René Glas (Amsterdam, 1980) is as an assistant professor in New Media and Digital Culture at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at the Utrecht University. His academics career began in Amsterdam, where he studied film and new media at the department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam. Here, he first developed a taste for studying games. He graduated in 2003 with an MA thesis investigating the relationship between film and digital games in an effort to (de-)construct the notion of the “interactive film”.
After his graduation he went on to become a junior teacher and, in 2005, started research as a PhD candidate in the same department. His research was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and was part of Transformations in Perception and Participation: Digital Games, one of the research projects within NWO’s Transformations in Art and Culture programme.
In 2010, Glas successfully defended his PhD dissertation. In this study, Glas frames online multiplayer games like World of Warcraft as complex socio-cultural phenomena defined by and evolving as a result of negotiation processes between its various stakeholders on ludic, social, technological, and managerial levels. By providing insight into these processes, the World of Warcraft phenomenon is shown to be emblematic of the relationship between consumers and producers in our increasingly collaborative and participatory media landscape. The research is now available in book form as Battlefields of Negotiation: Control, Agency, and Ownership in World of Warcraft, published by Amsterdam University Press. It is available through open access. Recently, he co-editing the volume Playful Citizenship: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture, the first book in Amsterdam Universiy press’s new Games and Play Series. The book itself can be bought, as well as downloaded through open access here.
Over the years, Glas has written and presented talks about various game and play related topics, including game history, fan culture, games and learning, participatory culture, media comparison and the political economy of games. Glas is a founding member of the Utrecht University’s Center for the Study of Digital Games and Play.
Right now, he is involved in a research project with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum dedicated to the preservation of Dutch game history as part of the national cultural heritage collection of audiovisual media. The project is a result of a seed money grant from Utrecht University’s Focus Area Game Research and a NWO Museum Grant. He is currently also the Utrecht University lead in the Erasmus+ project Spationomy 2.0: Spatial Exploration of Economic Data together with colleagues from Palacký University and MVSO from Olomouc (Czech Republic), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), and University of Maribor (Slovenia).
Ongoing research interest are ludic media literacties, gaming histories, paratextuality and games, deviant play (including cheating), and play as method. Other topics of interest are the relationship between digital games and other media (most notably film), alternative pop culture and participatory culture.
Glas currently acts as Master co-coordinator of the New Media and Digital Culture MA programme as well as its related specialization programme in the BA, and teaches a range of courses on BA, MA, and RMA levels.
Since 2013, Glas acts as member of the Programme Board of Mediawijzer.net, the Dutch network organisation for media literacy. In the past, he has also been active as a part-time film critic.
Contact Info
Dr. René Glas
Office: Department of Media and Culture Studies
Muntstraat 2a
3512 EV Utrecht
+31(0)302536510
r.glas @ uu .nl