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…

We are proud to announce that Douglas Rushkoff will defend his PhD dissertation on June 25. Below you can find the description of his thesis, titled Monopoly moneys: the media environment of corporatism and the player’s way out, from the Utrecht University website: By analysing corporatism through the lens of media ecology, Douglas Rushkoff shows how…

Good news: Sybille Lammes’ Charting the Digital research project is now looking to fill two PhD positions! Here’s the text for the job as found on the Utrecht University vacancies website: Job description Two PhD positions are now available as part of the ERC funded project ”Charting the Digital: Digital Mapping Practices as New Media…

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 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…

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…

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…