Utrecht University (my alma mater) has a vibrant (new media) student community and a very good student magazine called BLIK. I sat down with the magazine’s editor and had a long conversation about my views on social politics, the Obama campaign and new media in general (of course, in Dutch). The result is a 6-page interview, you can download the .pdf here. I had a decent amount of interviews on this subject but I think this interview captures my recent thinking on this subject really well! Also, the magazine looks great.

Summary from BLIK’s website:

Alhoewel het voorheen een onderbelicht thema bleek in BLIK komt in beide interviews van deze uitgave de wisselwerking tussen politiek en nieuwe media uitgebreid aan bod. Toepasselijk, want precies een jaar geleden behaalde de Amerikaanse presidentskandidaat Barack Obama een historische overwinning die ten minste ten dele te danken was aan een innovatieve inzet van nieuwe media tijdens diens verkiezingscampagne. UU alumnus en nu docent Nieuwe Media aan de UvA David Nieborg ervoer als vrijwilliger in het campagneteam van Obama van dichtbij de politieke bevlogenheid van de Amerikaanse burger. In ons openingsinterview vertelt hij hoe hij in Nederland die bezieling voor politiek en nieuwe media vooralsnog mist.

Just a quick note: Best wishes for 2010! For me it’s back to work (on my PhD). Lecturing will start in February and until that time it’s PhD-crunch-time.

Even though book reading season might be over for many of us, Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games seems essential reading for those scholars interested in war & games. As blogged below, the book is available at Amazon or at the publisher’s homepage. For Dutch/Europeans, Bookdepository.co.uk, as always, has the best deal, 21.50 euro for the paperback (free shipping), I have good experiences with them.

There’s more official info at the publisher’s webpage. I contributed the third chapter. The table of contents is after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, yeah, long time no blogpost. It’s not that it is that much work, but, you know…

For those who are wondering what I’ve been up to, let me lay out my agenda here. My main goal for the summer is to work on my PhD. It is coming along nicely and it is as much a process of redrafting as it is writing new stuff. As I’m writing this I’m once again at Schiphol Airport on my way to the US of A to spend some days in Minneapolis. Very much look forward to it, making new friends, BBQ’ing, roadtripping etc. This month I will wrap up our paper (co-writer is the beloved Tanja Sihvonen) for the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) 09 conference in London early September. The essay is titled “The new gatekeepers: The occupational ideology of game journalism” and reflects on the current status of game journalism. Much of the essay is based on our work as journalists (me in the Netherlands, Tanja in Finland). The line-up for the DiGRA conference looks quite packed but when I glanced over it I saw we were the only ones talking about game journalism, so I hope we can break some new ground here.

Talking about journalism, you might have heard my work for Dagblad De Pers has ended for the time being. I might pick up some special projects or small reviews, but for now I will not fill a page every Monday. De Pers is kinda broke and they could not afford me anymore. My editor will pick up where I left off. In the end it’s a good thing, I need to fully focus on my PhD and after 2.5 years (and 80+ articles later) it’s time to move on.

August will all about my PhD. In addition, I will work on two (academic) book chapters; one for a Dutch book on the game industry; my chapter will be, again, about game journalism (how to become one and how to navigate through the minefield that it is). The second book chapter will be for a book called “CounterPlay: Playing games against the rules”, edited by Jack Post and Jan Simons (to be published by Amsterdam University Press). A third project I will wrap up this summer is a short non-academic book chapter on war games. The book is titled “Oorlog. Voorbij maar niet verdwenen” (working title) and is kind of a neat project commemorating World War II. The line-up of authors is impressive and the foreword might be written by a very (VERY) famous Dutch VIP. Would be kinda cool to be in the same book as Them (yes, that’s a hint).

That is it for now, enjoy your summer!

The end of the academic year is near and the last two months I did a lot of talks and presentations. I added them to the presentations list, but here’s a list as well. There’s only one upcoming talk (for now) but it’s a very good and high-profile one. On September 7 I will open the new season of Universiteit Utrecht’s Studium Generale lecture series on social media and politics. The talk will be open to the public and will be taped as well.

Upcoming:
- September 7. “Nieuwe media & politiek – Obama’s campagne. Tussen hoop en Hype”. Studium Generale Universiteit Utrecht. Academiegebouw Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht.

As for academic talks, I presented my book chapter at the Digital Material book launch event.

- 2009. (May 15). “Empower yourself, do research! Playing games during times of war”. Digital Material book launch. Studio T, Utrecht.

What I haven’t talked about that much here were my two visits to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OC&W). During my first visit I met with the ministry’s Secretary-General and the Director of Communications and gave an informal talk on new media and politics. Later in May, I gave a talk at the weekly “Director’s Lunch” which all the (25) ministry’s directors attend. This was of course a huge honor :).

- 2009. (May 11). “Transparantie, Communicatie & Participatie Obama en Nieuwe Media”. Talk at the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The Hague.

And to wrap up, I did two gigs for The Next Speaker. One talk for the recruitment software company Connexys which was on the potential of using games (i.e. America’s Army) for recruiting purposes. And a series of keynote talks for Brunel for their annual Innovation Evening. The talks were on game culture in general and about all the stereotypical discussions on games, and were hilarious. I learned a lot myself about what the Dutch middle-aged non-gamer thinks of ‘us’ gamers.

- 2009. (June 4). “Recruiting en games: America’s Army.” Talk at Connexys‘ Doeltreffend werven! Seminar. Inn Style, Maarssen.
- 2009. (May 28, June 2, 9). “Gaming 101”. Series of keynotes for Brunel’s Innovation Evening. Various locations.

A very worthwhile op-ed piece in the New York Times “End the University as We Know It“. A good read, not only fingerpointing, which we all know is very, very easy, but also six practical solutions. Struggling with my own PhD (as every PhD student does) I agree most with solution numero 4:

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

Making a game out of my PhD? I should have done that.

No game reviews or articles this week (mainly because of Easter). Also, I’m working on other stuff (thesis supervision and my PhD). I am working on a newspaper article for next week’s paper and got some cool research related projects I am working on as well. But that’s all in the future.

In the meantime, there will be an interesting lecture by Richard Grusin (co-author of Remediation) at the University of Amsterdam on May 18. I’ll certainly be there because he’ll be talking about the concept of premediation which fascinates me because he draws on the representation (and premediation of warfare) in particular. Here’s an outline:

This talk is drawn from my recently completed book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11, which takes up where my earlier, co-authored study of new media, Remediation: Understanding New Media, left off. Premediation extends the theoretical concerns of Remediation to the period after 9/11, attending to the ways in which print, televisual, and networked media mobilize individual and collective affect in an era of heightened securitization. The book expands upon my 2004 article, “Premediation,” in which I set out to explain the geopolitical and medialogical inevitability that prevailed in the run-up to the Iraq war. In addition to functioning as the media logic of the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war, premediation helps to structure our post 9-11 media environment both in its social and in its technical formations. The talk will lay out two related concepts developed in the book’s concluding chapter–the mediaphilia of anticipation and the anticipatory gesture–which help to characterize the modes of affectivity that have come to inform our interactions with our increasingly mobile social networks.

More info: Lecture starts at 3:15pm (15.15u.), Location: University of Amsterdam, Oudemanhuispoort (OMHP) 4-6 1012 DL Amsterdam, Room A008

Wrote a short op-ed article on Twitter for the University of Amsterdam magazine Folia. Title: “Kroeggesprek in 140 tekens” (.pdf) on pages 8 & 9. My conclusion:

“Uiteindelijk is Twitter zo waardevol als je zelf wilt dat het is. Het blijft een online kroeggesprek dus het blijft altijd wat rumoerig en soms hoor of zie je dingen die totaal overbodig zijn – of zelfs een beetje gênant. Het is dus vooral zaak de juiste mensen te kiezen om de kroeg mee in te gaan. Andersom geldt hetzelfde. Hoe relevanter, grappiger of interessanter jouw tweets zijn, hoe meer mensen bij jou in de kroeg komen zitten.”

You might have heard, last month ‘my’ game magazine GMR ceased to exist (as well as the GMR-online website). There is some news about it at Bashers.nl. GMR’s sudden death is quite a blow. Not so much for me as well for Dutch game journalism, the GMR staff and its freelancers. At the same time one of GMR’s competitors (GamesTM) also quit. One can discuss how and why this happened, but the end of the line is that another quality print magazine about games is no more. And that’s just sad.

For the last issues of GMR I wrote three pieces, listed below. I wrote them during my stay in Boston (mostly November 2008). The first article is a profile on my MIT colleague Jesper Juul, on his new book and his thoughts on the field of game studies. The second piece is about the trip I made to Funspot, the American Classic Arcade Museum, a.k.a. Gamer Heaven. The third is a studio profile on Lord of the Rings Online developer/operator Turbine Inc., located in Westwood (MA). I had a great time during that particular visit.

- ‘Game-onderzoeker Jesper Juul – Ik speel, dus ik besta‘. In: GMR. 4.1, 2009, page 26-27.
- ‘Funspot – Een roadtrip naar het American Classic Arcade Museum‘. In: GMR. 4.1, 2009, page 20-21.
- ‘Ontwikkelaarsprofiel Turbine Inc‘. In: GMR. 4.1, 2009, page 34-35.

Because GMR folded I decided to upload the remaining set of articles and some older pieces. Check’em out:

- ‘Nieuwe Businessmodellen – Hoe vaak wil je betalen voor games die je al hebt?‘. In: GMR. 3.6, 2008, page 14-17.
- ‘Een interview with Kai Huang‘. In: GMR. 3.5, 2008, page 14-15.
- ‘Leipzig Games Convention 2008 – Gemütlich Gamespektakel‘. In: GMR. 3.5, 2008, page 26-27.
- ‘Ontwikkelaarsprofiel: Gearbox Software‘. In: GMR. 3.5, 2008, page 32-33.

There will be some output by me the coming days (some newspaper stuff, some blogging at bashers.nl and some GMR stuff). But for now, happy holidays!