SemioNerd

 New book: Urban Gamification

Today, one year has passed since the workshop "Mettiamo in Gioco la Città" was organised by my colleagues from CIRCe and myself (you can find all the materials online, videos, photos, pics, abstracts... alas only in Italian). After the success of the workshop, we decided to continue the project and to dedicate a book to the challenging topic of urban gamification. For a happy coincidence, today is also the day in which that book is being published!

This work is part of the series "I Saggi di Lexia" and contains chapters by Ugo Volli, Peppino Ortoleva, Gabriele Ferri, Agata Meneghelli, Mauro Salvador, Massimo Leone, Fabio Viola, Vincenzo Idone Cassone, Simona Stano, Federica Turco, Gabriele Marino, Elsa Soro, Eleonora Chiais, Alessandra Chiappori and Marta Milia.

Here a brief preview in English:

In the last few years the boundary that separates play and everyday reality is becoming more and more thin and permeable. The importance of playfulness in society is greater than ever. This phenomenon, called ludification, seems to answer the need to resemantise (i.e. to give a new meaning) times and spaces that the digital era made indifferent and de-structured. Play appears to be able to give structure, rhythm and direction to time and space - in other words, to make sense of them. Therefore the city - the quintessential human environment, the place of experience and of the construction of autobiographies - undergoes acts of urban gamification, practices that aim at re-writing the city by the means of play. The latter is a powerful tool to act on urban areas: it is able to trace paths, to give value to places, to transform citizens into players. Ranging from flash mobs to urban games, from locative technologies to street art, playfulness invade the cities, bringing along new strategies, new values, new ways of being citizens and new interpretations of the urban areas. This book offers a collection of papers from scholars, experts and professionals that approach urban gamification in all its nuances, using the tools of semiotics, philosophy, media studies and, last but not least, game design.