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”

Sixty-five years ago the Second World War ended, but it is still with us today. Especially in the Netherlands, grandchildren (like me) listen to their grandparents telling stories about “The War”. For me, and many others for that matter, World War Two has a special meaning as well. For decades now, war (and WW2) has been a pervasive theme in game culture. And when the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport approached me to contribute to a magazine marking the end of WW2, I combined the memories of my grandmother with my own view on virtual war. The result is an article titled “De strijd gaat virtueel verder”. The 34-paged book/magazine, titled “Voorbij maar niet verdwenen”, is freely downloadable here as a .pdf (7MB). The project has its own special website, keep an eye on it because mid-March there will an interactive version of the book (including videos, music etc.). For anybody even remotely interested in WW2, I recommend you to pick up, or download, a copy. There are high quality contributions by renowned Dutch journalists, historians and academics. On top of that, the magazine just looks great.

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.

Last Tuesday (January 26), I participated in a debate on “Individu 2.0”. The debate was hosted by Christian student organizations to prepare for their Easter gathering where they will tackle religious and societal issues. As an outsider/expert I was asked to share my thoughts on the mediatization of everyday life, together with Jan van der Stoep (affiliated with the Christelijke Hogeschool Ede). It was an insightful debate. Jan and I agreed on many counts which made the debate a little bit less spectacular, but for me it was good to have some outsider conformation on some deep felt thoughts and opinions on new media.

What I did not expect was that the debate would spark the interest of two attending journalists of the two leading Dutch Christian newspapers. At the end of the debate the students asked about my views on (Dutch) politics and new media, as well as the rise of the Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders. In a nutshell, I think social networks (Youtube, Facebook, Hyves, Twitter etc), could be a valuable (additional!) avenue to discuss politics and to voice one’s concerns about the deep seated fear (and sometimes hatred) towards “others” (i.e. non-native Dutch citizens). I might be hopelessly naive here, but I think engaging in a debate in this particular case (through movies, pictures, blogs, etc), and taking the concerns of those-who-fear very seriously (instead of trivializing the Wilders supports’ genuinely felt fear-of-others) could be one way out of a xenophobic, divided political future. There’s way more to this issue, and my argument is much more nuanced, but this is one of the points I made during the debate.

The debate’s media fallout was illustrative and focused on my views on social networks and politics and used my quotes in their headlines. The best article ended up in the newspaper (first link). The two other articles surfaced immediately after the debates on the newspapers’s websites.

- ‘Gebruikers netwerksites zijn machthebbers’. Nederlands Dagblad. January 28, 2010, page 6.
- „Twitter en Facebook zijn machtige wapens”. Reformatorisch Dagblad. January 27, 2010.
- ‘Netwerksites gaan Wilders stemmen kosten’. Nederlands Dagblad. January 27, 2010.

My research school is offering three PhD Fellowships starting in September 2010. Application deadline is February 8th, 2010. If you need tips / feedback on a proposal or something like that, you know where to find me. More information here.

Located at the Faculty of Humanities at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) brings together scholars active in literature, philosophy, visual culture, religious studies, film and media studies, and argumentation theory. Specialists in their own respective fields, they share a commitment to working within an interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary cultural and political debates within society at large and with the cultural institutions outside of the narrow confines of the academic world. Within ASCA they have joined forces to provide a stimulating environment for scholars, professionals, and graduate students both from the Netherlands and abroad.

Good day to you from beautiful Minneapolis! The coming months (October and November) will be busy in terms of presentations, lectures and talk. All of them will be in The Netherlands. This is an additional set of talks I will be doing, the complete list is here. There might be one or two more but they are not confirmed yet. I’ll update the list with links and titles the coming weeks. Most of these talks are public, so if you want more information, drop me an email!

- 2009. (Oktober 23, 24). “Workshop Game Journalistiek”. (Working title). GameXperience 2009. Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Hilversum.

- 2009. (November 4). “Follow the money: New Media and Politics”. (Working title). Talk at: Het mes in de democratie, Studium Generale, Hogeschool van Utrecht.

- 2009. (November 27). “The Cultural Games Industry” (Working title). Paper to be presented at: Participating in a mediated world. Platform for Communication, Media, and Information (CMI) within the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam.

- 2009. (November 30). “Nieuwe Media: An Introduction” (Working title). Lecture for the course Mediageschiedenis.

My talk on New Media & Politics – “Obama’s campagne. Tussen hoop en hype” – for Studium Generale Universiteit Utrecht (SGUU) was a big success! The room (or lecture hall) was packed with about 100 people attending and 140 people tuned into the live stream. As I said, I was very honored to open such a promising lineup. The questions from the audience were very good and provided me with a lot of food for thought.

But even better, you can watch the entire talk online (with slides!), including the Q&A session, here. You have to have Silverlight installed (with is a OS independent plug-in). If you look on Twitter (using the #sguu tag) you can see some commentary there as well.

Something completely different; I wrote a short bit on America’s Army for the STT newsletter. Download the article’s pdf here. STT (De Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek) is a non-profit think tank where Jacco van Uden is working on a white paper on serious gaming, hence my article on America’s Army. If you have not met him and you are working in the field of serious gaming you might want to contact him, he is working on some great stuff!

Tomorrow at 11.30 (am) Tanja Sihvonen and I will do our presentation on game journalism at DiGRA09 (Digital Games Research Association). Paper is titled: “The New Gatekeepers? On the occopational ideology of game journalists”. You can download the paper here. If you’re at DiGRA, do come by! If you have any questions about the paper, you know where to find me.