Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemFinding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2018)Hobby board gaming is a serious leisure pastime that entails large commitments of time and energy. When serious hobby board gamers become parents, their opportunities for engaging in the pastime are constrained by their new family responsibilities. Based on an ethnographic study of serious hobby board gamers, we investigate how play is constrained by parenting and how serious board gamers with these responsibilities create opportunities to continue to play board games by negotiating the context, time, location, and medium of play. We also examine how these changes influence the enjoyment players derive from board games across the key dimensions of sociality, intellectual challenge, variety, and materiality.
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ItemUsing internet enabled mobile devices and social networking technologies to promote exercise as an intervention for young first episode psychosis patients(BMC, 2011-05-12)BACKGROUND: Young people with first episode psychosis are at an increased risk for a range of poor health outcomes. In contrast to the growing body of evidence that suggests that exercise therapy may benefit the physical and mental health of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, there are no studies to date that have sought to extend the use of exercise therapy among patients with first episode psychosis. The aim of the study is to test the feasibility and acceptability of an exercise program that will be delivered via internet enabled mobile devices and social networking technologies among young people with first episode psychosis. METHODS/DESIGN: This study is a qualitative pilot study being conducted at Orygen Youth Health Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia. Participants are young people aged 15-24 who are receiving clinical care at a specialist first episode psychosis treatment centre. Participants will also comprise young people from the general population. The exercise intervention is a 9-week running program, designed to gradually build a person's level of fitness to be able to run 5 kilometres (3 miles) towards the end of the program. The program will be delivered via an internet enabled mobile device. Participants will be asked to post messages about their running experiences on the social networking website, and will also be asked to attend three face-to-face interviews. DISCUSSION: This paper describes the development of a qualitative study to pilot a running program coupled with the use of internet enabled mobile devices among young people with first episode psychosis. If the program is found to be feasible and acceptable to patients, it is hoped that further rigorous evaluations will ultimately lead to the introduction of exercise therapy as part of an evidence-based, multidisciplinary approach in routine clinical care.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDigital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home(Sage Publications, 2015-11-01)This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?
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ItemExploring the Digital Hinterland: Internet Practices Surrounding the Pursuit of "Offline" Hobbies(Association of Internet Researchers, 2017)The practice of boardgaming is thoroughly material, with abundant pawns, cubes, cards, dice, tiles and other game components contained within the box. However, this rich material engagement is surrounded by a “digital hinterland” of online practices that sits behind and frames the way that boardgamers experience games and gaming. Although boardgames are, increasingly, playable in digital form, in this paper we focus on the digital practices that surround offline play but are not themselves play. Using the example of BoardGameGeek.com, we demonstrate that these practices provide an environment for knowledge-sharing, collaboration and co-operation in which participants accrue a form of gaming capital. We extend these findings to show that similar practices exist for other offline hobbies, notably reading (Goodreads.com) and yarn crafting (Ravelry.com).
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ItemIntroduction: What 'is' Australian Game Studies?(Digital Games, 2015)This special issue of the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association Journal represent approaches by contemporary Australian scholars in the study of digital games. They responded to the provocation ‘What is Game Studies in Australia?’ the topic of the inaugural conference of the Digital Games Research Association Australia (DiGRAA). This event, held on 17th of June 2014, was a meeting of academic researchers, critics, designers, developers, and artists focused on developing a discussion of what game studies ‘is’ in Australia. The conference focused special attentiveness both to diversity and any particular regional issues that delegates chose to address. These articles illustrate the breadth and variety of approaches which were discussed.
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ItemVoice in Virtual Worlds: The Design, Use, and Influence of Voice Chat in Online Play(Taylor & Francis, 2014-12-22)Communication is a critical aspect of any collaborative system. In online multiplayer games and virtual worlds it is specially complex. Users are present over long periods and require both synchronous and asynchronous communication, but may prefer to be pseudonymous or engage in identity-play while simultaneously managing virtual and physical use contexts. Initially the only medium offered for player-to-player communication in virtual worlds was text, a medium well-suited to identity-play and asynchronous communication; less so to fast-paced coordination and sociability among friends. During the past decade vendors have introduced facilities for gamers to communicate by voice. Yet little research has been conducted to help us understand its influence on the experience of virtual space: where, when and for whom voice is beneficial, and how it might be configured. To address this gap we conducted empirical research across a range of online gaming environments. We analyzed our observations in the light of theory from human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and computermediated communication (CMC). We conclude that voice radically transforms the experience of online gaming, making virtual spaces more intensely social but turning them into maelstroms of impression management, identity play, and ambiguity over what is being transmitted to whom.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDwelling with media stuff: latencies and logics of materiality in four Australian homes(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2011-08)Extending research into material, media, and cultural geographies of the home, our interest turns to the spatiotemporality of dwelling with information and communication technologies. We pose a number of questions: How do inhabitants and their media stuff adapt to the more rigid physical spaces of a building? How does the building respond to the more rapid changes to dwelling produced by this media stuff? And how are these differing times synchronised? In answer to these questions we present four case studies of homes in Melbourne, Australia, each representative of a particular strategy of synchronisation. They are: the found home, the imagined home, the designed home, and the renovated home. We identify logics informing these homes: the first naturalises the choices made, the second rationalises choices, and the third is one in which dwelling and (re)building are intertwined.
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ItemFraming the NBN: An Analysis of Newspaper Representations(RMIT University, 2015)The National Broadband Network (NBN), Australia’s largest public infrastructure project, was initiated to deliver universal access to high-speed broadband. Since its announcement, the NBN has attracted a great deal of media coverage, coupled with at times divisive political debate around delivery models, costs and technologies. In this article we report on the results of a pilot study of print media coverage of the NBN. Quantitative and qualitative content analysis techniques were used to examine how the NBN was represented in The Age and The Australian newspapers during the period from 1 July 2008 to 1 July 2013. Our findings show that coverage was overwhelmingly negative and largely focused on the following: potential impacts on Telstra; lack of a business plan, and of cost-benefit analysis; problems with the rollout; cost to the federal budget; and implications for business stakeholders. In addition, there were comparatively few articles on potential societal benefits, applications and uses, and, socio-economic implications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNational, local and household media ecologies: The case of Australia's National Broadband Network(RMIT-SCH MEDIA & COMMUNICATION, 2013)
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ItemDIGITAL LITERACIES AND THE NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK: COMPETENCY, LEGIBILITY, CONTEXT(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2013-05)This article reports on findings from an ethnographic study of fifteen participant households in North Hobart and Midway Point, Tasmania. Key themes emerging from this research have been gathered up and presented through the metaphor ‘digital literacy’. The first half of the article is concerned with developing a critical understanding of what is at stake in the notion, or metaphor, of digital literacy. The second half tests these understandings against our research. In our conversations with the people of North Hobart and Midway Point, we found evidence of digital illiteracy, and also evidence of the weaknesses of digital literacy as an explanatory trope. We group these findings using three themes: the presence of instrumental literacy; the illegibility of the NBN and its HSB services; and structural conditions limiting the acquisition of the NBN and its HSB services. These draw upon the digital literacy metaphor, but make its shortcomings clear, and the latter two in particular extend the metaphor from a personal deficit model to one that embraces technologies and social structures.