Mattia Thibault

Tampere University | UTA · Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Studies

The advancement of human-computer integration as a research field promises to introduce transhumanistic ways of communicating through the enhanced abilities of augmented humans. Our work seeks to illuminate this experiential landscape, exploring a diverse set of human augmentation technologies (HATs) for communication purposes. We investigated this...

This exploratory paper seeks to combine findings from toy research with studies on digital object play with an interest in the toyification of the virtual realm, including VR, AR, and XR. The goal of the paper is to formulate ideas on the toyfulness of virtual objects and related toy experiences in virtual space and to give a definition of Virtual...

With a bang or with a whimper V I C, B S, M T * . Nomen omen Ad inizio , come parte di un gruppo di dottorandi e ricercatori (compo-sto dai sottoscritti, Simona Stano e Marta Millia) iniziammo a discutere di un convegno sul senso delle catastrofi e sul catastrofismo, osservando con interesse tale important...

In the last decades, the modelling ability of digital games has had an increasingly strong influence on both industrial communication and strategic decision making. The ways companies communicate, represent themselves, and organise their workflows and operations have been subject of an attempt to translate and emulate the semiotic features on digit...

This paper introduces the concept of "interreal translations," a novel area of inquiry situated at the intersection of evolving trends in Translation Studies. Interreal translations involve the translation of objects, spaces, and subjects across media-generated virtual spaces, including virtual and augmented realities. Grounded in intersemiotic tra...

Technological advances offer opportunities to motivate and support meaningful interactions with forests and nature. This paper outlines the findings of three distinct design days, all centred on human-forest interaction. The objective is to explore the gameful potential of the intersection between humans, forests, and technology. The design approac...

The academic research in information systems and neighboring disciplines has produced multiple terms and concepts relating to media-generated ``realities", often called with the umbrella acronym XR denoting either ``extended reality", ``x-reality" or ``cross reality". As new technological solutions and media emerge along with new modalities and for...

Throughout time, imagining fantastic and future cities has played a key role in developing Urban Design as a discipline and a practice. Images of fictional cities strongly influence the way we perceive the urban world today and open the dialogue for negotiating our future urban reality. Following both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches, t...

This chapter investigates the semiotics entails related to speculation and depictions of urban futures. Urban representations contain and display a series of assumptions, and perspectives both in regard of how the future is conceived, and of the role that cities will have in it. In this chapter we construct two semiotically-oriented tools for syste...

The Wild Probes (WPs) are a set of hybrid tools for designers and researchers to facilitate multi-stakeholder co-design engagements within the forest. They support situated forestry future-making by helping the participants of a co-design process pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences in ways that can i...

keywords transurbanism, production of space, semiosphere, design fiction, pastiche scenario, urban planning, urban design, additive manufacturing, transhumanism. What if the material and the social production of space were to coincide? Tekhla is a (fictional) transurban city in which the cognitive augmentations of citizens allow them to continuousl...

This paper presents a study based on research through design, exploring the potentials of the intersection between human play, forests, and technology. Building on the existing literature on urban games, we introduce the idea of sylvan games which focus on deepening the relations between players and natural spaces. We designed two different games,...

The rapid advancements in Extended Reality (XR) technologies and their integration into the urban design process bring the definition of 'space' and its production to the forefront, where a new type of designable space that accompanies, surrounds, and complements physical urban interventions emerges: the virtual space. XR technology has opened up n...

This chapter aims to initiate a dialogue between semiotics of culture and existential semiotics about how to understand and conceptualise the changing role of games and play in contemporary society. Games have become the largest cultural industry in the World and their prestige is now exceeding their traditional borders and contaminates the languag...

In Carlos Machado e Moura, Dalia Milián Bernal, Esteban Restrepo Restrepo, Klaske Havik, Lorin Niculae (2023) REPOSITORY - 49 Methods and Assignments for Writing Urban Spaces. COST Action Writing Unrban Spaces, nai0l0publishers

This paper introduces the notion of speculative semiotics as a scientific project within the larger umb- rella of speculative studies. The paper first provides a brief account of the projects of “nuclear semiotics” that investigated how to communicate across long periods of time. These efforts are then connected to the traditions of speculative des...

Engaging citizens with climate change is an urgent and complex issue. Gamified initiatives such as game-based learning are used to promote awareness, emotional connection, and action, but we would benefit from more examples of how players truly play serious games and learn through them, especially regarding climate change, which presents unique cha...

Games have been used for utilitarian purposes since at least the 1960s, with gamification pursuing game-like experiences in areas such as education, health, and sustainability. While these methods generally attempt to improve life for players, a central and underexplored issue is the friction between a design that wants players to attain a utilitar...

Forests are, both culturally and ecologically, one of the most important environments on our planet. As such, there are countless representations of them - with Digital Games being no exception. In this paper we adopt the perspective of ecocriticism, which regards the analysis of the textual portrayal of physical environments of the natural world....

This paper investigates how play practices affect players’ relationships with the urban environment through the bodily movement and performances that characterize them. Building on a definition of playful behavior derived by semiotics of culture, we investigate urban play from the perspective of motor praxology to outline how movement is central fo...

VRChat is a popular social virtual reality (VR) application with a strong user base and count less virtual worlds to explore and avatars to "wear". The breadth and popularity of this social VR game, and the forms of interaction that it allows, makes it a fascinating case study for investigating the effects of VR experiences in the creation and comm...

In this book, we compare and contrast the various forms of play that occur in urban environments or are dedicated to their design and planning, with the notion of the playable city. In a playable city, the sensors, actuators, and digital communication networks that form the backbone of smart city infrastructure are used to create novel interfaces a...

In this Research Topic, we compare and contrast the various forms of play that occur in urban environments or are dedicated to their design and planning, with the notion of the playable city. In a playable city, the sensors, actuators, and digital communication networks that form the backbone of smart city infrastructure are used to create novel in...

This article builds on previous scholarship on urban play, playable cities, and gamification by focusing on the contemporary relationship between play and mobility in cities. The article applies Floch’s semiotic square of valorisations to urban mobility by examining the values that are employed to make sense of movement through the city. The model...

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic that affected many cities around the world during the spring and summer 2020 was often met with regulations requiring people to lockdown, to quarantine or to respect social distancing. Urban spaces often became off-limits and depopulated, filled with borders isolating people confined at home. Nevertheless, in...

Games have always been everywhere. This is increasingly so because of the expanding pervasiveness of games in contemporary culture, shift to post-industrial era and the general awakening to the importance of human motivation, creativity and empowerment in the context of today’s human pursuits. This sudden but explosively expanding trend of gamifica...

Images of Hong Kong protestors tearing down facial recognition towers to avoid being identified by the authorities started circulating online in September 2019, quickly becoming a symbol of the technological dimension of contemporary struggles against power. While, on the one hand, devices aiming at dissimulating faces from facial recognition syste...

In this paper we present MESMER, a work-in-progress tangible conversation tool for playful design. Our work extends the Otherworld Framework (OF) [7] for tangible tools by centering specifically on play as a conversation topic. Here we unpack how early experiments with OF motivated our work and describe the current iteration of the MESMER tool, whi...

Smart city technologies offer the potential to address issues of sustainability and efficiency in cities. Continuous monitoring, geotracking and ubiquitous computing offer tools for engaging citizens, influence their behaviour and measuring its impact on the city. These technologies, however, are not neutral: if handled in a top-down way, give rise...

Smart Cities and Virtual Reality technologies are at the centre of many scientific and political discourses and are generally presented as among the major technological innovations of our time. This chapter aims to investigate the relationship between cities and VR and, in particular, how urban spaces are represented through VR technologies. This c...

The collection of articles in this issue of Versus on the semiotics of concealment proposes theoretical reflections and some of their possible applications on the many facets of secret communication. The aim of these texts is to bring together a semiotic methodology, to enunciate the logic of decryption, to highlight some rhetoric of dissimulation...

Tutti sappiamo, o pensiamo di sapere, che cos’è il gioco, ma come funziona davvero questo dispositivo culturale irrinunciabile e variegato? Che cosa significa “giocare”? Quali operazioni interpretative e comunicative comporta? Oggi, mentre la nostra cultura appare essere oggetto di una progressiva ludicizzazione testimoniata dal fiorire dell’indust...

What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries , institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human...

This chapter outlines a specific framework for the creation of critical playable cities. This framework combines three different concepts: DIY urbanism, critical design and urban gamification which are seen as complementary to each other. Cities are complex systems. Various actors often explicitly or implicitly harmonize or collide to shape the lan...

This paper investigates the use of the Klingon conlang outside the Star Trek franchise , trying to shed some light on why people invest time and effort to learn a very complex fictional language. The paper starts by outlining the history of the conlang, from its creation to its diffusion. It then proceeds to analysing the relationship between the K...

This paper investigates, from a semiotic perspective, the relationship between gamification and the latest digital marketing approaches within tourism and travel industry. First, we outline tourism as a specific form of valorisation, that produces-and is produced-by the tourist gaze. Such valorisation, however, changes with the semiosphere. Therefo...

This paper proposes a reflection on the notion of island and on its cultural productivity grounded in its morphological, logistical and symbolical features. First of all, we present a brief overview of the semiotic properties of water, underlining how it affects anthropic spaces such as cities and the way we interpret them. The second paragraph is...

Religious topics are increasingly common in video games, frequently addressing issues such as spirituality and transcendence. Yet this is only the surface of more complex phenomena, deeply tied to religious experience itself in interactive digital simulations. The aim of the chapter is to highlight the implications of the ties between religion and...

The aim of this paper is to overview the presence of catastrophes in game worlds and, in particular, to investigate what they can tell us about real catastrophes. To this end, we present a semiotic typol-ogy of catastrophes, confronting them with epistrophes and apostrophes and further articulating them relative and absolute cessation events. Then...

Our paper focuses on toyification. By this phenomenon, we point to two, parallel developments: 1) The increasing prestige of toys, which start to find their way in classrooms, art museums, fashion and so on, influencing in this way other languages, and, 2) The deliberate attempt to design products according to toy aesthetics in order to make them m...

This paper aims at proposing an alternative take on gamification, based on bottom up approaches and critical design. In the first part of the paper, several issues concerning gamification are reviewed: the claim that it is exploitative, the problematic definition of game elements as well as gamification's connections to power and discipline and the...

This paper aims to propose a semiotic perspective on how play can be used to change the citizens’ perception of the city. The paper propose a meaning-centered understanding both of play activities (seen as resemantisations of the surrounding environment) and of urban spaces (seen as complex meaning-making machines) and attempts to show how the firs...

The paper provides an overview of the macro-isotopy “cat”, a totemic figure disputed between the elitist and often-esoteric subculture related to the origins of Internet and the standardized mass culture permeating social media. Due to its features, “cat” is a cultural unit which is easy to anthropomorphize and iconize, according to a variety of te...

This paper introduces the concept of guerrilla memory as a strategy for transmitting historical memory that: 1) makes use of unconventional communication techniques, 2) moves the space/time dedicated to the memory in everyday life and 3) focuses on a humanized take on the events, often embodied by one or more martyrs. The paper, after introducing t...

In January 2018 the first promotional materials of Nintendo Labo (an expansion for Nintendo Switch allowing players to build cardboard interfaces, Figure 1) raised a lot of interest and hype around the product: the mixture of digital games and analogue playfulness, of sophisticated software and low-fi interface was both novel and appealing. In this...

Le retoriche giornalistiche e gli immaginari mediali ci parlano di un mondo in declino, il cui orizzonte si fa sempre più difficile da scorgere, tormentato da innumerevoli paure e messo in discussione da catastrofi imminenti. Crisi politiche, disastri ecologici, complotti globali, scenari da fine del mondo. Ma qual è il confine tra pericoli attuali...

The aim of the article is to introduce an approach to play based on semiotics of culture and, in particular, grounded in the works and ideas of Juri Lotman. On the one hand, it provides an overview of Lotman's works dedicated to play and games, starting from his article on art among other modelling systems, in which the phenomenon of play is treate...

Even though literary genres are instrumental for the study and analysis of video games, we should also take into consideration that, nowadays, the boundaries of literature have been crossed and we have to deal with a broader transmedia reality. Approaching it can be quite challenging and, in addition to the already existing genre theory, it require...

This paper approaches the visual alternatives to photorealistic computer games graphics â and in particular those influenced by analogue aesthetics â that appear to become more and more common in the indie game scene. The release of a great number of retro-games with pixelated aesthetics, the imminent publication of many analogue-looking video game...

Nowadays game studies are in the foreground of cultural and communication debates. Even if video games are strongly studied in semiotics, play is a wide field of study with many areas still unexplored. The area that this paper aims to explore concerns board games and it focuses on the relationship between game and narration and the role of a game’s...

Conspiracy theories permeate through every level of the Web. The semiotic features of this medium lead to mistrust, misunderstanding, and aberrant interpretations entailing a mythological approach to meaning. The essay investigates the relations between conspiracy theories and the semiotic features of a peculiar area of the Web: its peripheries. In...

Even though literary genres are instrumental for the study and analysis of video games, we should also take into consideration that, nowadays, the boundaries of literature have been crossed and we have to deal with a broader transmedia reality. Approaching it can be quite challenging and, in addition to the already existing genre theory, it require...

This paper aims to reconstruct the fortune of the semiotic analysis of cartomancy, considered as a proper semiotic system, focusing in particular on the point of view of Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics (TMS). TMS, founded by the renowned semiotician Yuri Lotman, offers one of the most interesting semiotic approaches to culture and communication ye...

This paper is part of the collective effort that sees many semoticians increasingly applying their analytic tools to the Internet, in order to give birth to an authentic "semiotics of the Web", capable of shedding some light one our time's most interesting medium. In particular I deploy the tools of Lotman's semiotics of culture in order to approac...

This paper exposes some considerations on images' agentivity and its links with biology and evolution. Trying to find out which kind of images are able to make people do things without involving any cognitive process, brings us to wonder about the role of natural instinct in our way of communicate. A biosemiotic point of view become thus very impor...