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Personalized medicine aims to tailor the treatment to the specific characteristics of the individual patient. In the process, physicians engage with multiple sources of data and information to decide on a personalized treatment. This article draws on a qualitative case study of a clinical trial testing a method for matching treatments for advanced cancer patients. Specialists in the trial used data and information processed by a specifically developed drug-efficacy predictive algorithm and other information artifacts to make personalized clinical decisions. While using high-resolution data in the trial was expected to provide a more accurate basis for action, sociomaterial engagements of oncologists with data and its representation by artifacts paradoxically hindered personalized clinical decisions. I contend that the engagement between human discretion, ambiguous data, and malleable artifacts in this non-standardized trial produced moments of contradiction within entanglement. Sociomaterial approaches should acknowledge such conflicts in further analyses of medical practice transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult and different from studying computer or board games. This article builds upon the experiences of staging and studying several playful pervasive technology prototypes. It discusses the challenges and pitfalls of evaluating pervasive game prototypes and charts methods that have proven useful in previous research. The aim is to open discussion on the situated methodology of qualitative study of evaluating and researching pervasive play. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since its introduction in academia and professional practice during the 1950s, gaming has been linked to simulation. Although both fields have a few important characteristics in common, they are distinct in their form and underlying theories of knowledge and methodology. Nevertheless, in the literature, hybrid terms such as gaming/simulation and simulation gaming are used for practical or pragmatic reasons, causing confusion and ambiguity about the marking out of gaming versus simulation. Generally it is not clear whether authors are talking about games and simulations as artifacts of certain forms or whether they are referring to their functionality. The author elaborates on the confusion about these terms and offers a frame of reference to bring more terminological coherence and reduce methodological ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]