Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 47
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    The disposition of the destitute
    Arnold, M ; Nansen, B ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Harewood Gould, H (Council to Homeless Persons, 2019)
    The final disposition is a term used by people in the funeral industry to refer to the burial or cremation of a dead person. The final disposition is a profoundly important event, not simply a pragmatic or material process, and its significance is expressed through ritualised performances. The disposition and its rituals are shared and communal, involving ceremonies attended by the deceased’s family, friends, and community, whilst less indirectly the disposition is shared by wider social norms and values around the proper treatment of the deceased body. Although the disposition is common to us all, then, it is also a personalised event in which the particularity of the life lived is recognised. Similarly, the place of interment, whether body or ashes, is named and marked to recognise the individual life of the deceased. Places of interment are thus not only identified, but are also accessible to family, friends and community, for the purpose of ongoing visitation and remembrance.
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    ‘Death by Twitter’: Understanding false death announcements on social media and the performance of platform cultural capital
    Nansen, B ; O'Donnell, D ; Arnold, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M (University of Illinois Libraries, 2019)
    In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative examples. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental; misreported; misunderstood; hacked; and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Cooperating to compete: The mutuality of cooperation and competition in boardgame play
    Rogerson, MJ ; Gibbs, MR ; Smith, W (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2018-04-20)
    This paper examines the complex relationship between competition and cooperation in boardgame play. We understand boardgaming as distributed cognition, where people work together in a shared activity to accomplish the game. Although players typically compete against each other, this competition is only possible through ongoing cooperation to negotiate, enact and maintain the rules of play. In this paper, we report on a study of people playing modern boardgames. We analyse how knowledge of the game's state is distributed amongst the players and the game components, and examine the different forms of cooperation and collaboration that occur during play. Further, we show how players use the material elements of the game to support articulation work and to improve their awareness and understanding of the game's state. Our goal is to examine the coordinative practices that the players use during play and explicate the ways in which these enable competition.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    "Adapt or Die": The funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety
    Van Ryn, L ; Nansen, B ; Gibbs, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Nansen, B ; van Ryn, L (Routledge, 2019-06-11)
    Funeral directors shot themselves in the foot over cremation, and cemeteries got splattered with the blood.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Finding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting
    Rogerson, MJ ; Gibbs, M (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.
  • Item
    No Preview Available
    "I love all the bits": The Materiality of Boardgames
    Rogerson, MJ ; Gibbs, M ; Smith, W (ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2016-01-01)
    This paper presents findings from a study of boardgamers which stress the importance of the materiality of modern boardgames. It demonstrates that materiality is one of four significant factors in the player experience of tabletop gaming and describes four domains of materiality in boardgaming settings. Further, building on understanding of non-use in HCI, it presents boardgames as a unique situation of parallel use, in which users simultaneously engage with a single game in both digital and material, non-digital environments.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Frame analysis of voice interaction gameplay
    Allison, F ; Newn, J ; Smith, W ; Carter, M ; Gibbs, M (ACM, 2019-05-02)
    Voice control is an increasingly common feature of digital games, but the experience of playing with voice control is often hampered by feelings of embarrassment and dissonance. Past research has recognised these tensions, but has not offered a general model of how they arise and how players respond to them. In this study, we use Erving Goffman’s frame analysis [16], as adapted to the study of games by Conway and Trevillian [9], to understand the social experience of playing games by voice. Based on 24 interviews with participants who played voice-controlled games in a social setting, we put forward a frame analytic model of gameplay as a social event, along with seven themes that describe how voice interaction enhances or disrupts the player experience. Our results demonstrate the utility of frame analysis for understanding social dissonance in voice interaction gameplay, and point to practical considerations for designers to improve engagement with voice-controlled games.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Design Patterns for Voice Interaction in Games
    Allison, F ; Carter, M ; Gibbs, M ; Smith, W (ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2018)
    Voice interaction is increasingly common in digital games, but it remains a notoriously difficult modality to design a satisfying experience for. This is partly due to limitations of speech recognition technology, and partly due to the inherent awkwardness we feel when performing some voice actions. We present a pattern language for voice interaction elements in games, to help game makers explore and describe common approaches to this design challenge. We define 25 design patterns, based on a survey of 449 videogames and 22 audiogames that use the player’s voice as an input to affect the game state. The patterns express how games frame and structure voice input, and how voice input is used for selection, navigation, control and performance actions. Finally, we argue that academic research has been overly concentrated on a single one of these design patterns, due to an instrumental research focus and a lack of interest in the fictive dimension of videogames.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    A History of Voice Interaction in Games
    Allison, F ; Carter, M ; GIBBS, M (Digital Games Research Association, 2016)
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Player Identity Dissonance and Voice Interaction in Games
    Carter, M ; Allison, F ; Downs, J ; Gibbs, M (Association for Computing Machinery, 2015)
    In the past half-decade, advances in voice recognition technology and the proliferation of consumer devices like the Microsoft Kinect have seen a significant rise in the use of voice interaction in games. While the use of player-to-player voice is widespread and well-researched, the use of voice as an input is relatively unexplored. In this paper we make the argument that notions of player and avatar identity are inextricable from the successful implementation of voice interaction in games, and consequently identify opportunities for future research and design.