Some weeks ago, when the sun was still shining and I was hidden in my PhD villa, I contributed on an Al-Jazeera English production. My contribution is very small, just two quotes about the military entertainment complex in general. The overall report is very good, they did an outstanding job fleshing out the subject (media & the military) and have some very good material, both from movies & games, as well as quality insights from experts.

The “Military and Media” special, part of the Listening Post-series, aired last Sunday (August 10) and is to be seen on Youtube, see part 1 and part 2. Part 1 is mainly about propaganda & film, part 2 features military games such as America’s Army, Call of Duty 4, and Special Force. My, again very small contribution, is in part 1. Kudos for Al-Jazeera. Their report is both critical and insightful without being overly sensationalist. And, best of all, it is very well researched!

Amidst all the writing (on my PhD) I worked on some additional academic publications, they are here in the Academic Writings section. One is a book chapter for a book to be published by Routledge early 2009. The chapter is titled: “Training recruits and conditioning youth: The Soft Power of Military Games”, the book will be titled “Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games”, a volume edited by Nina B Huntemann & Matthew Thomas Payne. Needless to say, I’m very proud to be a part of this. My chapter will be in the opening section of the book. From the looks of it, it will be a contribution to the field, as they say.

Another high-profile academic publication is an essay I co-wrote with my professor (and PhD supervisor) José van Dijck. The essay is titled “Wikinomics and its discontents. A critical analysis of collaborative culture manifestos” and deals with discussions which appear in books as Wikinomics, We-Think and Convergence Culture. The essay will appear in a forthcoming issue of the New Media and Society journal published by Sage. When all the copyright stuff is dealt with, I’ll put up the abstract. With a bit of luck the piece might make either this year’s October or December issue. From all the academic publications I’ve done over the years this is one which is very important to me because it does not deals with games whatsoever, but rather with participatory culture, user-created content and mass-creativity and the way in which business literature shapes the (non-academic) discourse on such practices. In addition, I learned quite a lot from co-writing the piece. A supportive professor who is able to share, teach, inspire, guide and mentor (all at the same time) truly is a gift from heaven.

Onto lighter stuff. Last Tuesday I did two very short reviews on two DS games for Dagblad De Pers on August 5 (.pdf). They’re online as well: “Handig: achterin de auto trainen voor je rijexamen” & “Geduld met de virtuele baby“.

Next stop, Leipzig!

(PS. If YOU are in Leipzig between August 20-22, drop me an email and we can meet up).