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In this edited book, we compare and contrast the various forms of play that occur in urban environments or are dedicated to their design and planning, with the notion of the playable city. In a playable city, the sensors, actuators, and digital communication networks that form the backbone of smart city infrastructure are used to create novel interfaces and interventions intended to inject fun and playfulness into the urban environment, both as a simple source of pleasure and as a means of facilitating and fostering urban and social interactions.

Questo articolo mira a definire ed espandere l'idea di gamification punk, in dialogo con le altre due provocazioni in questo numero di DigitCult. Iniziamo delineando le principali critiche che possono essere mosse alla gamification mainstream, vale a dire il fatto che possa essere considerata uno strumento di potere sugli utenti e che, naturalizzando le azioni degli utenti, possa essere di ostacolo al pensiero critico. Successivamente, sosteniamo la necessità di un approccio punk alla gamification, basato sulla libertà, invece che sulle regole, e su una visione non utopica del gioco. Dopo aver stabilito l'idea centrale della gamification punk, procediamo ad applicarla agli Alternate Reality Games, sottolineando così l'importanza di includere in essi nuove forme di co-creazione e partecipazione. Infine ci confrontiamo con la figura dello "zombie" e con le pratiche ludiche ad essa legate, posizionando quest'ultima tra le strategie di gamification urbana che possono consentire ai cittadini di riappropriarsi degli spazi urbani. In conclusione, la gamification punk può essere descritta come uno sforzo di resistenza contro la tendenza neoliberista che tenta di disinfettare e addomesticare il gioco, rivendicandone invece il potenziale dirompente e sociale.

Images of Hong Kong protestors tearing down facial recognition towers to avoid being identified by the authorities started circulating online in September 2019, quickly becoming a symbol of the technological dimension of contemporary struggles against power. While, on the one hand, devices aiming at dissimulating faces from facial recognition systems are multiplying, on the other the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed surgical masks into some mainstream garment. Within the framework of transurbanism, the present paper aims at exploring the complex relations between faces, technology, and urban spaces with transhuman technologies and smart cities. Such relations highlight several key junctions: issues of identity and self-expression, problems of surveillance and strategies of resistance, semiospheric changes, and new frontiers for the writing and creation of the face. publishedVersion

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ReClaim is a two-year, EU-funded research project dedicated to the study of Urban Gamification (MSCA-IF-2 017, grant agreement No 793835). The project is led by Dr Mattia Thibault (PI), supervised by Prof. Juho Hamari, and co-supervised by Dr Judith Veenkamp and Dr Gabriele Ferri. ReClaim ran between September 2018 and September 2020. This report offers an overview on its main activities and findings. After an introduction and an overview of the project outreach, the report is structured into five distinct sections. After a Visual Abstract, the first section presents the research outcomes related to the conceptualisation of “urban gamification”, its strategies and applications, and how it can help us rethink gamification altogether. The second section offers a preview on the results of two series of expert interviews (a traditional one and a boardgame-based one) with designers and academics involved in pervasive games, urban play, larps, DIY urbanism and similar. The third section presents several studies dedicated to specific case studies or fields of application of urban gamification (tourism, sustainability, memory etc.). The fourth section is dedicated to the practical implementations and designs that were part of the project, notably the urban toyification activity Jurassic Tampere and the playful data visualisation device ROOK. The fifth section, finally, throws a glance at the future of urban spaces and at the role of play within them exploring the concept of transurbanism. The report terminates with some conclusions and a detailed account of the project’s academic outcomes. Two appendices are dedicated to the professional profile of the PI of ReClaim, Mattia Thibault, and to a photo album.

Gamification has spread into almost all scientific fields as a way to achieve beneficial outcomes such as productivity, engagement, learning and health. However, gamification has been less applied into enhancing scientific process and science communication themselves. As a case in point, in this paper we demonstrate how an international gamification conference was gamified through Etsija's Call, a mysterious Alternate Reality Conference Game, to enhance conference engagement, create a positive mood for livelier communication and networking as well as to build a communal spirit among participants. The international GamiFIN conference 2020 was held online due to COVID-19. Therefore, the present paper also contributes to the growing literature on remote work and online research and dissemination practices. In this research effort, we employ both design science and mixed-method empirical work (N=47). First, we outline the process and materials involved in the ideation, design and implementation of the game, secondly, we outline the thematic analysis (n=17) of materials gathered throughout the conference from interaction with the game, and thirdly, we report preliminary results of the adapted Gameful Experience Questionnaire (GAMEFULQUEST) based on the participants' experience (n=6) and the game's probable influence on the conference experience (n=13). Our preliminary analyses show that conference participants had a meaningful interaction with the game which further enabled them to engage with several conference facets, situations and participants as indicated by the qualitative analysis of participants' interactions with the game. Moreover, the preliminary quantitative analyses based on the responses on the GAMEFULQUEST indicate that respondents had had a positive gameful experience as a consequence of interacting with Etsija's Call While the present study was preliminary and a first pilot of the conference game, future research on Etsija's Call and other similar implementations should attempt to increase the volume of the investigation in terms of participants. publishedVersion

International audience; The collection of articles in this issue of Versus on the semiotics of concealment proposes theoretical reflections and some of their possible applications on the many facets of secret communication. The aim of these texts is to bring together a semiotic methodology, to enunciate the logic of decryption, to highlight some rhetoric of dissimulation and to offer an anthropological overview of secret communication. The resulting material is offered to the scientific community, which often finds itself unarmed in the face of new occurrences of concealment whose traditional patterns are difficult to identify. After a brief account of the current state of research and of the practice of concealment over time, the articles published below are presented.