In the week of June 22, when I defended my PhD, I did an interview with Dutch game journalist Erik Coenen. We talked for over an hour about games, game research, my PhD, and developments in the Dutch game industry. Erik allowed me to post the entire interview here, a 9 page/5600 word article with my latest thoughts. Read the interview after the break, or you can download the .pdf here.

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Such a long time of not updating a blog either means really good news or really bad news. I am happy to report I have exciting news and new projects. In short, I started a new game company with a small group of talented people. More on that later this month. In this blogpost there is an overview of the activities of the last couple of months. I mostly worked on adjusting to post-PhD life, starting our company and doing interviews, writing columns and such.

My PhD was “reviewed” by dr. Linda Duits, a respected colleague from the Uni of Amsterdam. Read here review on De Jaap.nl or on her personal blog. More PhD-related coverage can be found at Eurogamer.nl where Erik Coenen wrote up an interview on game studies and my recent research.

Along the way I did several radio interviews:
- June 20, I talked to Eva Jinek at one of the longest running radio shows in the Netherlands: Oog op Morgen. This has always been bit of a dream to be there so do have a listen!
- June 22, I did a brief interview for Radio Wakker Nederland on my PhD, which can be heard here.
- June 30, an interview with NOS Radio 1 on the rise of Zynga and its possible IPO: “Gamewetenschapper over mogelijke beursgang maker Farmville“.
- July 11, a 60 minute discussion at BNR Business Radio on game journalism.
- July 20, an interview with Alexander Klöpping and Ernst-Jan Pfauth for their onetime nightly radio show. We talked about game journalism! You can download the .mp3 here (and remember, I was on at 2:40 at night!).

There is more I did on game journalism the last couple of months. Niels ‘t Hooft and I hosted a debate June 30 at De Waag. There is a review of the debate here, a brief video of the event, and there are photos over at Flickr. Over at Villamedia, journalist and author Nick Kivits wrote an extended piece on game journalism as well, worth a read!

In the meantime I wrote my bi-weekly column for nrc.next:
- “De gamer in mij wil punten, geen geld”. In: nrc.next. 2 september, p28.
- “Haat voor Bobby“. In: nrc.next. 15 augustus, p28.
- “Het kopieerprobleem“. In: nrc.next. 27 juli, p24.
- “Crunchtijd“. In: nrc.next. 15 juli, p29.
- “Games voor alle vrienden; Nieuwste hit: ‘Empires & Allies’“. In: nrc.next. 5 juli, p10. Met: Stijn Bronzwaer.
- “Dertig dagen maïs planten, naar olie boren en af en toe vechten“. In: nrc.next. 5 juli, p10.
- “Game-onderzoek is vers“. In: nrc.next. 29 juni, p12.
- “Geef een 8.5, krijg jij een reisje; Gamejournalisten worden aan alle kanten gepaaid door grote gamebedrijven“. In: NRC & nrc.next. 28 juni, p12.
- “Het is nog even afwachten met de nieuwe Wii U”. In: nrc.next. 16 juni 2011, p24.

In the world of academia there is news as well. I presented a paper in March on seriality in games. A rave review of the conference and my paper can be read here: »To be continued…«: Seriality and Serialization in Interdisciplinary Perspective.

Early July, for the Dutch blog Flabber I did a video interview on my (game) research, check out the video (or download the podcast) here.

And last but not least, mid-July I did a talk on gamification for Netwerk 023 (in Haarlem). There is a blog post and review on the talk, my presentation can be downloaded here, and a lot of pictures.

Next month I’ll do three talks. One on October 4 social media for Studium Generale (Universiteit Utecht), a talk on games and criminality at the VU (Free University of Amsterdam), and a talk October 5 on the ‘dark side’ of IT and games.

It have been two busy months since handing in my PhD. I travelled to San Antonio, Texas to deliver a paper on game journalism and then headed to Tampere, Finland, to talk about my PhD. I also did some lectures and talks in Delft, Amsterdam and Utrecht. See the list here. In the meantime a short text I wrote on the future of the book was published:

- 2011. Nieborg, David B. “Achievement Unlocked!”. In: Mieke Gerritzen, Geert Lovink and Minke Kampman (eds.). Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures. Valiz: Amsterdam, pp. 117-118.

I did a radio interview May 23 for VARA Radio 1 on my PhD. It was quite a long discussion which covered a lot of ground. You can watch the video of our chat after the break. You can download the mp3 here as well.

More recently my PhD got some more attention via a press release, which can be read here. The press release was picked up by some blogs and maybe a newspaper here or there. There will be more attention, I hope and expect, around the actual defense.

My bi-monthly column for the Dutch newspaper nrc.next (called Next Level) was also published. I have put them all online for your reading pleasure:
- “Gefluister over Warfare“. In: nrc.next. 31 mei 2011, 24.
- “Dat lossen we samen op“. In: nrc.next. 13 mei 2011, p12.
- “Sony Playstation gehackt: gegevens liggen op straat“. In: nrc.next. 28 april 2011, 10
- “Een link tussen games en schietpartijen? Onzin“. In: nrc.next. 14 april 2011, p10.
- “Oorlog is als een game. En iedereen speelt mee“. In: nrc.next. 29 maart 2011, p24.
- “Wij geven er niets aan uit“. In: nrc.next. 17 maart 2011, p25.

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Allow me to be just a little bit melodramatic, but I’m happy to report that the biggest intellectual challenge I ever faced is now behind me. My PhD is done & delivered. I took (and still take) my research very seriously, maybe a bit too much, so it took me some time to get it right. But Im incredibly excited about the result. I won’t put my PhD online soon. It has to be defended first and then my aim is to publish it as a book, but more on that later.

The Dutch system is set up in a way that the committee has to green light the defense, which is tentatively dated late June. When formalized I will post more information about my PhD and the date of my defense here.

The coming months I will update this website and tell you more about future plans and projects. For now, check out my latest newspaper column here. In the near future I’ll visit some conferences, do some lecturing at Utrecht University and start some other projects I cannot wait to tell you more about! To be continued…

Last update has been a while. Last weeks I have been working 24/7 on my PhD and I am very happy to report that it is shaping up nicely. Just a couple more days (yes days!!) and I can announce here and wherever I have a material or immaterial presence that my PhD is done (meaning: mailed to my PhD commission). I have a date set for my PhD defense in late June, but I’ll announce the exact date and time when I have actually finished my dissertation. Yes, I am very superstitious.

As sort of a preparation for my post-PhD time I became a columnist for the Dutch newspaper nrc.next. I will do a bi-monthly column on games (together with Niels ‘t Hooft) which will be featured irregularly (probably Wednesdays). I will post links of my columns here of course and they will be syndicated on Bashers.nl as well (the day after they appeared in the paper).

The first column was on Dutch gamers, well, begin Dutch (cheap that is): We zijn zuinig, ook bij games – Nederlanders geven bijna niets uit in de virtuele wereld. The second column was my take on the “war” (note the brackets) on/in Libya and how many see it as being “very much like a videogame”. The second column is syndicated at Netkwesties where it has a slightly different title: “Sarkozy 1 – Gadaffi 0”.

In the last couple of weeks, I have done quite some interviews for TV and print. Let me list them here:

- February 2, interview for RTL Nieuws on the launch of Killzone 3 and the status of console blockbusters (actually this is very much what my PhD is all about). You can watch the clip here. There’s a summary here on the RTL website, which has me saying:

“Het gaat juist hartstikke goed met de game-industrie. Maar de traditionele grote game op een schijfje is wel op z’n retour.”

- February 25, I was quoted in an interview in de Saturday edition of De Volkskrant in a very good and well research article titled “Drie Nederlandse ontwikkelaars maken kans op internationale prijs”. I argued:

‘Dit is the place to be’, zegt David Nieborg, gameonderzoeker aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. ‘Wanneer je zo’n prijs in de wacht sleept, staan de uitgevers voor je in de rij om je game op te pikken voor bijvoorbeeld de iPhone.’ Alleen games van kleine onafhankelijke studio’s, die de grenzen opzoeken, worden genomineerd. ‘Het is een tegenhanger van de commerciële game-industrie die juist heel conservatief is. Drie nominaties is een hele eer voor een klein landje als Nederland.’

- March 1, live radio interview for Villa VPRO (Radio 1) on the Dutch indie game scene: “Nederlanders groots in ontwikkelen games”. Download the .mp3 here.

- Late March. I was interviewed for the Dutch magazine Nieuwe Revu on the success of Angry Birds. The article is online here “Boze vogels worden stinkend rijk: de ontwikkelaar over het megasucces van Angry Birds”.

- March 26. For the weekend edition of the leading Dutch daily NRC I had an interview on the never ending rise of the military entertainment complex. The article was accompanied by a very nice graphic. You see (and hopefully) read the interview via this photo.

And to top it all off, yesterday I did the keynote speech at the opening event for Academy Noord on social media. My talk was titled “De hype voorbij”. The room was packed and enthusiatic, see this unedited Twitter feed for realtime feedback on my talk. And wanna see what they have to say about the event and me in Frysian, check out this Youtube clip.

A brief update from the trenches. Working extremely hard to wrap up that last draft of my PhD manuscript. I’m almost there, over 95% is done. But as they say in Dutch, the latest bits are the heaviest of all. Chapter 2 till 8 (out of 8) are done and delivered and need some very minor tweaking. As we speak I’m working on chapter 1 and then it’s mostly redrafting. I’ve set my official deadline at April 1. This means that, with a bit of luck, I can defend my PhD late June. If that for some reason won’t work, it will be early September. I really, really hope to defend it before the Summer break. But how the Dutch system works is that the moment the PhD committee accepts the manuscript, I’m done. The defense is somewhat formal and maybe even very tough but is rarely (i.e. never) a deal breaker.

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First of all, best wishes for 2011! My new year’s resolution is pretty straightforward; finish my PhD in Q1 and then defend it in Q2. I do actually have post-PhD plans but many of them are anything but set in stone and are subject to change. If I change affiliation, finish my PhD and/or start any big new projects, I’ll let you know via this blog.

Last year I did an extensive interview for the Xmas special of Elsevier magazine on military games. I’m happy with the result, the article is rather balanced and includes the viewpoint of the industry as well. Unsurprisingly, their stance towards military themed shooters is somewhat less critical. You can read the four paged article article “Het virtuele slagveld”, including nice pics here: page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4.

For the newspaper Spits I did a short interview last week on the success of the Call of Duty franchise. Again, I added a critical perspective on why Activision is so incredibly successful and what role gamers have in this respect. You can read the unformatted article “Call of Duty schiet met scherp” here.

The next months will probably be eerily quiet around here. Apart from maybe some interviews and Bashers editorials. Next up, I am going into full crunch mode to finish the last chapter and do a massive redraft.

As with every academic publication, I am excited, honored and very happy! I contributed a book chapter to an edited volume called “Professional playground: Alles over werken in de game-industrie”. In the chapter I talk about working as a game journalist (in the Netherlands) and critically reflect on being positioned between (the expectations of both) readers and the game industry. As far as I know, this might be the first academic publication in Dutch on the subject (just saying, for many gamers on message boards being “First!!11oneoen” is a major achievement).

Talking about firsts, the book is one of the few books (in Dutch) on games, but also one of the few books on working in the game industry. There is some work done on working in the game industry (e.g. by Mark Deuze in his book on Media Work & his edited volume Managing Media Work), but none of that is in Dutch or from a Dutch perspective.

The book has three parts (developer, publisher and support/related industries), and has a wide range of authors (working in the industry, in academia, and lawyers). There is a .pdf of the chapter outline here, and chapter 9 on serious game is the sample chapter (in .pdf as well).

If you’re interested in buying the book, you can do so on Bol.com. If you are interested in my chapter, drop me an email (david @ gamespace . nl) and I’ll send you my latest draft.

*update* (July 10) Democracy in action! Dutch member of parliament Tofik Dibi (of Groen Links) asked the minister of justice a series of (very spot on) questions. Our combined efforts (of gamers, academics and journalists) to argue for better media literacy among parents (and against censorship), seem to have made a difference! Read the questions here. */update*

Our Dutch minister of justice Hirsch Ballin send a letter to the “Tweede Kamer” (the House of Representatives) regarding the banning of violent video games. His letter is emblematic of a (political) culture in which key politicians are utterly media illiterate and build their arguments on selectively quoting solid research. On top of that, a ban on violent film would be less desirable because that would lead to civil unrest (as opposed to games?). Well, I/we obviously disagree.

At Bashers, there’s more information. I wrote an op-ed to ask gamers to have their voices heard. “Neem contact op met Hirsch Ballin en bewijs dat een verbod op gewelddadige games weerstand oproept“.

At game industry magazine Control there is a crucial piece of information (of prof. Jansz) slamming the minister’s letter.

And at Petities.nl there’s a petition to sign.

Via Twitter I heard about two essays of University of Amsterdam colleague dr. Linda Duits. Both accounts are very (very!) familiar from my perspective as a lecturer at the UvA. Please do read them as they provide a painful insight in the day-to-day and long term institutional problems “we” (lecturers at Dutch universities) encounter. Some of these problems have a deeper political and cultural background, and it is not that all problems can be traced back to either the university, students, or “The Hague” (politics), but that should be no excuse in finding a way to fix them. I am thinking what I can do about this, but the only thing I feel I can do now is to draw attention to these somewhat profound issues:

Please read: “De Onderwijsfabriek” & “Excellent onderzoek leidt tot benedenmaats onderwijs”