Yeah, all rumors you heard today are true. It is actually my birthday today. And yes, I’m also back in Amsterdam. Am I happy about that? What do you think? Honestly…?

For today’s paper I did an interview with University of Amsterdam PhD-student René Glas on the latest World of Warcraft expansion pack. It was an insightful conversation we had on hardcore versus casual WoW-players and on the merits of expansion packs. I also spoke with HKU lecturer Zuraida Buter who played WoW since the beta (respect!) and was happy to carry on with adventuring. The piece is here: “’World of Warcraft’ blijft groeien – Een knieval voor de massa”.

In addition I wrote a small review on the new Xbox 360 dashboard, XNE, and those dreadful avatars; “Geen interface, maar een ervaring” (the title was actually a remark made by my, sort of former now, GAMBIT colleague Jesper made about the new dashboard experience.

On related news, last week I posted a semi-academic review of Fable 2 (as blogged here). The article was picked up by various game blogs, such as Kotaku, resulting in quite some (insightful) comments and feedback. All I can say is: W00000t!