Media and Culture Studies
Game studies has been part of the field of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University since around 2000 in both research and education. From this disciplinary perspective, games, gameplay, and game culture are studied as cultural phenomena with ever-changing form and meaning which give shape not just to game culture but our media culture at large.
Spationomy 2.0
The Spationomy 2.0 project was started in October of 2019, and concluded with a final conference held in November of 2022. The project was funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union.
Ecomodding: Understanding and Communicating the Climate Crisis by Co-Creating Commercial Video Games
This article explores how the climate crisis and specifically the underlying “crisis of the imagination” (Bendor 2018, 132) exacerbate the entrenchment of environmental communication, and how modifying commercial video games (ecomodding) can facilitate the use of games as effective communication infrastructures to address this issue. Environmental communication challenges are well-studied, but remain difficult to tackle in practice.
Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies
The article at hand explores the concept of playful scholarship, focusing specifically on the use of playfulness in re-assessing the collaboration between academia and societal partners to tackle “intractable policy controversies” (Schön and Rein 1994, p. 23)—i.e., challenges in which opposing parties operate with conflicting frames (often without even noticing).
PhD Project: The Becoming-Playful of Warfare in the Netherlands
This PhD research project seeks to understand and explain this ongoing logistical process by mapping out the Dutch ‘military-academic-entertainment complex’ and the nature of its relationship to the ludification of warfare in the Netherlands.
Playable Personas: Using Games and Play to Expand the Repertoire of Learner Personas
This article explores how playing and co-creating games in higher education contexts contributes to expanding learner personas and facilitating a multimodal learning experience. Working from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media/games studies, pedagogy, and linguistic anthropology, Stefan Werning, Deborah Cole, and Andrea Maragliano conceptualize in-class learning as the making and playing of games, reporting on game experiments and playful practices targeted at learning key theoretical concepts in our disciplines.
Making Games – The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools
In Making Games, Stefan Werning considers the role of tools (primarily but not exclusively software), their design affordances, and the role they play as sociotechnical actors. He frames game-making as a (meta)game in itself and shows that tools, like games, have their own “procedural rhetoric” and should not always be conceived simply in terms of optimization and best practices.
Making data playable: A game co-creation method to promote creative data literacy
This article explores how making data playable, i.e. developing exploratory co-creation techniques that use elements of play and games to interpret small to mid-sized datasets beyond the current focus on visual evidence, can help a) promote creative data literacy in higher education, and b) expand existing definitions of data literacy.
The Playful Citizen. Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture
The Playful Citizen edited volume explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking.
Playing the Archive
Old games don’t play on modern equipment. To retain this part of our cultural heritage, we took action.
Game Research Magazine
In 2017, a special issue titled Game Research – Games that Change your Mind was published about the research projects of the Utrecht Center for Game Research.