Maurizio Tirassa | Università degli Studi di Torino (original) (raw)

Papers by Maurizio Tirassa

Frontiers research topics, 2019

Psychological Applications and Trends 2022, Apr 22, 2022

In recent decades, work has been going through a series of transformations leading to the rise of... more In recent decades, work has been going through a series of transformations leading to the rise of virtual organizations and to the spread of gamification practices. On the other side, also play activities have been going through a process of "workification", with the rise of phenomena such as "grinding" in video games. Nowadays, the boundaries between work and play are blurred, so that the old dichotomies between game and labour do not hold anymore. This entanglement between work and play might shape the organizations and the dynamics of their members, radically. To understand how, we investigate organizational dynamics occurring in a multiplayer video game, as virtual gaming worlds are often designed to replicate complex social structures and serious work ecosystems. We involve Esports professionals, streamers, and amateur players as they differently intertwine "playing" and "working" practices during the gaming activity. Professionals have problems that are typical of workers, like pursuing a remunerated career in the area; streamers invest an emotional labour during live performances in order to attract spectators who economically sustain them; amateur players could perceive their activity as a "second work". An ethnographic study within an Italian gaming community is in progress. We focus on "Call of Duty: Warzone", a First-Person Shooter Battle Royale game which requires players to enact organizational efforts in order to reach the in-game objectives (e.g., defeat the enemy team). The study uses i) semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted in the game environment played by the amateurs, ii-iii) observation of gaming sessions, analysis of online content and semi-structured interviews with reference to streamers and professional, iv) analysis of communication exchanges of all three types of players during the gaming sessions. We expect that players belonging to different categories will enact distinct organizational behaviours and give rise to various organizational structures. A cross-comparison between them, which is missing in current literature, would clarify how different modalities of combining work and play impact on organizational behaviours and dynamics; it could also help both academic and practitioners address the issues faced by current working virtual organizations, by providing insights on how to effectively organize people collaborating from a distance through "best practices" that can be found in games. Preliminary results will be presented at the conference. Since the study is targeted to the Italian context, generalization of the results might be difficult; however, we expect to provide rich insights through the adoption of a qualitative ethnographic approach.

Fieldwork in Religion, Mar 15, 2023

The aim of the research was to study motivations to volunteer, and their relationship with religi... more The aim of the research was to study motivations to volunteer, and their relationship with religious orientation in a sample of volunteers working in a Catholic organization. A self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 190 volunteers working in a Catholic organization based in a large city in northern Italy and devoted to ending poverty and situations of marginalization through the promotion of social justice. Of these, 160 (90 females, 70 males) agreed to participate. The main result was that all motivations, except Career, increased with the intrinsic religious orientation. The Social and Career functions increased with the extrinsic-social religious orientation. The Protective and Enhancement functions increased with all religious orientations. The result concerning gender differences showed that the creation of a social network through volunteering and the opportunities to create and maintain a positive relationship with others are more important to women than men. Managers could benefit from these findings to improve the recruitment and retaining of volunteers and to think strategically about the mission and the cultural/religious belief of the organization. The impact of two and a half years of Covid-19 policies, however, remains unclear.

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers

This paper presents an ongoing project, PIUMA, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism, wi... more This paper presents an ongoing project, PIUMA, Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism, with the aim to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move and live within cities.

Investigando la mejora de la enseñanza universitaria a través del aprendizaje-servicio, 2017, ISBN 9788433860804, págs. 11-17, 2017

Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021, 2021

The PIUMA app aims at allowing users with autism to explore their city, finding new places that c... more The PIUMA app aims at allowing users with autism to explore their city, finding new places that can be interesting for them but at the same time do not annoy them. Users can navigate the city through an interactive map that is both personalized and crowdsourced.

This is an encyclopedia entry and does not include an abstract.

Human–Computer Interaction

The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in people's lives. The Human-Computer Interacti... more The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in people's lives. The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community widely investigated technology use during crises. However, commercial video games received minor attention. In this article, we describe how video game play impacted the life transformations engendered by the pandemic. We administered a qualitative online survey to 330 video game players who were living in Italy during the lockdown measures. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic altered the participants' sense of time and space, reshaped both their intimate and wider social interactions, and elicited a wide spectrum of disturbing emotions. Players escaped from this unsatisfying reality into video game worlds, searching for a new normality that could compensate for the unpredictability and dangerousness of the pandemic life, as well as seeking uncertainty in the game environments to balance the flatness of the lockdown everydayness. In doing so, they "appropriated" the gaming technologies, which also led to several unexpected outcomes. Starting from these findings, we propose a model of escapism that points out four ways to escape from reality into video game worlds. Moreover, we outline some design implications that might inspire future strands of research in the field of crisis technologies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary approach to the study of mind and intelligence. Its main... more Cognitive science is a multidisciplinary approach to the study of mind and intelligence. Its main goals are to draw the architecture of cognition and to understand how cognition enables an organism to interact with and to produce adaptive behaviour within its environment. Cognitive science has also been defined as the study of the different forms of intelligence that characterize the domains of humans, animals and machines (Von Eckardt 2001). Because of the complexities intrinsic to the study of the mind and of the different levels and perspectives from which it may be studied, some theorists prefer to speak of 'cognitive sciences' in the plural (Miller 2003). Some characteristics that were defining of cognitive science in the 1960s are now considered of doubtful utility, while others that were initially marginal occupy a central role in current theorizing. A consequence of the dynamic and multidisciplinary nature of cognitive science is that it is often unclear whether it should be defined based on its object of study (the mind) or on a particular epistemological and methodological approach to it (the simulative or computational one). The only way to avoid this question is to conflate ontology and methodology, an option that presents problems of its own. For these reasons, the nature of cognitive science is better understood from a historical perspective. The proximal intellectual roots of cognitive science may be situated around the middle of the 20th century with the rise of cybernetics (Wiener 1948). This new science claimed that complex machines have to have control systems (that is, subcomponents of their architecture in charge of governing their inner functioning and their interactions with the external world), and that all such systems are to be considered instances of the same natural kind. Control systems began to be considered as machines in their turn and, because Turing machines (Turing 1936), of which digital computers practically are physical incarnations, were provably able to simulate the functioning of any other finite machine, digital computers began to be used to understand and duplicate control systems. The next step on this path was to view the mind as a control system in its turn (Miller et al. 1960) and to therefore claim that it is a machine (Chomsky 1957) and can be simulated by a digital computer. The final pillar of the burgeoning discipline was the reification of the analogy, that is, the claim that human minds-all minds, actually-are digital computers (Newell and Simon 1976). These final steps took place in the mid-1950s when some disciplines began to view computer simulation as the unifying methodology for the study of the human mind and its cognitive processes (Bara 1995). A specific event, which is often taken to be the birth date of the new science, is a symposium on information science that was held at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in Boston on the 11th of September 1956 (Gardner 1985). The converging disciplines were philosophy, psychology, computer science (later to become artificial intelligence), neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology (Keysers et al. 1978). The formalization of the enterprise as a properly recognized scientific discipline took place in 1977 when the journal Cognitive Science commenced publication, and was completed with the first conference of the Cognitive Science Society in 1979 at the University of California at San Diego. The subcommunities within psychology that underwent the 'cognitive revolution' (Miller 2003) were thus able to abandon behaviourism, which had considered that mind and cognition were unamenable to scientific inquiry. The simulative methodology was based on the functionalistic assumption that the physical structure on which cognitive processes are built in the human body is substantially irrelevant. If, given an input, a computational model can reproduce the same output of a mental process, it may be claimed that such a model reproduces that process, and this is claimed to be all that needs to be understood about it (Turing 1950; Pylyshyn 1984). This close relationship between artificial intelligence and psychology thus lies at the very heart of cognitive science. Human beings are conceived of as information processors with limited capacities and top-down architecture, capable of coding, elaborating, storing and retrieving symbolic structures that represent the objective

The crowdsourcing paradigm (i.e., people while moving provide data from different places) can pla... more The crowdsourcing paradigm (i.e., people while moving provide data from different places) can play a fundamental role in transforming users in significant actors in society. In the last years, several crowdsourcing services have been developed to allow citizens to collaborate collecting data about urban accessibility, but focusing mainly on physical disabilities. The project Personalized Interactive Urban Maps for Autism (PIUMA) aims to help people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) move and live within cities by means of a crowdsourced personalized map. The map is populated with comments and reviews by people with ASD and caregivers, in order to highlight places, routes, and activities (e.g. less crowded routes, quiet places, ways to socially behave in different places) for making ASD people’s daily lives more comfortable. Keywords— Crowdmapping, Inclusive Smart City, Autism

Interest in the implementation of service-learning (SL) in university courses in psychology has r... more Interest in the implementation of service-learning (SL) in university courses in psychology has risen in recent years. SL allows the students not only to read and talk about social problems, but also to act upon them and thus to learn from practice as well. The aim of this work is to present the service-learning experienced in psychology courses at the University of Turin, Italy. The experiences—named “The Volunteer's Helpdesk” and “Service Learning: Urban Area Analysis and Proposals for Action”—were analyzed following the Comprehensive Action Plan for Service Learning (CAPSL) model proposed by Bringle and Hatcher (1996) for implementing SL in higher education. The work presented is intended to contribute to laying the foundation for a broader reflection on how to implement SL in university courses in psychology.