Hello everyone.
Thank you for watching this video presentation.
My name is Yubo Kou, the third author.
The paper's title is Mobile Collocated Gaming:
Collaborative Play and Meaning-Making on a University
Campus.
So our research question is, how do university students
play mobile games?
And we were interested in this topic
because the video game landscape in China
is very different from the Western context.
Mobile gaming is very popular in China, and a lot of people
use their smartphones to play not only casual games but also
team based esports games.
So, to answer this research question,
our first author carried out an ethnographic study
of mobile gaming in his university.
He observed and also took pictures
of the students from his cohort who play mobile games.
And he also interviewed 37 of them.
And our findings are mostly focused
on three particular locations on the University campus
where mobile gaming took place.
The first location is dormitory.
The picture is quite telling in showing
the physical proximity afforded by the dormitory setting.
So, the first student on the right
was playing with his own laptop, but the rest two
are playing mobile games together.
You can notice how these were sitting face-to-face
but their eyes were fixed on their own devices.
Our participants told us that they
enjoy the mobile gaming in their dormitories for many reasons.
For example, 28 told us that she could
warn her roommates if anything dangerous in game
was going to happen.
And P3 said that the dormitory was a safe space where
he can vent negative emotions and gather support
from his roommates.
The second location is the classroom.
The classroom setting expects students to pay attention
to class and listen to the instructors,
but our participants didn't follow the institution
expectations.
The picture shows two students sitting in the back
and playing mobile games.
P9 told us that [INAUDIBLE] be able to watch
for the last few rows in the classroom.
So if they could sit there, and then
they could just play mobile games the whole class
without being noticed by the instructors.
And P10 told us that the courses like socialism
with Chinese characteristics are useless
and that he would rather play mobile games.
The third location is the laboratory.
The laboratory expects the students to do research
and many laboratories discourage entertainment, especially
video gaming.
But it has been tried to bypass this institutional setting.
You can see in this picture that the students are sitting
in their cubicles and several of them are holding their phones
and playing games.
So, on the one hand, participants
would play with their labmates if they
wanted to take a break as P17 suggested.
On the other hand, people like P32
had to stay vigilant so that they would not
be caught by his advisor.
So, our take home message is that although many mobile games
are designed to be placeless, people's mobile gaming
was associated with assigning meanings to places.
And this echoes the classic discussion of place and space
in CSCW.
And to be more specific, this paper
contributes empirical insights into the social, cultural,
and institutional contexts of mobile gameplay.
We showed that people enjoy the collaborative play
in physical proximity, and their play
was shaped by the institutional arrangements,
such as the architectural and policy design of classrooms
and laboratories.
And lastly, the institutional arrangements
also reflect the collectivist cultural value
that seeks to control people in groups, which in turn shaped
how they play mobile games.
That's all of our talk, thank you very much.