediated collective sensing expedition which allows people to explore imperceptible phenomena in the world around them. We present a description of the technical system and reflect on our design decisions. Key questions we are concerned with centre around how to represent imperceptible phenomena in real time both inside a building, and outside, and how to engender a sense of collective engagement. We also consider the value created through the multi-disciplinary work involved in constructing such an experience

Sensory threads

Sensory Threads is a pair of interlinked experiences, which explore the way in which sensing can give us insight into how our bodies are a part of their wider environment. Sensory Threads seeks to investigate what happens when wearables move beyond being technologies designed for individuals and are transformed into tools of ‘collective sensing'. It aims to stimulate participants' behaviours through their own emergent and unpredictable actions in an environment, not by pre-defined choices determined in advance by the project's makers or by ‘interesting' geographic sites. This article describes the design of this artwork, which is currently in prototype form

Let’s jam the reactable: peer learning during musical improvisation with a tabletop tangible interface

There has been little research on how interactions with tabletop and Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) by groups of users change over time. In this article, we investigate the challenges and opportunities of a tabletop tangible interface based on constructive building blocks. We describe a long-term lab study of groups of expert musicians improvising with the Reactable, a commercial tabletop TUI for music performance. We examine interaction, focusing on interface, tangible, musical, and social phenomena. Our findings reveal a practice-based learning between peers in situated contexts, and new forms of participation, all of which is facilitated by the Reactable's tangible interface, if compared to traditional musical ensembles. We summarise our findings as a set of design considerations and conclude that construction processes on interactive tabletops support learning by doing and peer learning, which can inform constructivist approaches to learning with technology