A piece for De Pers on the Wii game My Horse & Me. It’s a game on horses (you wouldn’t say right) targeted at little girls. It will be interesting to see whether it gets picked up. I did an extensive interview with Maarten Brands (marketing & sales director) at W!Games – the studio is located in the city center of Amsterdam. I played the game which was quite fun. If you want to join an interesting discussion on reviewing casual games in the hardcore versus the mainstream press, go over to Bashers.nl.

Yesterday (which happened to be my b-day) I had a background article in the Saturday edition of Dagblad De Pers. It is a piece about which console (Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360) to buy this holiday season and why (not). Check it out in this .pdf, see page 21. I personally are very enthusiastic about Super Mario Galaxy, Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 and Call of Duty 4.

Last thursday I did a workshop at the Corporate Social Network (CSN) Conference, hosted by Krem, in Amsterdam. The room was packed with PR and marketing peeps and I had a very good time and got some good feedback. There is a great write-up about my lecture over at Frankwatching.nl, including slides and all.

The Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs is looking for ways how to strengthen its ties with the general public through virtual worlds. They need the help of you (the creative people) to envision how such a cooperation would look (or feel or sound) like. Sounds like a noble cause right? There is more information on the Virtuele Overheid website. There’s also a Youtube clip. You can win some prizes and the options to enter the contest are manifold:

Het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (BZK) schrijft een prijsvraag uit voor innovatieve en bruikbare toepassingen in virtuele werelden voor de overheid. Uit de inzendingen wil BZK een beeld krijgen van de mogelijkheden voor de overheid om zich te manifesteren in, dan wel gebruik te maken van virtuele werelden.

De vorm waarin de inzending kan worden ingediend is vrij. Dit kan met een filmpje, een blog (eventueel met video als vlog), of als tekst. Het is niet nodig dat het idee daadwerkelijk is uitgewerkt in een virtuele wereld zoals Second Life, al dient de inzending wel voldoende duidelijkheid te geven over de mogelijkheden van uitvoering.

This morning I was interviewed on L1 (Radio Limburg) about elderly people playing games. Or rather, why they don’t. There is no transcript or audio file but there will be one soon (probably). The interview was a plug for my lecture this Thursday in Maastricht:

Voorbij de morele paniek – Gamecultuur anno 2007 – Donderdag 22 november , 20.00 uur – Aula Bestuursgebouw Minderbroederberg 4-6

Together with my professor and PhD-supervisor José van Dijck I wrote a book review on three highly important and interesting books on participatory culture (Henry Jenkins‘ Convergence Culture), co-creation from a business perspective (Tapscott and William‘s Wikinomics) and the political economy of the information economy (Benkler‘s Wealth of Networks). The review appears in De Academische Boekengids, coincidentally exactly two years after I wrote a book review on games (“Spelend Leren – De ontluikende relatie tussen wetenschap en games“). Suffice to say, I am very honored to publish this particular piece with José and I think the review raises some important issues regarding contemporary digital culture.

Here’s a short introduction:

Met de belangeloze bijdragen van burgers op internet ontstaat een wereldwijde digitale cultuur. Grote bedrijven profiteren echter graag van de creativiteit van internetgebruikers.

The article, De opmars van de cybernauten – Drie nieuwe studies geven hun visie op de digitale participatiecultuur, can be read online and is available on paper at all major Dutch universities.