This book extends current understandings of the effects of using locative social media on spatiality, the experience of time and identity. This is a pertinent and timely topic given the increase in opportunities people now have to explicitly and implicitly share their location through digital and mobile technologies. There is a growing body of research on locative media, much of this literature has concentrated on spatial issues. Research here has explored how locative media and location-based social media (LBSN) are used to communicate and coordinate social interactions in public space, affecting how people approach their surroundings, turning ordinary life "into a game", and altering how mobile media is involved in understanding the world. This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on identity through an engagement with the current literature on spatiality, a novel critical investigation of the temporal effects of LBSN use and a view of identity as influenced by the spatio-temporal effects of interacting with place through LBSN. Drawing on phenomenology, post-phenomenology and critical theory on social and locative media, alongside established sociological frameworks for approaching spatiality and the city, it presents a comprehensive account of the effects of LBSN and locative media use.

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.

While the metaverse is often marketed as a future utopia, the vision of the metaverse represents an attempt for private corporations to control the code of the real. In the hands of companies that established and maintain the surveillance capitalism model, the ability to build a persistent, all-compassing environment means all activity in that world can be metricized and commodified, making the metaverse worthy of critical examination. Significant parts of life are already conducted in a digital place that combines various aspects of digital culture. Likewise, digital worlds for socializing already exist, and in a form akin to the VR metaverse, just as VR worlds based on play now coexist with online worlds of user generated content. These discreet private "microverses", as we refer to them, are spaces which can model the tensions that would be inherent in the metaverse. From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds examines the place attachments, world-feeling and dwelling of several "microverses" to assess the possibilities of the metaverse as a realistic proposition. Critically analyzing the phenomenological feeling of place, the political economy of emerging tech, the mechanisms of identity and self along with the behavioral constraints involved, the authors map what a metaverse might be like, whether it can happen, and just why some companies seem so determined to make it happen.

This book extends current understandings of the effects of using locative social media on spatiality, the experience of time and identity. This is a pertinent and timely topic given the increase in opportunities people now have to explicitly and implicitly share their location through digital and mobile technologies. There is a growing body of research on locative media, much of this literature has concentrated on spatial issues. Research here has explored how locative media and location-based social media (LBSN) are used to communicate and coordinate social interactions in public space, affecting how people approach their surroundings, turning ordinary life "into a game", and altering how mobile media is involved in understanding the world. This book offers a critical analysis of the effect of usage of locative social media on identity through an engagement with the current literature on spatiality, a novel critical investigation of the temporal effects of LBSN use and a view of identity as influenced by the spatio-temporal effects of interacting with place through LBSN. Drawing on phenomenology, post-phenomenology and critical theory on social and locative media, alongside established sociological frameworks for approaching spatiality and the city, it presents a comprehensive account of the effects of LBSN and locative media use.

Intergenerational Locative Play: Augmenting Family examines the social, spatial and physical impact of the hybrid reality game (HRG) Pokémon Go on the relationship between parents and their children. The ubiquity of digital media correlates with a mounting body of work that considers the part digital technologies, such as video games, play in the lives of children. Consequently, commentators have deliberated the effects of rising levels of screen time and the association of this trend with antisocial behaviour, mental health-related problems, and the interference of family life. Yet, recent studies have demonstrated that the intergenerational play of video games can in fact strengthen familial connections by facilitating communication between adults, and children, and allowing adolescents to experiment with a range of roles. Research on intergeneration play, however, has tended to focus on video games played within the domestic sphere. In contrast, Locative games, such as Pokémon Go involve players physically interacting and moving through their surroundings. Through an original study of Pokémon Go this book extends developing research on intergenerational play to the field of locative games.