Amsterdam University Press has published the edited volume “The Playfule Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture”. For more information, click here. In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to…

The Utrecht Center for Game Research launched a magazine highlighting several research projects and researchers in the field of games. The center started in 2014 to develop an integrated approach to to scientific and social questions by linking academic excellence and fundamental research to the university’s societal mission. In the magazine the center presents an…

Amsterdam University Press has now published the edited volume “Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures”. See here. Digital media technologies increasingly shape how people relate to the world, to other people and to themselves. This prompts questions about present-day mediations of identity. This book explores the notion of play as a heuristic lens…

We are proud to present the latest issue New Media Studies Magazine, a magazine created by students of our MA programma New Media & Digital Culture. This issue focuses entirely on the theme The Age of Play. Edited by Laura Coomans and Joeri Taelman, the issue compiles some of the best and most innovative research papers written during the MA courses…

From René Glas’ blog: After some delays, I am proud to announce that my book Battlefields of Negotiation: Control, Agency, and Ownership in World of Warcraft is out now. About the book:   The massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft has become one of the most popular computer games of the past decade, introducing millions around the world…

Joost Raessens’ inaugural address Spelenderwijs. De ludische wending in de mediatheorie (“Homo Ludens 2.0 The Ludic Turn in Media Theory“) on the occasion of accepting the Chair of Media Theory at Utrecht University in November 2010 has now been published through open access in both a Dutch (here) and English version (here).

Douglas Rushkoff’s PhD dissertation Monopoly Moneys : The media environment of corporatism and the player’s way out is available through open access and can be found here. It studies corporations and the monetary system on which they operate through the lens of media ecology. By treating corporations and currencies as media, we become capable of parsing the environments…

The students of our New Media & Digital Culture MA program have put together a special issue on games for the NEWMEDIA_studies Magazine called Serious Gaming! Edited by Eline Muijres and Anna Sonnemans, this issue is, however, not all about what has become known as “serious games”. Instead, also expect articles on a wide variety…

The Handbook of Computer Game Studies, edited by our own Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein for The MIT Press and first released in hardcover in 2005, is finally on sale in paperback edition. For those who do not own a copy yet, here’s the book description from the MIT Press website. The table of content…

Stefan Werning, Transcript Verlag/ Columbia University Press  The book analyzes the multifarious exchange of algorithmic technologies and concepts between the military and the media industry from the early 1990s until now. Unlike most related scholarly work which focuses on digital games, it drafts a model of programmable media which is grounded in a close-reading of the…