Games are bad mmmmkay. A lot has been said about the (postponed) release of Manhunt 2. I really want to write an opinion piece about it, but I lack the time. And maybe my opinion is not that valuable. So, I did a story for De Pers instead. I tried to be as balanced and non-opinionated (in the newspaper piece) as possible. It is for you, the reader, to decide what the **** is going on in the heads of both Rockstar and Dutch politicians.

The article is titled: “Censuur of bescherming“, it was in the paper edition last Friday June 22 (page 17). I would say censorship and I think that censoring adult games is a reallly slippery slope. Yet, if there is one game that has to be censored, well let it be Manhunt 2 then.

O and for the love of everything that is ludological, please do not ban Forza Motorsport 2, I just unlocked and pimped my new Volvo S60r.

It’s almost summertime (i.e. no teaching/lecturing) and the Folia asked me to write a piece on Second Life for the special Folia summer edition. I wrote about ‘The Hype’, the University of Amsterdam in Second Life and about Amsterdam in Second Life. The article is on page 26-27 (and some nice homemade screenshots :) and the .pdf is downloadble here. From the (end of the) article:

De zomer biedt een uitgelezen mogelijkheid om je eens te verdiepen en zelf een oordeel te vormen over wat Second Life nu zo bijzonder maakt, of juist niet. En dan niet meteen opgeven. De leercurve ligt hoog, dat is bekend. Het zal enkele uren kosten om je draai te vinden. Second Life bezoeken is in ieder geval minder vermoeiend dan jumpstyle, die andere hype.

You’ve got game magazine EDGE, we got GMR. Ok, EDGE is in a league of its own, but GMR is one of the few more serious game magazines in the Netherlands. So I am proud that I contributed to the third issue of 2007.

The story I wrote is on ‘the game canon‘, an initiative by five experts who want to conserve games. There is a NY Times piece on it from March 12, 2007:

In just a few years, however, Mr. Lowood’s notion that video games were something with a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying has gone from absurd to worthy of consideration by the Library of Congress.

My article digs a little deeper into the what and why of this laudable initiative. GMR is in stores for the coming two months, my article is on page 40-41. I will not put the article up here until the new number comes out. But, common, buy the magazine!

My (ex) colleague Marinka Copier from Utrecht University defended her PhD last Tuesday. It was a nice ceremony and it was great catching up with former colleagues and foreign visitors such as prof. Aarseth. In honor of her PhD entitled “Beyond the magic circle, a network perspective on role-play in online games” I wrote a piece for De Pers. I read most of her PhD and especially the ethnographic parts are real page turners.

The article is called “Even een oorlogje winnen” (page 14) and is of course downloadable (.pdf).

Studying games within a university setting is hard, it is a challenge. A really really hard challenge where the rules constantly change, where there is constant struggle for getting game studies on the institutional agenda. Back in 2002 Espen Aarseth already compared doing game studies within a university with a game:
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