Bjorn Nansen

This paper explores the motivations, ritual practices, and cultural meanings of digital offerings on Chinese virtual memorials. Drawing on four years of online observation, auto-ethnography, and in-depth interviews, it finds digital offerings feature distinctive persistence, traceability, networked circulation and personalization. These affordances reshape mourning into an individualized, frequent, and flexible mediated practice, foregrounding mourner ’ s agency. Their circulation transforms private grief into a networked relational practice that challenges the utilitarian logic of traditional rituals. In this process, digital offerings and virtual memorials function as collective coping mechanisms, enabling bereaved parents to form affective communities grounded in shared trauma. Meanwhile, they are embedded in the digital economy of symbolic goods, producing intersections between emotional expression, affective labor, and commercial logics. Overall, as a mediated relational practice, digital offerings facilitate self-healing and filial piety while fostering connective mourning and social support networks, offering new possibilities for emotional communication and relationship building in China.

Children’s FinTech apps are digital mobile platforms that incorporate features for managing children’s financial activities ranging from the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, the capacity for saving and spending, and the facilitation of investment options. As we show in this paper, a key aspect of these child money and finance apps is the inclusion of playful affordances such as gamified interface designs and elements that aim to make financial activities fun and appealing to younger users. In doing so, we build on emerging research on children’s FinTech to identify and discuss key implications of playful finance in children’s app environments. Methodologically, the paper draws on established app walkthrough and interface design feature analysis methods, as well as a case study approach from app studies, which are applied to children’s financial app platforms. We identify various playful affordances such as gamified designs and app features in three case study examples where children are incentivised to complete chores, document their savings goals, embrace debit cards and digital consumption, or learn about money and finances through digital rewards such as points, tokens, or levels. Through the interface design analysis, we find that children’s finance apps encourage regular input and collection of their economic activity and information, build attachments to platforms through personalised branding and the accrual of valued in-app assets and status, and instruct children in norms of both digital finance and data surveillance.

When discussing time spent playing video games, concern and media panic often cloud the perspectives of both developers and players. To develop our understanding of factors that may influence this concern, we examined the presence of time-centric language across the marketing information of 1,000 popular games on Steam, identifying 315 games that communicate temporal aspects in their marketing. Using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, six themes were identified that communicate temporal aspects ranging from explicit play durations to temporal investment, legacy, and nostalgia. This study contributes to game studies and HCI by providing the first empirical, thematic analysis of time-centric language in video game marketing on Steam. By identifying six thematic patterns which reveal developer practices around temporal communication - while also exploring how such language can shape player motivations - this study opens a new avenue for understanding both developer priorities and player perceptions regarding time in games.

Video games act as digital playgrounds in which players can build social networks, interact with technological systems, and develop both hobbies and professional skills. This exploratory study inspects the reflections of eight video game content creators to understand how engagement with video game spaces and communities develops an understanding of the social, technical, and professional elements of content creation. Data was collected via semi-structured interviews from a broad range of creation roles (game journalism, modding, audio creation, physical merchandise production, etc.) with thematic analysis used to identify shared topics of significance from social risks to competitive industry. Findings reflect the unique social and technical skills developed through creation and the challenges presented by platforms, video game stakeholders, audiences, competitors, and their own aptitude when approaching audience-focused, platform-dependent labour.

Digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in memorialisation, but their use at cemeteries has been criticised for lack of sensitivity. Designers of digital cemetery technologies (cemtech) face a high risk of causing offence or failing to attract users due to social norms of memorial sites. To map this area of design and its pitfalls, we first developed a typology of cemtech through a review of examples from around the world. We then evaluated social acceptance of various types of cemtech through a survey of 1,053 Australian residents. Younger people were more accepting of cemtech than older people. Acceptance was highest for cemtech with three characteristics: familiarity, intimacy of user group and peacefulness. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four attitudinal dichotomies that explain divergent reactions to cemtech: Expands/Impedes, Public/Private, Lively/Restful and Pragmatic/Affective. We conclude with a discussion of how this work can assist designers of public memorialisation technologies.

The consumption of music is increasingly reliant on the personalisation, recommendation, and automated curation features of music streaming services. Using algorithm experience (AX) as a lens, we investigated the user experience of the algorithmic recommendation and automated curation features of several popular music streaming services. We conducted interviews and participant-observation with 15 daily users of music streaming services, followed by a design workshop. We found that despite the utility of increasingly algorithmic personalisation, listeners experienced these algorithmic and recommendation features as impersonal in determining their background listening, music discovery, and playlist curation. While listener desire for more control over recommendation settings is not new, we offer a number of novel insights about music listening to nuance this understanding, particularly through the notion of vibe.