Search

This paper advances debates at the intersection of geographies of children, youth and families, digital geographies, and geographies of home. We argue that social, seasonal and limited time are vitally important for understanding the new landscape between gaming and gambling and have wider analytical purchase for geographers. This paper reveals parenting practices connected to the multi-billion-dollar industry of paid-for currency in digital games used to access gambling style systems and chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes. We use this timely example to develop new digital geographies of home from original interviews with families based in England on their everyday lived experiences of gambling-style systems in digital games as well as data from video ethnographies with children and young people and interviews with international game designers. This paper challenges current understandings by examining how parents make sense of gambling-related harms and demonstrates the spatial and temporal dynamics of purchasing decisions, rules, and associated conflicts in domestic space. We argue these systems in digital games shape and are shaped by family geographies. This paper concludes by outlining its relevance for the social and health sciences at a time of intense legislative interest in the increasingly blurred space between gaming and gambling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Critical social scientific research holds that credit–debt is a principal economic and governing relation in contemporary economy and society, but largely neglects money's role in indebted life. Drawing on qualitative research in the payday loan market in the United Kingdom, the paper shows that borrowers typically relate to loans in monetary rather than financial terms and incorporate them into practices of payment, spending and online banking. To analyse how indebted life is variously experienced and enacted through money, the concept of money culture is developed to refer to money's culture, money's meanings and money's affects. Borrowers enter into and negotiate payday loans through a digitally mediated money culture that both mobilizes and runs counter to money's powerful fictions as circulating universal equivalent and calculative means of account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently cultural geographers have become increasingly interested in postphenomenological ways of thinking. This article develops a distinct postphenomenological style of analysis. Such a style is twofold, referring both to a style of conceptualizing and writing about objects and a concern for those objects' style. Drawing on the example of the television show In the Night Garden, the article demonstrates two postphenomenological styles of thought—allure and resonance—and how these styles enable us to understand the style of these objects and the role they play in the construction and experience of different cultural worlds. [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]

Presents a study initiated in late 1999 to map new media with substantial input from fifty-one CEO's or other top executives from a list of 350 new media firms in the U.S. to participate in the industry assessment. Aim of the study to foster a taxonomy for new media outlets and firms within the larger media and entertainment industries; Identification of key elements in defining new media; Factors identified by CEOs that are essential in defining new media that distinguish them from traditional media and entertainment industries.