Search

Developing current geographical debates on children's digital geographies and popular culture, this article examines children and young people's experiences and understandings of gambling-style systems in digital games. Chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes are a growing feature of the global gaming industry. This article examines the space between gaming and gambling and provides new perspectives to this emerging field, drawing on empirical research from video ethnography game-play sessions with children and young people. This article uniquely foregrounds these accounts, giving room for their voices in a debate dominated by adults. We argue gambling-style systems must be understood within children's everyday sociospatial experiences, including friendship, family, and curating collections. We provide a fuller picture of children and young people's situatedness and negotiations around digital gaming through interviews with parents and game designers. We demonstrate the conceptually striking ways they narrate generational change, mobilizing powerful social constructions of childhood. We advance understandings of children's popular culture and nostalgia in academic debates on digital childhoods, arguing that loot boxes are a new and important lens through which to view wider anxieties. Furthermore, we reveal potential risks associated with these systems and offer recommendations for a timely international policy debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the concept of technical memory in relation to smart city systems. Using the example of the UK air pollution monitoring system Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) and how information from this system is displayed in smartphone air monitoring apps, the article theorizes the memory of smart systems. Developing the work of Garcia, the article rethinks Stiegler's retentional accounts of technical memory, which suggest that memory is held or inscribed on or within a particular technical object. To do this it argues that technical memory can be productively considered as a form of artificial comprehension. Here, the memory of smart systems is analyzed through a variety of logics that disclose particular qualities of objects for particular purposes, which shapes how people make sense of and respond to their environment. Through the example of AURN, the article suggests that the concept of artificial comprehension is useful for geographers studying a range of smart and nonsmart technical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]