For the Valuable Games Blog, moderated by Berkman Center’s Gene Koo, I wrote a review of Fable 2 and its moral dimension introducing the notion of “gamer guilt” and talking about the game’s “social physics engine”. It builds a bit on my previous newspaper article on the game. The Valuable Games group is a MIT-Harvard cooperation having monthly meetings in order to discuss games for change.

Click: Morality and “Gamer Guilt” in Fable 2.

Amidst all the election preparations, nail biting, partying, after-partying, recovering and generally being very happy and excited, I wrote an article and a review for last Monday’s Dagblad De Pers on the Xbox 360 RPG Fable 2. I interviewed Berkman Center Fellow Gene Koo on games & morality and he helped me framing and understand the underlying goals and morality system as it is implemented in the game. For those who are interested in this particular topic, there is an interesting interview with Peter Molyneux (Fable 2 main developer) on Bashers.nl (by Niels ’t Hooft).

Check out the main story and (small) review here (.pdf link, see page 21).

The elections are only 15 days away, so the NBC ticker tells me every, 5, seconds. Like I would forget. Watching US television all day is a treat for a media scholar. Now I hope to get a robocall, but since I’m not in a swingstate I think that wont happen.

I wrote a story about all this for Dagblad De Pers. Politieke advertenties in videogames: yes we can. I hope I can say this here, but I think it’s one of my better pieces.

After visiting the Leipzig Games Convention last August I wrote quite some articles for GMR (out now!).

- An interview with Kai Huang (CEO of RedOctane) – page 14-15.
- A preview of Call of Duty 5: World At War titled “Van Palau naar Berlijn” – page 22-23.
- A more analytical piece on the show itself: “Leipzig Games Convention 2008 – Gemütlich Gamespektakel” – page 26-27.

In addition I did another studio profile and a feature article on Achievements.

- Ontwikkelaarsprofiel: Gearbox Software – page 32-33.
- Achievement Unlocked: De Zin en Onzin van Microsofts Gamerscore – page 16-19.

I am especially proud of the Achievements piece, I wanted to write that piece for over a year. As for the interview with Gearbox, I spoke mainly with Randy Pitchford. The talk was very insightful and quite fun as well. Randy is a cool guy. Sadly I don’t have any game development skills, but Gearbox seems a good company to work for.

Because GMR 3.3 is off the shelves I uploaded some earlier stories:

- ‘Ontwikkelaarsprofiel: Infinity Ward’. In: GMR. 3.3, 2008, page 34-35.
- ‘America’s Army – De ultieme oorlogsmachine’. In: GMR. 3.3, 2008, page 20-21.
- ‘Larry Hryb (alias Major Nelson) – Het gezicht van Xbox Live’. In: GMR. 3.3, 2008, page 15.

For this week’s newspaper I did a story on the Wii game De Blob and the role the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU) played in this. I interviewed Jeroen van Mastrigt and asked about his view on the role of higher education for keeping the game industry innovative. The story is online here: “Nederlandse studenten maken succesgame“. I played De Blob and I think it’s a well done game, there was no room (nor the need) for an extensive review.

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).

Yesterday I played a minor role in a report on games on the Dutch news show 1Vandaag, the videoclip is online here. I blogged about it on Bashers.nl: “Geweld en games bij EénVandaag op Campzone”. The report itself is not that long but behind the scenes I had great fun and good discussions with the journalist (+crew) who put this together. After years of waving off TV interview requests, maybe I should do this more often.

Last tuesday I wrote a (short) review of Guitar Hero: On Tour for my favourite free newspaper. Great game, loads of (portable) fun. My only gripe is the set list. Too much pop (No Doubt… come onnnn), not enough Heavy Metallll. Pick it up if you have the chance!

There’s some more news, interviews, writing and other stuff coming soon. My seemingly endless writing crunch is almost over.

After weeks of solitary confinement and writing hoity-toity academic stuff (a.k.a my PhD) I was able to do two newspaper pieces. The smaller one was on Echochrome, a perspectival puzzlegame (yes, perspectival, how about that). I love the concept, the execution, i.e. the game’s bare bone approach to game design being in black-and-white, classical music, very minimalist and all. My brain is not optimally wired because I found many of the Echochrome puzzles very (painfully) hard to complete. The game is only 10 euro in the Playstation Store, so that’s a no-brainer.
The other story is somewhat longer and on Buzz (or Buzz! Quiz TV for the PS3 to be exact). I had the game on my debug PS3 since march and played it with over a dozen friends. It’s still a very groovy game. True, there’s room for improvements and minor tweaks, but that’s the hardcore gamer in me speaking.

On an unrelated not, last few days I’ve been playing quite a lot Battlefield: Bad Company. Good stuff, always loved the Battlefield franchise. I did a preview on it way back for GMR but I can safely say that the game, as they say, ‘delivers’. To ‘honor’ the fact that the game is so well done, I uploaded the preview I did (.pdf is here) for GMR. Oh, and Rock Band apparently will make it to the Netherlands. How about that… Wrote about it in De Pers mid-march. We’ll see if the game actually will get a place on the shelves and which gamer will be rich enough to buy it.

A blogpost, a post I tell ya! I joined the Bashers.nl-crew, mostly because I believe in quality game critique (& journalism) and one way to get there is the way the guys & girls at Bashers are doing it. That, and the fact that I have huge respect for Niels ‘t Hooft (who now writes for nrc.next). For your information, it’s a labour of love, it has nothing to do with downgrading anything else and it is just to keep me from going insane by reading critical theory.

My first post is a opinion piece on the new ‘bandpack format’: “Het Aerosmith-bandpack, of: de flinterdunne grens tussen uitbreiden en uitmelken“:

Maar is een bandpack nu iets waar we op zitten wachten? De fan zegt natuurlijk: “Ja!” Die kan de game met een gerust hart kopen. Maar de grens tussen uitmelken en succesvol uitbreiden is flinterdun. Vraag maar aan EA. Pietertje Moore moet er hard aan trekken om het beeld van EA als ultieme verkrachter van sportlicenties bij te draaien. Als dat ooit nog lukt. Nogmaals, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is een kwalitatief goede productie. Geen bugs, voldoende content en het kern-gameplay-mechaniekje werkt nog steeds als een trein.

Meh, if only writing a PhD was as easy as blogging… I won’t post regularly on Bashers (the coming weeks), mainly because of PhD related time constraints, but later this year I probably will.

What a ride it has been. Waiting for GTA4. Was it worth it? Yup. Last Tuesday (launch day) I didn’t write on it for De Pers, instead I did a short interview with DAG, read the story here (.pdf).

My take on GTA4 is that the game is a special something. The single player is compelling and there’s food for over 3 academic books and dozens of papers (and not be me I that is), I look forward to informed analysis of my colleagues. So far, one article I liked in particular is on Slate “It’s Not Just About Killing Hookers Anymore“:

The reputation of the series might be too far gone for nongamers and politicians to appreciate the depth and richness of this amazing game. But Grand Theft Auto IV is not an orgy of death. It’s a living, breathing place—and when you’re forced to kill, it’s nothing to celebrate.

What surprised me the most was the multiplayer part. As it was the only part which was completely new, I was somewhat skeptic. There are 15 multiplayer modes, some are just tagged on (it seems), others are extremely fun. I had a great time playing “Team Mafiya Work” (i.e. 2-8 teams compete to complete contract work for the “mafiya”, such as escorting/killing targets or stealing cars) with friends. I very much look forward to playing the objective based multiplayer modes again. Overall I think the multiplayer part has quite some potential. I really do hope that Rockstar expands on the current model. There’s much to improve, not that multiplayer is bad as it is, but there so much to expand upon in terms of designing a balanced & fun multiplayer experience.

As of yet I’m only at a mere 15% of the single player part. I hope to be able to complete this game before winter sets in again with my agenda filling up and the upcoming PhD crunch time.