The Gamification of Mobile Communication among Young Smartphone Users in Seoul

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Kyong Yoon ◽  
Dal Yong Jin
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Mobile Communication ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Mobile Games ◽  
Mobile Gaming ◽  
Communication Practices

Drawing on the empirical findings, the present study discusses how mobile media and gaming practices are integrated with young people’s everyday lives in Seoul, Korea. In particular, the present study aims to critically examine mobile gaming as a social practice, by adopting the notion of “gamification”. The study has found that users coped with urban everyday life by appropriating mobile apps and thus engaging with the gamification of mobile communication. Various mobile games have become popular add-ons on smartphones and offered casual involvement in gaming in daily moments such as commuting, waiting, and eating times. Gamified communication practices may imply that smartphone-mediated communication redefines our world as the gameful world while urban space and agency constantly engage with gameplay. However, the seemingly gameful world that may empower certain casual gamers may conceal the hegemonic process in which mobile gamers are subject to existing power relations.

Self-(Re)presentation in Mobile Communication Practices

2020 ◽  
pp. 354-369
Author(s):  
Amparo Lasén
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Devices ◽  
Mobile Communication ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
The Self ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Technical Requirements ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
Shared Agency

Mobile communication entails multiple and multimedia ways of representing the self: of depicting, performing, and making oneself present, to ourselves and to our significant ones, as well as to different connected audiences. This chapter explores how these complex choreographic performances of presentation–representation–embodiment, are the effect of a shared agency between people and mobile media, involving intentions, desires, habits, collective norms and expectations, written and non-written rules, as well as the affordances and constraints of the different digital infrastructures, from mobile devices to apps and platforms, with their commercial and technical requirements. Special attention is given to the choreographic aspect of these performances, for instance, how gender and race are performed in mobile-mediated forms of self-(re)presentation, with aesthetic and ethical implications. These choreographies are forms of current digital labor, where the production of images and visibilities prevails, in mobile practices such as the taking and sharing of selfies and the uses and practices around mobile apps.

Mobile Games

2015 ◽  
pp. 1185-1193
Author(s):  
Ingrid Richardson ◽  
Larissa Hjorth
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Mixed Reality ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Mobile Games ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Mobile Gaming ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Cross Platform ◽  
Social Applications ◽  
The Impact

This article provides a critical overview of mobile gaming, from discrete offline casual games to location-based, mixed reality, cross-platform, and urban games and, more recently, the array of downloadable playful and social applications for the touchscreen smartphone and handheld tablet or iPad. The discussion begins by casting mobile games as one of the most significant trajectories of an emerging app-based media ecology. The authors consider the way mobile gaming and play have become intrinsic to our everyday practices and challenge the distinction that is often made between casual and hardcore (or ‘real') gamers. The article then explores how location-based mobile games generate hybrid experiences of place and presence, requiring the player to integrate their own situated and embodied perception of the world with dynamic GPS-enabled information. Finally, the overview turns to the relation between mobile media and social media games—which include those mobile games and apps that embed social networking and sharing features into the game or games accessed and played through social networking services via a mobile device. On a broader scale—in terms of the impact of mobile games on our daily lives—the proliferation of mobile interfaces, games, and playful apps is playing a key role in what is termed the ‘lusory' or playful turn in culture.

Sociability on Location Based Mobile Games: An Ethnographic Research on Pokémon Go and Ingress in Istanbul

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-120
Author(s):  
Cemile Tokgöz ◽  
Burak Polat
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Mobile Games ◽  
Pokémon Go

Abstract Physical space has become intertwined with digital information with the escalatory development of information and communication technologies such as ubiquitous computing, mobile and wearable devices, GPS technology, wireless networks, smart city applications and augmented reality. The relationship between urban space and location-based technology has transformed everyday life practices; and one of these life practices is playing game. Location based mobile games (LBMGs) are being played on streets and provide interaction with urban environments. Mobile devices become the interface between the player and urban space, and players experience the urban through the game narrative. Nowadays, the most popular LBMGs are Ingress and Pokémon Go. Although the both games were created by the same company and configured on the same map, they arouse different effects. LBMGs have a great potential to shape gaming experiences thus researching different effects of Ingress and Pokémon Go hold an academic importance. The difference between these two games can only be revealed by participating in game communities and conducting a qualitative research. Because of that, this study is built on an ethnographic research about Ingress and Pokémon Go; and the results of the research revealed the importance of sociability. In this study, firstly, LBMGs are defined and the influences of these games on everyday life are discussed. Secondly, the differences and similarities are examined between Ingress and Pokémon Go according to the analysis obtained from participant observation and in-depth interviews. Finally, the importance of sociability is emphasized and foresights are provided in the light of research results to contribute to the game studies.

scholarly journals Cutting the Cord: Social and Scholarly Revolutions as CMC Goes Mobile

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott W Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Computer Mediated Communication ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Media And Communication

Abstract Mobile media and communication (MMC) serve as the preferred context for going online among many individuals today and the only means for others less fortunate. As computer-mediated communication (CMC) increasingly goes mobile, scholars should bear in mind the distinctive, and oftentimes disruptive, implications for everyday social life as well as research in the field. Toward that end, this article reviews select ways that MMC structures how people connect with each other and places of social activity. Synthesis of that research casts light on key developments in technology, social practice, and scholarship as CMC primarily becomes a mobile phenomenon.

scholarly journals Mobile media and communication: A new field, or just a new journal?

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott W. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Communication ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Distinct Field

This journal represents a step forward in the development of mobile communication studies as a field. This field has been establishing itself through a number of other initiatives as well, including conferences, symposiums, edited books, listservs, and centers for research. Despite this momentum, little attention has been given to defining – and justifying – the field itself. This essay begins by questioning whether there really is, or should be, a distinct field of study for research and theory on mobile media and communication. I then proceed to address this question by highlighting themes in the literature that illustrate how mobile communication is distinct from other forms of mediated communication and information exchange, with correspondingly distinctive social consequences. The essay argues that there are indeed justifiable reasons for treating mobile communication studies as a field. However, like the technology itself, this field is – or at least should be – highly integrated with research and theory of media and communication more broadly.

Socio-Spatial Relations in Mobile Gaming

2014 ◽  
pp. 260-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Martin
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Mobile Games ◽  
Mobile Game ◽  
Mobile Gaming ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Game Player ◽  
Technology Practice

This chapter explores the opportunities of mobile games to critique and constitute the networks of which they are a part, attending particularly to location-based games. It discusses how these kinds of mobile games reconfigure people's relationships with other people and objects in their environment. In order to understand this reconfiguration, a model is put forward that clarifies the various ways in which people and objects are presented to the mobile game player. Using this model, examples are discussed of games that make interactions available that are disruptive of a social or political order, arguing that this disruption may be drafted into socio-political critique. Other examples demonstrate how mobile games bring everyday life within a capitalist logic, monetizing leisure and the mundane. This suggests that mobile gaming as a technology, practice, or product is neither fundamentally emancipatory nor fundamentally regressive but rather can be employed in various ways.

Glocal intimacies and the contradictions of mobile media access in the Philippines

2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2098596
Author(s):  
Cecilia S Uy-Tioco ◽  
Jason Vincent A Cabañes
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Media Access ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Global Modernity

This article looks at mobile media access in the Philippines and the kind of social intimacies that have emerged from it. To frame our discussion, we use the concept of ‘glocal intimacies’. This pertains to how mobile technologies have normalised and intensified the entanglement of people’s relationships of closeness with the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. We show that the uneven access that Filipinos have has led to equally uneven ways in which they imagine and enact intimate relationships. Drawing on case studies emblematic of the country’s key income clusters, we point out the emergence of a contradictory situation, wherein those with relatively high-quality access are those who are least dependent on mobile media for their glocal intimacies. Meanwhile, those with relatively low-quality access are those who are actually most dependent on mobile-mediated communication for such intimacies.

Mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities: Shaping alternative consumer cultures in mobile media communication

2020 ◽  
pp. 205015792092745
Author(s):  
Zhuoxiao Xie
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Communication ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Tourist Center ◽  
The One ◽  
Coordination Patterns

This study aims to update notions of how the practical elements of mobile communication (i.e., microcoordination and synchronization) alter the interconnectedness between places and mobilities. Based on ethnographic research on personal shoppers’ mobile purchasing practices between mainland China and Hong Kong (HK), this article argues that mobile communication, as a social practice, extends relational places in cross-border shopping, on the one hand, and transforms the performances of mobilities that are used to anchor the spatial identities of shoppers and localities for consumption, on the other. Shoppers’ mobile communication practices create variable interactions between mobilities and places, manifested as mobile communicating place and place-inscribed communicative mobilities. The consumer cultures of HK personal shopping are anchored by the multiplicity of places and shifting mobilities of people, data, and objects. Mobile communication in/of HK is a medium through which people from the mainland can consume the symbolic space and “localness” of HK, embodying the “spatial selves” of personal shoppers through digital expressions of mobilities. Shoppers produce place-inscribed communicative mobilities of themselves and of commodities in HK through differing synchronization and coordination patterns in two places (Tsim Sha Tsui and Sheung Shui), based on the fact that the former is an international and local-brand tourist center and the latter has risen as a new “parallel trading hub” for cross-border consumption.

Mobile media and communication in everyday life: Milestones and challenges

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Linke
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Mobile Communication ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media And Communication

The article contributes conceptual ideas to the multi- and interdisciplinary forum for research on social aspects of Mobile Media & Communication. Starting with everyday observations, a review of selected milestones regarding matters of space and presence, sociality and emotion and on multiple dialectics is offered to demonstrate the significant and complex interrelations in the field of mobile communication in everyday life. Finally, it is argued that the challenge of non-deterministic and sustainable research approaches has to be met in order to deepen and broaden future research and contribute to an understanding of mobile media and communication.

scholarly journals What’s mobile in mobile communication?

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Bruhn Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Communication ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Cell Phones ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Great Divide ◽  
Embodied Communication

Interrogating the terminology of “mobile” communication, this article notes that media and communicative practices have been mobile for millennia. What’s mobile about cell phones and other current mobile media is a new range of contexts in which personally meaningful and socially consequential interactions become possible. Mobile media should be studied, above all, as resources of social action across physical space. Mobile media, further, provide the wider field of research with an opportunity to revisit the great divide between technologically mediated and embodied communication. Technologically mediated communication remains grounded in human bodies residing in local places. Humans can be understood as a first degree of media whose communicative and performative reach has been extended in time and space by historically shifting technologies.

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