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Janet Murray: “Who’s Afraid of the Holodeck: Facing the Future of Digital Narrative without Ludoparanoia”

On May 21, Hartmut Koenitz and I hosted a public lecture by Janet Murray at Utrecht University in close cooperation with the new professorship in Interactive Narrative Design at the HKU.

 Who’s Afraid of the Holodeck: Facing the Future of Digital Narrative without Ludoparanoia
In the light of MIT’s 2017 publication of an expanded and updated version of her classic 1997 book “Hamlet on the Holodeck,” Janet Murray examines the ways in which the vision of the Star Trek Holodeck still serves as a reference point for the many things we desire and fear about the future of digital narrative. Murray also revisits the often contested territory where games and stories intersect.

Hartmut and his team have uploaded the lecture to YouTube, so have a look!

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DiGRA paper on play as a method

The paper Jasper van Vught and I wrote on play as a method, titled “Considering play: From method to analysis” has been uploaded to the DiGRA Digital Library as part of the DiGRA 2017 Melbourne proceedings. You can find the full paper here, below is the abstract:

Considering play: From method to analysis

Abstract: This paper deals with play as an important methodological issue when studying games as texts and is intended as a practical methodological guide. After considering text as both the structuring object as well as its plural processual activations, we argue that different methodological considerations can turn the focus towards one of the two. After outlining and synthesizing a broad range of existing research we move beyond the more general advice to be reflective about the type of players that we are, and explore two methodological considerations more concretely. First of all, we discuss the various considerations to have with regards to the different choices to make when playing a game. Here we show how different instrumental and free strategies lay bare different parts of the game as object or process. Secondly, we consider how different contexts in which the game and the player exist, can function as different reference points for meaning construction and the way they can put limitations on the claims we can make about our object of analysis.

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Two book chapters out now

Within just two weeks from each other, two edited volumes came out to which I contributed a chapter.

The first one is actually a co-authored one which I mentioned in an earlier blog post on the Let’s Play game preservation projects I have been involved in. The book is The Interactive Past: Archeology, Heritage, and Video Games, edited by  Angus A.A. Mol, Csilla E. Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke, Krijn H.J. Boom & Aris Politopoulos of the Leiden University Value group. It’s a great collection of diverse chapters on the relationship between digital games and the past. The book was made possible through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and one of the chapters was actually crowdsourced by Kickstarter backers.
Our contribution to the book – I co-wrote it with Jesse de Vos, Jasper van Vught and Hugo Zijlstra – is called “Playing the Archive: Let’s Play videos, game preservation, and the exhibition of play”. It presents the findings of a research project we did at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, where we investigated the potential uses of Let’s Play videos as part of game preservation and exhibition practices in order to not just preserve games but also capture gameplay. 
Have a look at the chapter and the book: you can buy it but also download an open access version here. 
The other chapter is part of a Dutch-language book titled Onderwijs in Tijden van Digitalisering (Education in Times of Digitization), edited by Ad Verbugge and Jelle van Baardewijk of the Centrum Èthos at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It’s a collection os articles and essays on the use and misuse of digitazation in education to counter overly optimistic, almost utopian visions we often see in the “digital revolution” in education. 
My contribution to the book is titled “Van Spelenderwijs naar Wijs over Spel(l)en” which is somewhat difficult to translate but focused on game literacy, or lack thereof, when it comes to educational games used in classrooms and beyond. It’s a critical take on the type of games which call themselves “educational” but are very limited in scope and ambition, and points towards alternative ways of thinking about games as educational. It’s also a call to action for those who find themselves dealing more and more with games as part of educational curricula (as teachers) or as part of the children’s media consumption (as parents) but are not necessarily equipped enough to fully understand and engage with them. Game literacy, I argue, should become part of media literacy practices in and around educational settings, not just because learning and playing are related, but also because digital games and play have become an essential part of our media and culture.   
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Let’s Play game preservation

It has been rather quiet on this blog, but I nonetheless wanted to share some interesting results of a research project I have been involved in which deals with digital game preservation as part of national cultural heritage, a collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. It started as a Seed Money project colleague Jasper van Vught, Sound and Vision’s Jesse de Vos, and I got funded through Utrecht University’s Focus Area Game Research (a project overview of which can be found here), which had as its goal to set up “the first unified effort between game research, cultural heritage institutions and the Dutch game industry to define, preserve, archive and exhibit the history of Dutch digital games and game development”. The project continued as an NWO funded Musuem grant called Game On, with Jesse the Vos as main lead, with our MA student Hugo Zijlstra acting as research assistant and later research intern.
The results of the Game On project are a significant first step into creating an archive of Dutch digital games as part of our cultural heritage, as well as thinking about exhibiting such history in a museum setting. I’m proud I could play a part in this effort, but a lot of the actual game preservation (in all its facets) took place at Sound and Vision. They have an overview of all the projects’ results up now at the Sound and Vision’s website here. I’m afraid most of it is in Dutch, but some highlights I participated in are:

  • A symposium organized by Utrecht University and Sound and Vision called “Let’s Play Dutch Game History” on November 18 2016 with various talks by scholars and practitioners as well as panels including one with the founding fathers of the Dutch game industry. For an video impression of the symposium see the video below. The symposium itself was part of a larger game exhibition at the Institute called Let’s Play, a full evaluation of which became Hugo Zijlstra’s internship research report which can be found here.  
  • During the symposium I presented the research Jasper, Jesse, Hugo and I had been doing as part of the seed money project, which dealt with the Let’s Play video format as part of game preservation strategies (see a video of it here, in Dutch too I’m afraid). We presented initial findings of the project at the DiGRA/FDG conference in Dundee in August 2016 and will publish a full article on the matter soon in the edited volume The Interactive Past as well as a shorter manifesto-like piece in the first issue of the new Video Game Art Reader journal (on which more soon!).   
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Full paper DiGRA/FDG online

The full proceedings of the DIGRA/FDG ’16 – First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG are now online in the DiGRA digital library. The conference itself was held in August in Dundee, Scotland (see here). Many members, both staff, students, and affiliates of our Game Studies group were present and presented their work. Below, you will find and overview of all the full papers which wound up in the proceedings, including my own:

Glas, René. Paratextual play: Unlocking the nature of making-of material of games.

Hurel, Pierre-Yves. “Playing RPG Maker”? Amateur game design and video gaming. 

Ottens, Michel. Enacting aporia. Roger Caillois’ game typology as formalist methodology. 

De Smale, Stephanie. Game essays as critical media and research praxis. 


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We are looking for a Postdoc candidate in Persuasive Gaming

My department is currently looking for a Postdoc candidate in the field of persuasive gaming: Please check it out – you can apply till August 19!

Utrecht University (UU), Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) are looking for highly motivated Postdoc and PhD candidates who consider it a challenge to conduct their research in the context of a collaborative research project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) on Persuasive Gaming. From Theory-based Design to Validation and Back. The project is a collaboration between UU, TU/e, EUR and a number of Dutch game developers.

Project description

The research in this collaborative project is concerned with the characteristics, design principles, and effectiveness of persuasive gaming. We study gaming practices that combine the dissemination of information with attempts to engage players in particular behaviors and attitudes. The project has three subprojects: two PhD projects and one Postdoc project. The PhD projects focus on design principles (TU/e) and validation (EUR), the Postdoc project focuses on the persuasive dimensions of serious games (UU).

For more information, click here.

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Summer School 2014: Identity and Interdisciplinarity in Games and Play Research

Together with a group of other European universities active in the field of games and play studies, we got a EU grant to set up an ERASMUS Intensive Program in the form of a Summer School in 2014:

The first interdisciplinary European summer school in game and play research will take place 16-31 August 2014 at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. It is is aimed at talented PhD and MA/MSc students who are interested in the study of games and play. It offers students an innovative interdisciplinary platform for learning about games and play that doesn’t exist anywhere else in Europe or beyond.

A proper website will follow, but for now head over to our GAP website for further details.

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Article in ToDiGRA out now.

I’m honored to say that the paper I presented at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference back in 2011 has now been published as part of the inaugural issue of the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (ToDiGRA) Journal. The paper is called “Breaking Reality: Exploring Pervasive Cheating in Foursquare”(html/pdf).

From the journal’s press release: “ToDiGRA is a refereed, open access, quarterly, international, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to research on, and practice in, all aspects of games. ToDiGRA is published electronically and in print via its partner ETC Press”.

The fullhere. Here’s the table of contents:
first ToDiGRA issue can be found

– Annika Waern and José Zagal: “Introduction”
– Jason Begy: “Experiential metaphors in abstract games”
– René Glas: “Breaking reality: exploring pervasing cheating in Foursquare”
– Ioanna Iacovides, James Aczel, Eileen Scanlon, and Will Woods: “Making sense of game-play: How can we examine learning and involvement?”
– Jonas Linderoth: “Beyond the digital divide: An ecological approach to gameplay”
– Gareth Schott and Jasper van Vught: “Replacing preconceived accounts of digital games with experience of play: When parents went native in GTA IV”