New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Epic Games Store’s struggle to become a platform

Epic Games finally found a way to invest the 4 billion dollars of Fortnite revenue: they are opening their store to compete with the largest PC gaming platform – Steam. Steam, originally envisioned as a tool for automatic update...

By Alexander Bernevega on 09/22/19 Comments Off

Facebook Gaming: Live Streaming the Perils of Data Privacy

The ability to record and live stream video games has completely reformed the gaming industry as it became the birthplace of popular online live streaming communities. Why do younger people today spend more time watching gaming content than playing...

By Boy Singmanee on 09/20/19 Comments Off

Mission Control: The changing boundaries of control and ownership in the world’s biggest crowd funding success.

The latest controversy surrounding the in development game Star Citizen, struck me as illustrative of the pitfalls and complexities of new forms of financing, and how they manifest the sunk cost fallacy in new, unexpected ways. It isn’t just...

By Tim Groot on 09/24/18 Comments Off

Twitch.tv: A Socially Valuable Platform, or Just Another Amazon Revenue Stream?

Instagram influencers and YouTube vloggers have long been seen as the leaders in monetizing one’s online self. New to this scene are an entirely different cohort of digital money makers: those who profit as professional video gamers on live...

By Emma Knight on 09/21/18 Comments Off

A Streamlined Explanation: The Problem with Streaming Games on YouTube

Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg is one of the most popular video game streamers on YouTube with more than 57 million subscribers (Orland, 2017). Because of a racial slur uttered in one of his recent Let’s Play videos, PewDiePie faced a...

By Ayse B. Tosun on 10/25/17 Comments Off

Functions of representation in a work of art & MMORPGs

Interactive Digital Art ‘‘Do Not Touch” is an interactive crowd sourced music video for Light Light’s song ‘Kilo’. The video was created by Amsterdam based art collective Moniker. Before the experience starts users are being notified that their cursor...

By Giel Veenstra on 09/18/14 Comments Off

Virtual reality rebooted: Can duct tape fix (virtual) reality?

‘Imagine a wraparound television with three-dimensional programs, including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands. Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather...

By Natta Frank on 09/11/13 Comments Off

Remediation in Grand Theft Auto

Remediation is definitely one of those well-known concepts that new media scholars can discuss about for hours. According to Bolter and Grusin, remediation is the representation of ‘old’ media in new media. Characteristics of television and radio, for instance,...

By Wessel Schillemans on 09/09/13 Comments Off

Piracy in the Gaming Industry; Consumers at a Loss

Piracy has been both a key aspect and influencer of the video gaming industry ever seen its conception. It has affected the way in which games are perceived, played, made, and the way in which they are sold....

By Joseph Jackson on 03/19/13 Comments Off

Gaming can save the world – A gamer’s perspective (interview)

Could it? I may have exaggerated Jane McGonigal’s thoughts on gaming’s potential possibilities, but her optimism and enthusiasm may well agree with the title. McGonigal talks of gaming’s collaborative potential, that if harnessed correctly, could lead to better and...

By Christopher Mead on 10/31/11 Comments Off

We fought the fight – and we’re still fighting- Wikipedia and Tek9.

So you’re thinking, ‘fight’… ‘battle’? What kind of nonsense is this guy stirring up? How can you fight Wikipedia? Good question. The only answer to that is yes, it’s possible, and most importantly, probable if you’re intending on making...

By Christopher Mead on 09/29/11 Comments Off

Master New Media; a logical choice.

The first week at the Master New Media was interesting and it gave a good view of what we will do in the upcoming year. It is nice to see that the classes consist of so many students from...

By Daan Fliervoet on 09/15/11 Comments Off

I Played Kinect, and I Liked It

During my recent travels I came across a demonstration for the Xbox 360 Kinect in the Zurich Hauptbahnhof railway station. For those that don’t know, the Kinect is Microsoft’s latest peripheral for the Xbox 360 that allows gamers to...

By Ronen Shay on 10/31/10 5

A short essay on how Remediation can ruin Your gameplay

Being disappointed by certain facts of various remakes of games is an extremely common feeling for a nowadays gamer. Especially while living in times where technological evolution outruns the concepts of game-makers. As smaller companies struggle to come up...

By Bart Brodzki on 10/15/10 2

World of Tweetcraft?

The emergence of MMO gaming and virtual reality, especially the largest artificial worlds such as Azeroth in World of Warcraft, gave us a new way of socializing with people from around the globe. Twitter is one of the...

By Bart Brodzki on 10/07/10 3

Botting, Plotting and Multiboxing

A short entry on people botting, people plotting, bots multiboxing, and virtual goods adverts in games. Includes a MOVIE!

By Bart Brodzki on 10/01/10 3

Virtually Yours! The Meteoric Rise of Virtual Game Goods

In the space of just over a decade, virtual game goods have gone from being a black market cottage industry to an extremely successful business model for gaming and social networking virtual goods industries. This evolution, caused by player...

By Isobel Gorman on 09/27/10 1

Little Big Planet Not So Web 2.0?

During the First Look event, held last saturday in Amsterdam, Sony Computer Entertainment’s Bernard Groeneveld presented Little Big Planet, already presented in this post. Sony presented this “Make-your-own”-game as the gaming industry’s answer to Web 2.0 applications like Youtube.

By Stefan Keerssemeeckers on 09/28/08 2

The faces of gaming

Besides playing games, one of the greatest pleasures would be watching other people's expressions while playing games. When people are playing games they totally forget to how look...

By Maarten van Sprang on 11/15/07 Comments Off

Ignis Solus

In this little machinima movie, Valve shows of their new rendering style in the upcoming game Team Fortress 2. The cool thing about it is that it almost looks like a genuine Pixar short. But everything you see is...

By Maarten van Sprang on 10/10/07 3