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The paper explores Google Maps’ COVID-19 layer, a special feature launched by the cartographic platform in September 2020, and shut down two years later. Through the reading of promotional corporate blogposts and interfacial analysis of the layer, it critiques the layers' mediation of the pandemic, caught between public health needs and Google's overarching ethos. The analysis underscores three central claims: that interfacial choices endemic to the layer impose certainty and reduce necessary user hesitancy; promote data commodification regardless of its pandemic need; and stake unnecessary exceptionalism to the pandemic-spcecific information rather than integrating it into the maps’ existing hybridity. The paper ends with design recommendation for a better COVID layer, centered around bottom-up community practices, higher degree of personalisation, and increased friction.

This paper critically interrogates the claims of game-like elements in online brokerages through an interface analysis of three platforms, eToro, Plus500 and DeGiro. The 2021 GameStop Short Squeeze, where coordinated Redditors influenced financial markets through the mass purchase by individuals of ‘meme stock’, was made possible through the availability of retail trading platforms. One popular reading of the events saw it as ‘gamification’ of trading, without necessarily defining how the term is applicable. While we do not find evidence of direct gamification, we offer an explanation of why the gamification discourse persists. The platforms subtly deploying affective grammars linked to playfulness, thus creating a feeling of play without explicit game-like elements. In so doing, they are not just encouraging users to trade extensively, but are calling into question the epistemic distinction between investment and play, which has underpinned the development of finance since the eighteenth century.

Following the infrastructural turn in media studies with its focus on the material and social practices, this paper offers to reexamine contemporary data colonialism by empirically exploring some of its most crucial infrastructural artifacts – data centers. Particularly, this paper explores six data centers currently built in Israel as part of "Project Nimbus" – a $1.2 billion tender offered by the Israeli government to move its computational infrastructure "to the cloud". The tender was won by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, and has drawn considerable attention, both due to its high-cost and technical complexity; and due to attempts by these companies' workers to curtail the tech giants' involvement in Israel/Palestine on moral grounds. Power differentials are also present within the Israeli society, as intimate governmental data will be processed and stored by foreign US companies. Based on thematic analysis of local journalistic sources, public officials’ documents, local planning authorities and the tender winners themselves, we delineate the concrete materialization of this cloud infrastructure. We show that the notion of data colonialism is complicated within project Nimbus, when lines blur in terms of whose data is colonized by whom, whose lands are used (and colonized) by these centers, and whose resources (predominantly electricity and water) will be used for their functioning. Thus, this paper offers a more granular understanding of data colonialism, and of the different actors and stakeholders involved in the creation and sustainment of this emerging global regime.

The monetization of the modern Triple-A game has undergone severe changes, as free-to-play revenue models and game as a service distribution strategy have become standard for game developers. To date, the established tradition of the industry’s political–economic analysis focused on the value extraction and user exploitation of video game as a cultural commodity, centered on the video game as generating value through the selling of boxed or digital units. In this article, we present a new analytical framework grounded in understanding the modern video game as an asset that continuously generates revenue for its owners. This theoretical lens encapsulates the changes in contemporary game development, distribution, and value generation. To demonstrate, we apply it to the analysis of the monetization strategies of three recent free-to-play Triple-A titles: Fortnite (2017), Apex Legends (2019), and Call of Duty: Warzone (2020).

This paper explores Disco Elysium’s first major expansion, “Working Class Update” as emblematic of the potential fracture between the game’s themes and its politics of production and distribution. Our central claim is that in this update, the studio has reacted to the audience’s appreciation for the game’s labor themes within broader dissatisfaction with the industry’s otherwise exploitative practices, yet was constrained by the contemporary dynamics of said industry. First, we examine Disco Elysium’s radical political orientation and the platformized political economy of digital game distribution through ZA/UM’s origins within the Estonia-specific ICT scene. Second, we describe the current state of videogames distribution, in critical dialog with Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter’s concept of a “game of multitude.” We show the limits and contradictions of Disco Elysium to enact radical political stance in a grow-ingly consolidated and platform-dependent video games market. Finally, through a qualitative empirical analysis of the community’s responses to the Worker’s Class Update on Reddit and Steam, we examine the game’s fit into the above-mentioned framework through key themes of dissonant development, tactical games and software commons.

This paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Duffy, Poell, and Nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (Berry 2016; Brügger 2018; Ben-David 2019) and algorithmic curation (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. The term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perhaps experience by) users; (2) the erosion of digital ownership, emblematic of similar trends in companies limiting one’s ability to modify – or even repair – their owned hardware and software; and (3) the data-driven race for content optimisation, where platform owners use consumer surveillance to deliver their products for maximum engagement (Helles and Flyverbom 2019). These three components of the term are further explored in relation to the ontological and epistemological repercussions of a continually updating cultural commodities, across four key domains. First, cloud culture highlights $2 . Second, it emphasises the $2 , and the shift of platform power toward large-scale cultural revisions. Third, it alerts over the seeming $2 of replaced and rewritten digital objects. Fourth and ultimately, this might have severe repercussions on $2 both for media researchers and – more importantly – the public at large

TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content, hate speech, and the lack of platform accountability in countering these issues. In this article, we analyze how politics is performed on TikTok and how the platform’s design shapes such expressions and their circulation. What does the playful architecture of TikTok mean to the nature of its political discourse and participation? To answer this, we review existing academic work on play, media, and political participation and then examine the case of Sabarimala through the double lens of ludic engagement and platform-specific features. The efficacy of play as a productive heuristic to study political contention on social media platforms is demonstrated. Finally, we turn to ludo-literacy as a potential strategy that can reveal the structures that order playful political participation and can initiate alternative modes of playing politics.

In this paper we suggest the notion of $2 to account for the intermingling of socio-technical processes that make online platforms (in this case: YouTube) resistant to stable definitions. It has been over a decade of YouTube studies and yet, a consensus on what precisely YouTube is seems unlikely. Arguably, Burgess and Green began this ontological quest with the first edition of YouTube (2008) in which they set out ‘to work through some of the often-competing ideas about just what YouTube is.” (iv) Snickars and Vondereau (2009) considered the “ontological ambivalence” (2009, p. 28) of YouTube to be an asset since the platform’s success was rooted in its flexibility as a stage for content. Following work attempted to understand YT as a ‘new screen ecology’ (Cunningham 2016); through its platform logics of monetization and viewership (Postigo 2015, Van Es 2020); as a contested space between creators, content and audience (Berryman and Kavka 2018, Bishop 2018; 2019); and as a database, often implementing scraping and other computational techniques to account for its nature as vast graph network of content (Airoldi et al. 2016) with internal algorithmic dynamic - for instance the preference of “YT-native” content over mainstream actors within its search and recommendations (Rieder et al. 2018). We abandon the ontological stability of YT as singular and instead present it from a post-representational (Thrift 2008) and temporally-orientated (Adam 2008) perspective. Using BreadTube as a case study, we refrain from asking what YT is, but rather $2 YT happens.

This panel brings together emerging scholarship that challenges the contemporary hold of major platforms over public and private life. It critically questions the scope, valence, and embeddedness of platforms in the everyday, challenging (commercial) platformization as the new normal. We attempt to offer new ways of managing, changing and co-opting platforms for the benefit of end-users rather than proprietors only. To this end, the panel discusses and debates 'non-market' approaches to tackling social and environmental effects of platforms. It is designed to build on recent work within infrastructure, platform and critical data studies to suggest alternative approaches to the neoliberal ordering of economic life. A central question is whether the data streams monetized by “big tech” can be harnessed for public, democratic, or socialist ends; in doing so, bringing them 'in house' and into competition with big tech itself. In other words, the panel takes a “protocological” (Galloway 2004) resistance approach, in appropriating the methods of algorithmic- and data-governance occurring under platformization, and utilising them at the regional (state) or (hyper-)local (city, city block) level. Moreover, it seeks to highlight examples of successful community-based and cooperative instances of platformization. Looking at the seemingly ruthless efficiency of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) in the extraction of value through digital means, the panellists ask: what would resistance look like if we use the economic and infrastructural strategies levied against us? $2 Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. MIT press.

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.

This article examines contemporary practices of ‘idling’ (playing ‘idle games’) and ‘let’s playing’ (watching ‘Let’s Play’ [LP] videos of performed gameplay) as forms of power and resistance in the attention economy. Through the prism of interpassivity, a theory developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek, it establishes idling as relegating certain enjoyment from gameplay to the machine, while reproducing the anxieties associated with digital work as a whole. LPs, on the other hand, position the viewer as a critical analyst rather than a hands-on player. This vicarious experience of delegating play to others can allow avoidance and disengagement, which in turn may allow for a critical examination of the system as whole. As I will argue in this article, such interpassive practices can thus be seen as forms of resistance enabling users to step outside the controlling mechanism of digital media and the associated cybernetic feedback loops.

The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. Novel objects, forms, processes and approaches have emerged and pose new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices: in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. This collection brings time back into the map, taking up Doreen Massey's critical concern for 'ongoing stories' in the world; it asks how mapping enrols time into these narratives. Maps often seek to ‘freeze’ and ‘fix’ the world, looking to represent, document or capture dynamic phenomena. This collection examines how these processes are impacted by digital cartographic technologies that, arguably, have disrupted our understanding of time as much as they have provided coherence. The book consists of twelve chapters from experts in the field. Each addresses a different type of digital mapping practice and analyses it in relation to temporality. Cases discussed range from locative art projects, OpenStreetMap mapping parties, sensory mapping, Google Street View, to visual mapping, smart city dashboards and crisis mapping. Authors from different disciplinary positions consider how a temporal lens might focus attention on different aspects of digital mapping. This kaleidoscopic approach demonstrates a rich plethora of ways for understanding the temporal modes of digital mapping and the interdisciplinary background of the authors allows multiple positions to be developed and contrasted."

In this paper we propose the use of ‘Encountering’ a location-based game (LBG) based on the Wherigo platform to facilitate interdisciplinary student learning about places on field courses. Deploying a mobile, digital map-based platform addresses significant challenges – such as the sacrifice of context specificity and methodological applicability and depth. It also runs the danger of ‘gamifying’ the fieldwork, blinding the participant to their own agency and emergent encounters. Interactive and layered digital map interfaces have affordances that can potentially overcome such challenges. We claim that one such affordance is the ability to play through the map. In other words, maps – and digital maps in particular – offer the possibility of decoupling results-orientated actions from free-form serendipitous engagement with the field. Our argument is two-fold. First, that LBG toolsets such as Wherigo can provide a ‘common ground’ for students engaging in place-based interdisciplinary research, by providing a material, cartographic basis for playful investigation. Second, that they can facilitate the production of ‘spaces of epistemological failure’, allowing students to challenge taken-for-granted conceptual and methodological axioms within and across disciplines.

From Mah-Jong, to the introduction of Prussian war-games, through to the emergence of location-based play: maps and play share a long and diverse history. This monograph shows how mapping and playing unfold in the digital age, when the relations between these apparently separate tropes are increasingly woven together. Fluid networks of interaction have encouraged a proliferation of hybrid forms of mapping and playing and a rich plethora of contemporary case-studies, ranging from fieldwork, golf, activism and automotive navigation, to pervasive and desktop-based games evidences this trend. Examining these cases shows how mapping and playing can form productive synergies, but also encourages new ways of being, knowing and shaping our everyday lives. The chapters in this book explore how play can be more than just an object or practice, and instead focus on its potential as a method for understanding maps and spatiality. They show how playing and mapping can be liberating, dangerous, subversive and performative.

The paper draws parallels between quantification as found in the user interfaces of video games, to similar elements of more “serious” devices, in particular mapping and navigational platforms. I present an autoethnographic study of a mundane experience that would be familiar to many Google Maps users: locating a nearby place of interest and figuring out how to reach it. The navigational case is used as a canvas for a further analysis of the role of quantified elements in user interfaces. My autoethnography shows how the mundane actions performed on the screen are informed by the necessary reductions that mapped media perform on the physical world. Such reductions are imitated and enabled by user interfaces designed to control and guide user attention. Designers aim to simplify and streamline user interactions with the system and such practices are built on tracking the user and habituating the actions she performs through the screen.

Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. The Games for Health Conference brings together researchers, medical professionals and game developers to share information about the impact of games, playful interaction and game technologies on health, health care and policy. Over two days, more than 400 attendees participate in over 60 sessions provided by an international array of 80+ speakers, cutting across a wide range of activities in health and health care. Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, health behavior change, biofeedback, rehab, epidemiology, training, cognitive health, nutrition and health education.