scholarly journals Location-Based Games and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of Responses from Game Developers and Players

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuli Laato ◽  
Teemu H. Laine ◽  
A.K.M. Najmul Islam

In early 2020, as a countermeasure to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments issued limitations on the movements of their citizens, cancelling social events and advising people to stay home. As location-based games (LBGs) have been found to influence human movement, their role during COVID-19 deserves closer inspection. Under regular circumstances, the very aim of these games is to motivate people to go out, explore and meet other people. However, during COVID-19, people were advised to do the exact opposite. To study how LBG developers and players reacted to the situation, we used the netnography research method utilizing three types of data: (1) COVID-19 related in-game changes made by seven popular LBG developers during March 2020; (2) social media reactions on 20 posts across three popular Pokémon GO subreddits; and (3) the raiding activity (collaborative play) in Pokémon GO in a Finnish municipality during February–May 2020. All observed LBGs made in-game changes due to COVID-19. The social media reactions showed overwhelming appreciation towards these changes, and two central second order themes arose: (1) LBGs have the ability to influence human movement during pandemics; and (2) people should be able to self-regulate their behaviour during COVID-19 independent of LBG influence. Surprisingly, recorded Pokémon GO player activity in Finland was more influenced by offered in-game rewards than the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings have implications on how games and gamification can be used to direct human movement in situations such as COVID-19 where population-level interventions are needed.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azweed Mohamad ◽  
Radzuwan Ab Rashid ◽  
Kamariah Yunus ◽  
Shireena Basree Abdul Rahman ◽  
Saadiyah Darus ◽  
...  

This paper discusses the speech acts in Facebook Status Updates posted by an apostate of Islam. The Facebook Timeline was observed for a duration of two years (January 2015 to December 2016). More than 4000 postings were made in the data collection period. However, only 648 postings are related to apostasy. The data were classified according to the types of speech acts. Expressive speech act is the most frequent speech act (33%, n=215), followed by the directive (27%, n=177), assertive (22%, n=141), and commissive (18%, n=115), respectively. Based on the speech acts used, it is discernible that the apostate attempts to engage other Facebook users and persuade them into accepting her ideology while gaining their support. This paper is novel in the sense that it puts forth the social actions of an apostate which is very scarce in literature. It is also methodologically innovative as it uses social media postings as a tool to explore the apostate’s social actions in an online space.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shishuo Xu

<div>Small-scale events involve interactive human movement in limited space and time. Social media platforms possibly generate large amount of geospatially-referenced information related to small-scale events. It benefits individuals, management departments, and urban systems if small-scale events can be timely detected from social media platforms, where measuring the abnormal patterns of human movement to discover events and analyzing associated texts to interpret the reasons behind abnormal movement are two keys. Through investigating how people move as different events occur and measuring the patterns on social media platforms, small-scale events can be generally classified into two types, namely type I events with abrupt patterns and type II events with random occurrence of key factors, where social events and traffic events are representative correspondingly.</div><div>Despite many studies have been conducted to detect social events and traffic events using geosocial media data, there still are some un-answered questions requiring further research. Most existing studies did not identify occurring events from a full coverage of spatial, temporal, and semantic perspectives. Studies concerning social event detection lack efficient semantic analysis summarizing event content to infer the reasons driving the abnormal movement. The typical classification-based method regarding traffic event detection lacks investigation on how the spatiotemporal distribution of traffic relevant posts associate with the occurring traffic events, and simply assigns the detected events with predefined categories, missing events that indicate traffic anomalies but go beyond the predetermined categories.<br></div><div>In this thesis, spatial-temporal-semantic approaches are proposed to measure spatiotemporal patterns of posts and users of social media platforms to capture abnormal human movement, and analyze the content of associated posts to mine the reasons driving the movement. A variety of techniques including machine learning, natural language processing, and spatiotemporal analysis are adopted to realize effective detection. Based on one-year Twitter data collected in Toronto, 2014 Toronto International Film Festival and traffic anomaly detection are selected as two case studies to evaluate the performance of proposed approaches. Through comparing with the ground truth data, the result reveals that more than 80% of the detected events do refer to real-world events, which illustrates the feasibility and efficiency of proposed approaches.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: Small-scale event, Event detection, Geosocial media data, Traffic event, Social event, Twitter, Spatiotemporal clustering<br></div>


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-26
Author(s):  
AWAD BIN MUHAMMAD ALKATIRI ◽  
ZHAFIRA NADIAH ◽  
ADINDA NADA S. NASUTION

Social media is popular with all ages, people in young and old age groups can access social media. Social media is a place for information and opinion exchange. Twitter is one of the social media that is actively used in Indonesia. The new normal phenomenon that is currently being applied is wanted to be further known by researchers by referring to the hashtag #newnormalindonesia on Twitter. Researchers want to find out how public opinion is formed based on the hashtag #newnormalindonesia on Twitter. This research uses the concept of public opinion which is categorized into positive, negative, and neutral. In the research method, researchers use quantitative content analysis, the analysis unit uses thematic analysis units with the operationalization of concepts using the concept of public opinion. Coding sheets are used as instruments in data collection techniques, then in testing the validity and reliability using inter-coder reliability. The results showed that the twitter posts with the #newnormalindonesia hashtag tendto be negative by not supporting the implementation of new normal.


Author(s):  
R. Gulay Ozturk

In today's world, a shift from conventional to digitalized marketing is increasing in the investment made in the commercial sector. This particular study analyses the growing influence of a new online advertising strategy called “FRIENDVERTISING” pertaining to social media marketing. Thereby, this chapter conducts a content analysis to investigate how social networks are interacting with each other and how consumers are oriented to certain brands advertised in a specific way. According to the results, the brands that motivate the youth to share their own advertisements in the social media more frequently receive more positive comments about their advertisements. One should decide on the following crucial criteria while applying friendvertising practices: cultural background of audience, frequency of social media use, referring to other friends in social media (being knowledgeable and reliable about the brand), expectations of users and their previous experiences about the brand, creativity of advertisements, originality and entertaining content of advertisements, genre, as well as difficulties and opportunities of the field.


Inventions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgios Palaiokrassas ◽  
Athanasios Voulodimos ◽  
Antonios Litke ◽  
Athanasios Papaoikonomou ◽  
Theodora Varvarigou

In this paper, we propose a method for event detection on social media, which aims at clustering media items into groups of events based on their textural information as well as available metadata. Our approach is based on distance-dependent Chinese Restaurant Process (ddCRP), a clustering approach resembling Dirichlet process algorithm. Furthermore, we scrutinize the effectiveness of a series of pre-processing steps in improving the detection performance. We experimentally evaluated our method using the Social Event Detection (SED) dataset of MediaEval 2013 benchmarking workshop, which pertains to the discovery of social events and their grouping in event-specific clusters. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method attains very good performance rates compared to existing approaches.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Priandy Yaputra

This research was conducted to determine the effect of social media marketing, store environment, sales promotion, and perceived value to purchase decision SOGO Department Store. This research uses a quantitative method that is by distributing questionnaires to 100 respondents who have bought goods at SOGO in West Jakarta. The research method in this study used multiple regression analysis assisted by SPSS. The results of this study are known that simultaneously all independent variables have an influence on purchase decision. Partially, the variables of the store environment, sales promotion, and perceived value have a significant influence on consumer purchase decision, while the social media marketing variable do not significantly influence consumer purchase decision.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosramadhana Rosramadhana ◽  
Sudirman Sudirman ◽  
Muhammad Iqbal

This research reveals and develops a theoretical study of cultural values, which are needed ??to understand the distinct differences between humans and gender-sensitive approaches. It examines issues that lead to a new system of understanding the importance of respecting different human beings and avoiding violent acts of bullying through the social media. This research finds a new model in gender-sensitive approach to adolescent girls’ ability to overcome bullying violence in social media. The research method used was qualitative research method with a virtual ethnographic approach. Research data was collected by searching for techniques on the internet in a bid to gather virtual-based data, since data analysis was practically needed to compile, review and submit questions to the online community, so that a gender-sensitive approach model to introduce the nature of women, especially for adolescents, can be implemented. The application of a gender-sensitive approach model was carried out on young girls, especially students, and activities were oriented towards forming multicultural-based groups of young women. The introduction of ethnic characteristics becomes the base for strengthening gender identity and in applying a gender-sensitive approach model.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evi Intan Puspitasari

Abstract. Nowadays the community considers social media as one of the most important things in daily life. For the social media community is a form of self-editing exporters, for example, many anonymous accounts that violate ethics in their use in social media such as accounts to spread hoaxes, build hatred, and are provocative, but on the other hand anonymous accounts have a positive impact if used wisely. The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of anonymous accounts for the public from the positive and negative sides of using anonymous accounts. The research method used is descriptive qualitative analysis of anonymous accounts on social media and through interviews from several sources with an analysis of positive and negative impacts. The results showed that an anonymous Twitter account can be a medium to pour out your heart through writing. Twitter can be an entertainment for users through uploading posts, photos and videos.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-219
Author(s):  
Nesya Pravitasari Suherman ◽  
Dhita Widya Putri ◽  
Yolanda Stellarosa

One of many social media phenomena, especially on Instagram, is the rising number of accounts with pseudonymous identity, commonly known as Fake Instagram (Finstagram). A private account appears  with a fake username and photo display and small number of followers, with the purpose of being unidentified. The phenomenon starts from the social media standards Instagram trends to social judgements, resulting in users feeling uncomfortable when sharing aside from the implicit standards and trends which are currently happening. From that perspective, this research aims to see whether an influence is present in pseudonymous identity usage on Instagram on self-disclosure. Data of this research is gathered from 100 respondents through questionnaire  using a purposive sampling technique. The result of questionnaire is later researched using a quantitative research method. With the use of simple regression analysis, it is known that pseudonymous identity usage on Instagram (variable X) and self-disclosure (variable Y) have a strong correlations and a significant influence on one another. Based on self-disclosure theory, the result shows that pseudonymous identity usage on Instagram (also known as Finstagram) contributed 43,6% to self-disclosure, whereas the remaining 56,4% is contributed by other factors than pseudonymous identity usage on Instagram.


2015 ◽  
pp. 2051-2076
Author(s):  
R. Gulay Ozturk

In today's world, a shift from conventional to digitalized marketing is increasing in the investment made in the commercial sector. This particular study analyses the growing influence of a new online advertising strategy called “FRIENDVERTISING” pertaining to social media marketing. Thereby, this chapter conducts a content analysis to investigate how social networks are interacting with each other and how consumers are oriented to certain brands advertised in a specific way. According to the results, the brands that motivate the youth to share their own advertisements in the social media more frequently receive more positive comments about their advertisements. One should decide on the following crucial criteria while applying friendvertising practices: cultural background of audience, frequency of social media use, referring to other friends in social media (being knowledgeable and reliable about the brand), expectations of users and their previous experiences about the brand, creativity of advertisements, originality and entertaining content of advertisements, genre, as well as difficulties and opportunities of the field.


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