Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness
Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness

Author: Konstantinos Papangelis

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1003807550

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores how smart cities enable new and playful ways for citizens to experience, inhabit and socialise within urban environments. It examines how the functionality of digital technologies within municipal settings can extend beyond environmental pragmatism and socio-economic concerns, to include playful approaches to urban spaces that co-constitute and reinvigorate the experience of place through location-based applications and games. Chapters highlight the varied ways the city, as both a conceptual and lived space, is changing because of this confluence of technologies. The book also considers the extent to which these transformations form an armature upon which more playful approaches to the urban domain are emerging, while exploring what effect these ludic formations might have on related understandings of sociability. Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of information technology, urban planning and design, games and interactive media, human-centred and user-centred design, human centred interaction, digital geography and sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Behaviour & Information Technology.

Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness
Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness

Author: Konstantinos Papangelis

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2023-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781032608501

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores how smart cities enable new and playful ways for citizens to experience, inhabit and socialise within urban environments. It will be a resource for scholars and researchers of information technology.

Urban Play
Urban Play

Author: Fabio Duarte

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0262362260

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers. In Urban Play, Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play--in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal--that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them. The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users' behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.

Urban Life and the Ambient in Smart Cities, Learning Cities, and Future Cities
Urban Life and the Ambient in Smart Cities, Learning Cities, and Future Cities

Author: McKenna, H. Patricia

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2022-11-11

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1668440989

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The topic of urban life and the ambient in smart cities, learning cities, and future cities is a timely one, fitting as it does in the world today by responding in an interdisciplinary way across many areas of research and practice. It is essential for researchers to think about and engage with the notion of flourishing in increasingly challenging environments in smarter ways. Urban Life and the Ambient in Smart Cities, Learning Cities, and Future Cities expands upon explorations of urban life to the ambient. As such, perspectives are offered in this work on urban life in the context of smart cities, learning cities, and future cities, enriched by understandings of the ambient, infusing the interactions of people and technologies in 21st-century environments with increased awareness, at the moment. Covering topics such as ambient learning, smart homes, and extended realities, this premier reference work is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, architects, urban planners, instructional designers, sociologists, city officials, community leaders, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

Making Smart Cities More Playable
Making Smart Cities More Playable

Author: Anton Nijholt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9811397651

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores the ways in which the broad range of technologies that make up the smart city infrastructure can be harnessed to incorporate more playfulness into the day-to-day activities that take place within smart cities, making them not only more efficient but also more enjoyable for the people who live and work within their confines. The book addresses various topics that will be of interest to playable cities stakeholders, including the human–computer interaction and game designer communities, computer scientists researching sensor and actuator technology in public spaces, urban designers, and (hopefully) urban policymakers. This is a follow-up to another book on Playable Cities edited by Anton Nijholt and published in 2017 in the same book series, Gaming Media and Social Effects.

Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City
Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City

Author: Dale Leorke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1000217728

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores what games and play can tell us about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how the dynamics of gaming can help us understand the interurban competition that underpins the entrepreneurialism of the smart and creative city. Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City is a collection of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from game studies, media studies, play studies, architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. It situates the historical evolution of play and games in the urban landscape and outlines the scope of the various ways games and play contribute to the city’s economy, cultural life and environmental concerns. In connecting games and play more concretely to urban discourses and design strategies, this book urges scholars to consider their growing contribution to three overarching sets of discourses that dominate urban planning and policy today: the creative and cultural economies of cities; the smart and playable city; and ecological cities. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of game studies, play studies, landscape architecture (and allied design fields), urban geography, and art history.

Playable Cities
Playable Cities

Author: Anton Nijholt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-14

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9811019622

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book addresses the topic of playable cities, which use the ‘smartness’ of digital cities to offer their citizens playful events and activities. The contributions presented here examine various aspects of playable cities, including developments in pervasive and urban games, the use of urban data to design games and playful applications, architecture design and playability, and mischief and humor in playable cities. The smartness of digital cities can be found in the sensors and actuators that are embedded in their environment. This smartness allows them to monitor, anticipate and support our activities and increases the efficiency of the cities and our activities. These urban smart technologies can offer citizens playful interactions with streets, buildings, street furniture, traffic, public art and entertainment, large public displays and public events.

Playing Smart
Playing Smart

Author: Julian Togelius

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0262350157

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE FUTURE OF GAME DESIGN IN THE AGE OF AI: Can games measure intelligence? And how will artificial intelligence inform games of the future? In Playing Smart, Julian Togelius explores the connections between games and intelligence to offer a new vision of future games and game design. Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how. Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM’s Deep Blue and DeepMind’s AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.

Drama and Digital Arts Cultures
Drama and Digital Arts Cultures

Author: David Cameron

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-06-29

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1472592220

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drama and Digital Arts Cultures is a critical guide to the new forms of playful exploration, co-creativity, and improvised performance made possible by digital networked media. Drawing on examples from games, education, online media, technology-enabled performance and the creative industries, the book uses the elements of applied drama to frame our understanding of digital cultures. Exploring the connected real-world and virtual spaces where young people are making and sharing digital content, it draws attention to the fundamental applied drama conventions that infuse and activate this networked culture. Challenging descriptions of drama and digital technology as binary opposites, the book maps common principles and practice grounded in role, embodiment, performance, play, and identity that are being amplified and enhanced by the affordances of online media. Drama and Digital Arts Cultures draws together extensive original research including interviews with game designers, media producers, educators, artists and makers at the heart of these new digital cultures. Young people discuss their own creative practices and products, providing insight into a complex and evolving world being transformed by digital technologies. A practical guide to the field, it contains case studies and examples of the intersections of drama conventions and networked cultures drawn from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Singapore and Australia. Written for scholars, educators, students and 'makers' everywhere, Drama and Digital Arts Cultures provides a clear understanding of how young people are blending creativity and learning with the powerful and empowering conventions of drama to create new forms of multimodal and transmedia storytelling.