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Traditional sports have seen declining participation at many levels, with football being no different. This is occurring at a time when emergent technologies present new challenges, particularly to the crucial yet ignored cohort of millennials. Without meeting the needs of millennials, football cannot be successful in the future. This research seeks to understand how millennial football fandom (sport, not team) in Australia impacts football participation, whilst empirically examining the impact of football video games (FVGs).

Survey data are collected from online groups, forums and social media pages of Australian football (soccer) fans. Quantitative analysis of millennial fandom and its influence on football participation (for the first time demarcated into play and engagement) is undertaken, including the moderating influence of time spent playing FVGs, amidst covariate influences of age and number of children.

Results highlight the multi-dimensionality of millennial football fandom in Australia, reveal the typical hours spent playing football across a range of participation types (including play and engagement), support fan involvement’s influence on engagement with football, establish that a desire to interact with other football fans manifests in playing more football, specify how playing FVGs moderates these relationships, supports the covariate influences of age and evidences that playing FVGs does not hamper football play.

This is the first study to examine millennial fans of football (the sport, not tied to a club) and the influence of fandom on football participation. By separating football participation into two forms, play and engagement, we highlight discrete influences, whilst evaluating for the first time the moderating influence of the time millennials spend playing FVGs. For sport managers and administrators, these are important findings to facilitate better segmentation, recruitment, retention and participation, each with broader societal health benefits. This is undertaken in Australia where football is not a dominant code, relegating fandom to a niche, thus revealing important findings for sports and business management.

In a postmodern context this paper proposes that analogical scholarship in which one conceptual schema is used to view another in order to generate new perspectives, be used to view play. Hermeneutic philosophy specifically is used in a process modelling hermeneutic inquiry. Included are a review of play, hermeneutic philosophy, and the outcomes of the juxtaposition of hermeneutic concepts against play. Resultant perspectives on key issues in play, such as the meaning of play, play in meaning making, the binaries of play, play and practice, and play in the reconceptualizing movement in early childhood education, follow.

This chapter discusses children’s imaginative play and literacy practices as mediated by mobile digital technologies and media. In this chapter, drawing on sociocultural theory and the notion of dynamic literacies, we consider how digital technologies including mobile technologies interact and potentially expand children’s imaginative play, leading to dynamic literacy practices and learning opportunities. Based on this understanding, we will propose some pedagogical principles that can be applied to play-based early childhood education in support of young children’s creative thinking, storytelling and dynamic literacy practices, both indoors and outdoors.

This chapter investigates sidewalk sociability and neighborhood use, by focusing on the regular encounter of a group of retired men to play cards on their neighborhood’s main street. Direct and ethnographic observations were used on one Lisbon suburban working and lower middle-classes residential district.

Sidewalk card-playing is understood as “focused gathering” (Goffman, 1971a) and this concept discloses the social organization of a public gaming held encounter and the specific rules created to regulate interactions between players and their audience. The sidewalk sociability effects produced by card-playing are interpreted as originating from “triangulation stimuli” (Lofland, 1998; Whyte, 2002) and “sociability pillar” construction (Charmés, 2006).

Card-playing encounters are discussed in detail as a practical and symbolical neighborhood-use (Blokland, 2003) enacted by an elder-men peer-group. Research underscores the relationship between the elderly peer-group members’ practices and the neighborhood’s public space appropriation, their public characters’ attributes (Jacobs, 1972) and behavior, and social construction of a sidewalk small social place. Among aged peer-group members, sidewalk card-playing accounts for an increase in social and psychological benefits, ranging from social contacts to memories self-expression, derived either from the gaming situation or from its pervasive sociability.

This study provides empirical support for a link between video game play and likelihood to major in a STEM field.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), this study investigates whether adolescents who play video games are more likely than those who do not to choose a STEM field major in college, and if other characteristics explain this relationship.

Results from a nested series of logistic regression models show that – compared to those who do not play video games in adolescence – teens who play video games are 70% more likely to major in a STEM field when they attend college.

The Add Health dataset allows for empirical verification of the link between video game play and STEM major choice, but it is dated. Future research should use more recent data. Factors such as gaming platform and game genre are likely to be key variables in future research.

This finding lends support for including video game play as a potential factor in future studies on college major choice, and offers further empirical support for utilizing video games as a potential gateway into STEM.

Going beyond previous research, this study finds that playing commercial video games may be one entry point to STEM fields, and implies that it is important to understand the impact of games that millions of young people play.

This chapter reiterates the conclusions drawn on Pokémon Go in the context of intergenerational play. We begin by reflecting on the exigency of this book, before summarising our key findings under the following headings: (1) spatial activity and cognisance, (2) familial rhythms and digital labour, (3) playful bonding and ‘non-confrontational spaces’, (4) personal development and cursory connections, (5) familial challenges and concerns, (6) surveillance and the game beneath the game. Importantly, these findings are discussed in a manner that extends beyond the specificity of Pokémon Go. That is to say, our findings are used to establish how the next generation of locative games differs from the previous generations. Here, we pay particular attention to the various ways this current generation is predicated on a more dynamic digital architecture than earlier locative games and location-based social networks (LBSNs). Accordingly, this section is critical in terms of both surveying the area as it stands and positioning the current project in the canon of both locative media and intergenerational play. Moving forward, we reflect on how the experience of playing Pokémon Go has changed to accommodate the social restrictions put in place to help combat the COVID-19 global pandemic (Byford, 2020a, 2020b; Orland, 2020; Takahashi, 2020). In particular, this section highlights the adaptability of current hybrid reality games (HRGs) such as Pokémon Go in the wider field of locative games. Finally, this section looks to the future by deliberating how Pokémon Go might continue to develop in a COVID-19 world and what these developments might suggest about our approach to environments that increasingly feel at odds with the notion of play.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship of gamification design elements on social play habit and we-intention to continue playing in a mobile multiplayer game context. The study further intends to reveal the mediating role of social play habit in the relationship between gamification design elements and we-intention to continue playing.

The proposed model was empirically evaluated using survey data collected from 292 PUBG users based in Malaysia. PLS-SEM analysis was used to assess the model since it includes formative and reflective constructs.

The results indicated that gamification design elements significantly affect social play habit in a positive direction. In the simultaneous condition, social play habit also significantly affects the we-intention to continue playing the mobile multiplayer game. However, these three elements of gamification design did not significantly affect the formation of we-intention to continue playing in the context of mobile multiplayer games. Notably, social play habit was found to fully mediate the relationships between immersive-related interaction, achievement-related interaction, social-related interaction and we-intention to continue playing.

This study highlights the importance of social play habits as a factor linking the relationship between gamification design elements and we-intention to continue playing. In addition, this study also provides significant insights for the game creators to emphasise the gamification design elements so that the sustainability of the game can be secured from the perspective of retaining the current users through the social play habit element.

The study is noteworthy because it is the first attempt to use gamification design elements to explain how social play habit affect the formation of we-intention to continue playing in the setting of a mobile multiplayer game environment. In addition, the findings may add to the body of knowledge in the field of gamification theory.

The average American child spends more time “playing”¹ than doing any other activity besides sleeping and attending school (watching television comes in next, with children gradually replacing play time with TV time as they grow older) (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b). In fact, free, unstructured time makes up between 20 and 50% of children’s waking hours² (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b; Larson & Richards, 1989). Nonetheless, sociologists currently know very little about how children’s free time use influences their well-being. Although scholars, teachers, and parents all have strong opinions about the types of free-time activities that they think are “best” for children, recent studies of the association between children’s time use and their well-being have failed to find consistent associations (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b; McHale, Crouter & Tucker, 2001).

The five play texts You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock (Phyllis Klotz, 1994), Glass House (Fatima Dike, 2002), Born in the RSA (Barney Simon, 1994), Has Anyone Seen Zandile? (Gcina Mhlophe, 1994), and So What’s New? (Fatima Dike, 1998) are introduced providing a brief insight into the strength of women as they struggle to make a living for their children in the face of extremely adverse political conditions, both in urban areas and in their households, as well as their suffering and grief for the loss of children caught up in the political struggle. Marginalised and struggling African women represented the most vulnerable members of the urban community. The reader is introduced to the voices within the play texts and how they represent both white and black South African women and how they on women’s lives from different backgrounds, classes and race thereby providing insight into their diversity of experiences and the censorial and penal repercussions women were forced to endure for contravening political Afrikaner ideology and statutory law.