The ubiquity and integration of technology into daily life have blurred the boundaries of where technology ends and an individual begins. This cyborg existence necessitates a better understanding of how individuals conceptualise their relationships with technology. Researchers recently developed a concept IT identity to explain the phenomenon of people identifying themselves in relation to IT. Though emergent literature demonstrates the predictive power of IT identity as an antecedent to technology use, there have yet to be empirical investigations into how and why people make claims about themselves in relation to IT. This exploration is crucial to understanding the drivers of IT identification. Using an inductive approach, we conducted in-depth interviews with 51 individuals from diverse walks of life. We found evidence of IT identity through IT identity claims regarding emotional energy, dependence, and relatedness. IT identity spanned spectrums from weak to strong and positive to negative. Our analysis further reveals that IT identity can be ambivalent, as evidenced by inconsistent implicit and explicit IT identity claims. The interplay between social desirability, oneness, and personal values explains the IT identity claim patterns, with values at the core of these relationships. We develop an IT identification framework to explain these complex relationships.

The controls for digital games understandably have an important part in building up the gaming experiences that people have. Whilst there is substantial work on innovative controllers for consoles, like the XBox Kinect, relatively little has been done to understand the effect of the different control mechanisms that can be used to play games on mobile devices like smartphones. A well-defined framework of naturalness has emerged as potentially useful concept in area of game controllers. This paper reports two experiments that look at how the naturalness of the game controls influences the experience of immersion in mobile games. It seems that where there is an a prior natural mapping, this will improve immersion in the game but in the absence of a prior mapping, naturalness alone is not sufficient to account for immersion. This opens up the need for a more thorough investigation of this area.