From the Utrecht University website:

Monopoly moneys: the media environment of corporatism and the player’s way out

By analysing corporatism through the lens of media ecology, Douglas Rushkoff shows how an invented set of rules became – like any totalising media environment – indistinguishable from nature. He concludes that while the corporatist rule set may have become the default operating system of our economy, it is not necessarily closed to intervention.

 

While a closed economic operating system may have been consonant with the closed, top-down media of the print and broadcast eras, as Rushkoff argues, interactive technology does offer new avenues for resistance and redesign. This “playability,” as he describes it, might yet return to economic systems in the form of digital innovations such as peer to peer exchange, decentralised value creation, and even new alternative currencies. This playability would be a positive development for the way it would allow for human intervention in a mechanism that has disproportional influence over our society.

When: June 25, 16:15
Where: Academiegebouw – Domplein 29, Utrecht

The 75-page final publication for the GATE: Game Research for Training and Entertainment is now available for download at the GATE website (or directly here). In it, you can find an article on the Knowledge Transfer Project Citizen Science for Smartphones which forms the background of our conference.

Here is the project summary:

Games played on mobile devices offer ‘ordinary’ citizens without a particular professional training or occupation great opportunities to become and enjoy being citizen scientists. It enables citizens to engage in the sensing and measuring of various environmental data, their dissemination to a broader audience of either fellow citizens or professionals, and in some instances to even act as ‘professional amateur’ interpreters of these data. Through the use of mobile technologies people can playfully move through their environment to acquire and distribute scientific knowledge. This knowledge transfer project wants to explore how the 7scenes platform can be used for such purposes.

The full article, written by Utrecht University’s Sybille Lammes and 7scenes Ronald Lenz, can be found on page 64/65.