The Department of History has been awarded an NWO grant through the PhD in the Humanities competition for research on the history of the Dutch game industry. PhD candidate, Anne Heslinga, will spend the next four years working on her research project "Mainstreaming the game: digital participatory culture and collective gaming identities in the Netherlands" under the supervision of prof. dr. Ben Wubs and prof. dr. Paul van de Laar.
Anne Heslinga
Before graduating cum laude from the Global Markets, Local Creativities (GLOCAL) Erasmus Mundus International Master’s Programme at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Anne has worked in in partnership with digital media communities across music, film and games in both the Americas and Europe. Her research and professional experience have centred around the contemporary histories of amateur and semi-professional digital creative communities and their role in political and cultural identity-making. She is currently working as a lecturer in the Department of History at Erasmus University Rotterdam and has previously worked between research, education and digital media industries with New York University and the New York City public school system.
Mainstreaming the game: digital participatory culture and collective gaming identities
As social movements such as #MeToo and #Blacklivesmatter have made evident, online spaces often serve communities whose shared values have very real impact in the physical world. The game industry comprises one such digital community with 2.5 billion gamers world-wide in 2019. Access to spaces for gaming, however, remains highly unequal. There are frequent reports of gender-based harassment in gaming communities – one notable example being the #Gamergate scandal which saw mass threats issues against female gamers and game developers on an international scale. As gaming becomes more popular, and its communities further develop as hubs for social activity, there is new need to gain insight into the development of localised, diverse cultures in the game industry.
Participatory gaming culture, or a culture in which users themselves produce content, is not a new practise for gaming. Hacker communities in the Netherlands have produced and circulated programmes for games since the 1980s. The central aim of this research is to develop an understanding of how these early software communities enacted and performed gamer identity, and how new modes of participation have renegotiated membership and belonging over time. In order to do so, the project addresses the rapid development of gaming in the Netherlands through large-scale text analysis methods using consumer publications, fan materials and archived gaming content. The work of the PhD ultimately hopes to contribute to efforts to not only collect, but also contextualise, the significance of gaming experiences for Dutch cultural heritage.
The project will start in September 2020 and is based on research on the origins of the Dutch game industry Anne conducted with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in 2019.