School of Design

How does the massively-multiplayer online gameworld (MMOG) of World of Warcraft (WoW) refute or reflect the capitalist leanings of the neoliberal culture in which it is situated? How does this understanding of gaming as suspect leisure feed out into the everyday understood associations between gaming, leisure, labour, and being in a neoliberal context? Using these questions as a foundation for investigation, this thesis analyzes connections between gameworld participation as an activity, the WoW gameworld as a lived environment, and that activity and gameworld‘s relation to leisure, labour and being, and demonstrates how these understandings commit at least one of four ontological errors. By situating gameworld participation as a set of hybrid work-leisure practices that re-inscribes neoliberalism, this thesis will describe how MMOG participation is an activity that is a full corroboration of the work, consumption and action orientations of western neoliberal capitalism.

What is the work that gamer-communication accomplishes, and how can we make visible the discursive elements of gaming that are ‘made to matter’ (Latour 2004; Law, 2004) and are materialized in and through such communication? Drawing on an extensive data set of chatlogs, player interviews and off-line communications compiled from our study of 250 MMO players, this paper borrows tools from both actor-network theory and discourse analysis to examine MMO discourse as ‘situated action’. Its purpose is to understand how the discursive communities formed within, by and around games position players and manage play, and through what specific discursive materials and practices this work is accomplished.

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In order to understand the social mechanics of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), this paper presents a situated action analysis of the ARG, "I Love Bees". We examine the action traces found within the ILB forum accounts around teamwork and puzzle solving. Our playful assemblages or "ludic ecologies" demonstrate that the presence or absence of certain non-human actants has a definite impact on each ludic ecology, and that each impact is contextually specific. We found that the careful design of in-game challenges by the game designers worked differently in practice because of the impact of unconsidered non-human actants. In response, players formed teams and adopted technology to overcome their specific temporal, spatial and organizational constraints. Therefore, designers of collaborative systems and online communities need to provide appropriate sociotechnical infrastructure to support player needs, and nonhuman actants should be considered when studying and designing hybrid digital/physical environments.

Pregnancy is a period of life that is most often understood in mHealth design as a medical issue. Recognizing that there is more to pregnancy than medical health, as understood by diet, exercise, sleep and fetal development, we set out to understand pregnancy from the perspective of lower-income American women. Through our qualitative study, we present our pregnancy ecology concept, which accounts for the multi-faceted experience of pregnancy as a transformational event within the life course. We use the ecology concept to call for a paradigm shift in mHealth design, away from medical information and diet and exercise tracking, and toward the use of pregnancy as a teachable moment in encouraging healthy life management practices generally.

We present a novel method for conducting requirements gathering with adolescent populations. Called videographic requirements gathering, this technique makes use of mobile phone data capture and participant creation of media images. The videographic requirements gathering method can help researchers and designers gain intimate insight into adolescent lives while simultaneously reducing power imbalances. We provide rationale for this approach, pragmatics of using the method, and advice on overcoming common challenges facing researchers and designers relying on this technique.

ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of an ongoing study into the potential role of mobile or wireless health applications for targeting the prevention of excessive gestational weight gain in pregnant lower-income American women. Informed by a qualitative study of pregnant women's experiences, we develop a set of design requirements for designing mobile health (mHealth) interventions related to healthy pregnancies. We identify a disconnection between physical activity and food tracking application design paradigms, and the reality of pregnant women's lives and capacities. We introduce the concept of an individualized pregnancy ecology, which provides an alternative paradigm for design of health and wellness management tools for lower-income pregnant women.

This ongoing research project examines ad-hoc virtual teamwork in playful environments. Our results suggest that alternate reality game (ARG) players devise leadership structures spontaneously over short periods of time, in response to a lack of formal structure. In the ARG we studied, teams self-structured around tropes of military culture, going so far as to adopt military ranks to describe team roles and individual statuses. Our findings have implications for effective in-game virtual organizing, and for the design of gameful environments.

Ad-hoc virtual teams often lack tools to formalize leadership and structure collaboration, yet they are often successful. How does this happen? We argue that the emergence of leadership and the development of expertise occurs in the process of taking action and in direct response to a lack of structure. Using a twinned set of eight modality sliders, we examine the interactions of fourteen players in an alternate reality game. We find that players adopted military language and culture to structure and arrange their play. We determine that it is critical to account for the context of play across these modalities in order to design appropriately for effective in-game virtual organizing.

I investigate the potential for mobile health communication and social collaboration technologies (mHealth) to have a positive impact on pregnancy for lower-income American women. Recognizing that pregnancy is more than medical health, I set out to understand what pregnancy is for this population and how the embodied experience of pregnancy impacts women's lives. I have initiated a mixed methods study, which uses focus groups, interviews, information landscape analysis and social media discourse analysis. From the preliminary focus group and interview data, I have created a structuring health concept that I call the pregnancy ecology, accounting for the multi-faceted experience of pregnancy as a transformational event. The future work will incorporate all of the data into a holistic health ecology concept for pregnancy. Using this concept, I intend to design and build a mHealth app that treats pregnancy as a teachable moment for health, wellness and social support throughout the lifecourse.

*PhD Dissertation*

Developing and delivering contextually-sensitive user experiences in sociotechnical systems which are geared at helping lower-income women manage their pregnancies requires understanding the human, technological, and the sociotechnical perspectives that are embedded in the mediation of the experience. Yet most digital systems and tools for pregnancy management treat pregnancy experiences as problems: problems of health, problems of socioeconomic status, and problems of consumer power.

Through my depiction of the design space, I give attention to specific situational contexts of lower-income pregnancy. Using a contextual qualitative research approach, and the results of three research studies, I identify the set of information, situations, and interactions of lower-income women around pregnancy-related interactions and management. I detail expectant women’s adoption of technology tools and digital information for guiding their pregnancy management. I focus on the relations between information and social interaction needs relative to the impacts of pregnancy on subjective impressions of wellness, and on the expectant woman’s abilities to adjust her life and her coping strategies to the pregnancy experience. Framing the experience of lower-income pregnancy as a sociotechnical experience that is heavily mediated by digital and mobile technologies, I employ an action process stance towards opportunities and challenges within lower-income women’s lived experience of pregnancy as a structure for my response to the sociotechnical design opportunity.

I provide a set of eight evidence-based design considerations which incorporate the dimensionality of everyday pregnancy experiences into a revised design space. Through my research findings and my eight design recommendations, I offer three contributions to the fields of mobile human-computer interaction design specifically, and the domains of human-computer interaction and medical informatics generally. My first contribution is an articulation of the mobile app design space of lower-income pregnancy. My second contribution provides a scope of the gaps, oversights and issues with existing mobile applications for pregnancy, relative to lower-income women. My third contribution is a set of eight design considerations which reflect a sociotechnical approach to viewing lower-income pregnancy as inter-dependent sets of interactions between humans, technology and information. By reshaping the digital design space of lower income pregnancy, and taking into account the offered design considerations, the intended outcome of a new mobile app for lower-income pregnant women would be increased feelings of pregnancy success, improved information management capacities, and better emotional and physical coping strategies within pregnancy and throughout women’s lives.

Pregnancy is a major life experience that changes relationships, identities, and home environments. It is a personal, collaborative, and domestic process of health changes, behavioral adaptations, and social adjustments that goes beyond the medical care of a pregnant woman. Using the lenses of information and support ecologies, we examine whether the complexities of pregnancy are reflected in the design of mobile technologies that support this life altering experience. To do this, we analyzed 191 iOS pregnancy applications (" apps ") to understand the types of functionality they supported. We found that the majority provided static medical and birth event information but had shallow functionality for leveraging social support. Almost all apps excluded expectant fathers, used gendered interfaces and information choices, and focused primarily on fetal development or the pregnant woman's physical health. We call for less gendered and more meaningfully collaborative mobile health technologies to support pregnancy.

We present a novel method for conducting requirements gathering with adolescent populations. Called videographic requirements gathering, this technique makes use of mobile phone data capture and participant creation of media images. The videographic requirements gathering method can help researchers and designers gain intimate insight into adolescent lives while simultaneously reducing power imbalances. We provide rationale for this approach, pragmatics of using the method, and advice on overcoming common challenges facing researchers and designers relying on this technique.

The author has granted a nonexclusive license allowing Library and Archives Canada to reproduce, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, communicate to the public by telecommunication or on the Internet, loan, distribute and sell theses worldwide, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, in microform, paper, electronic and/or any other formats. L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou autres formats. 1*1 Canada CARLETON UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled "Neoliberal digitality, labour and leisure in an MMOG: An ethnography and analysis" submitted by Tamara Paradis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS.

The prenatal care visit structure has changed little over the past century despite the rapid evolution of technology including Internet and mobile phones. Little is known about how pregnant women engage with technologies and the interface between these tools and medical care, especially for women of lower socioeconomic status. We sought to understand how women use technology during pregnancy through a qualitative study with women enrolled in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. We recruited pregnant women ages 18 and older who owned a smartphone, at a WIC clinic in central Pennsylvania. The focus group guide included questions about women's current pregnancy, their sources of information, and whether they used technology for pregnancy-related information. Sessions were audiotaped and transcribed. Three members of the research team independently analyzed each transcript, using a thematic analysis approach. Themes related to the topics discussed were identified, for which there was full agreement. Results: Four focus groups were conducted with a total of 17 women. Three major themes emerged as follows. First, the prenatal visit structure is not patient-centered, with the first visit perceived as occurring too late and with too few visits early in pregnancy when women have the most questions for their prenatal care providers. Unfortunately, the educational materials women received during prenatal care were viewed as unhelpful. Second, women turn to technology (eg, Google, smartphone applications) to fill their knowledge gaps. Turning to technology was viewed to be a generational approach. Finally, women reported that technology, although frequently used, has limitations. The results of this qualitative research suggest that the current prenatal care visit structure is not patient-centered in that it does not allow women to seek advice when they want it most. A generational shift seems to have occurred, resulting in pregnant women in our study turning to the Internet and smartphones to fill this gap, which requires significant skills to navigate for useful information. Future steps may include developing interventions to help health care providers assist patients early in pregnancy to seek the information they want and to become better consumers of Internet-based pregnancy resources.

Background-For adolescents and young adults (AYA) with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the transition from pediatric to adult care is often challenging and associated with gaps in care. Our study objectives were to (1) identify outcomes for evaluating transition success and (2) elicit the major barriers and facilitators of successful transition.

Developing and delivering contextually-sensitive user experiences in sociotechnical systems which are geared at helping lower-income women manage their pregnancies requires understanding the human, technological, and the sociotechnical perspectives that are embedded in the mediation of the experience. Yet most digital systems and tools for pregnancy management treat pregnancy experiences as problems: problems of health, problems of socioeconomic status, and problems of consumer power. v Research Design .

Extending Corneliussen's [2008] study of the gender disparity of World of Warcraft Non-Player Characters (NPCs), this paper examines the relationship between sex and profession of NPCs in in the same game. Because NPCs are understudied to date, we attempt to show where and how normative frameworks are, even if unintended, working very much to marginalize women. Our primary focus is to determine if stereotypical associations between types of jobs and the bodies that are depicted performing these jobs are being reinforced. Our findings show that while there are male and female NPCs for all professions, they are not equally represented. There is no statistically significant pattern linking gender and profession, however, males still make up approximately two thirds of the NPCs associated with a 'job' within this particular gameworld. There seems to be subtle hierarchies at work within the distribution of professions within World of Warcraft. For example, ideas of gender in the field of medicine have been transposed into the gameworld through the use of some male first aid NPCs having the title 'Doctor', and yet the title given to a female trainer of the same profession is 'Nurse'. Ultimately, we argue that there are other forces, influences and processes to consider when examining a sociotechnical system like World of Warcraft, including player preferences and conditioning, the fantasy lore upon which the game draws (as well as produces) and the general presentation of gender roles in the larger sociotechnical context.