The digital conference proceedings of the Think Design Play: DiGRA 2011 Conference, held recently in Hilversum here in The Netherlands, are now online. We were fortunate that many papers of our team, our affiliated researchers and (former) students were accepted. Here’s an overview: Lammes, Sybille – “The map as playground: Locationbased games as cartographical practices”…

The Executive Board (College van Bestuur) of Utrecht University has awarded the Faculty of Humanities a subsidy (30.000 euro) to develop an International Master Degree Game Studies. In the academic year 2011-2012 we will organize expert meetings with game research groups of the IT University of Copenhagen (Msc in IT: Games), the University of Potsdam (Digital…

More good news! The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded our own Sybille Lammes with a prestigious ERC Starting Grant!Here’s a description of the “Charting the Digital” research project, which will involve Lammes as principal investigator, a postdoc and two PhD positions: The key objective of this research programme is to investigate to what extent…

The Center for the Study of Digital Games and Play congratulates our own Teun Dubbelman with receiving the prestigious Fulbright scholarship! From the press release: Teun Dubbelman MA, PhD candidate at the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC), has received the prestigious Fulbright scholarship for PhD fellows. He will spend three months at the…

  The recent issue of the magazine published by De Nederlandsche Bank (the Dutch central bank) focuses on the Dutch game industry. It shows how the 160 companies working on games in the Netherlands right now already have a healthy 150 milj. euro turnover. According to the article however, the industry needs to get more…

Starting in college year 2011-2012, we will be offering a full-fledged Minor in Game Studies. In this minor program, students will follow three compulsory courses, and a choice of one out of two noncompulsory courses, all of which can be found among the courses listed at our courses overview. Students who participate in this minor…

  From the blog of René Glas: Digital media platform SETUP is hosting a new edition of their Debite boxing ring debate evenings on games and game culture (a partnerprogram of the yearly industry event Festival of Games which takes place April 28 & 29). I’ll be debating with (or against) Dylan Nagel, co-founder of…

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and ICT Regie have awarded a subsidy to the Center for the Study of Digital Games and Play (GAP) for the research project Mobile Learning. The goal of this project is to improve and evaluate the learning results of mobile applications and games that are developed by 7scenes,…

The Utrecht-based foundation Dutch Game Garden has received 4 million Euro from the European Union and local, regional and national governments in the Netherlands. From press release: The contribution ensures Dutch Game Garden is able to continue its mission for the coming five years: to establish a better climate for new companies, create more job…

We congratulate our colleagues in Game and Media Technology with the launch of their Gamelab, a joined venture of the Department of Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, and Microsoft Corporation. From Microsoft’s press release (in Dutch): Op dinsdag 1 maart opent Universiteit Utrecht officieel het Gamelab: een plek waar nieuwe games met behulp van geavanceerde technologieën…