The Assassin’s Creed franchise mainly consists of video games but has over the years created a narrative universe spanning different media. Seeing how the traversal from the individual installment Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag into the narrative universe of Assassin’s Creed changes player engagement with the franchise allows one to understand audience interaction with different mediaproducts in a transmedia and convergent culture. Seen as a performed possible world, the individual installment is shown, through a three part gameplay analysis, to function as an unfinished commodity. This implies striking a balance between an individually satisfying experience and a plot-hole ridden incentive for further activity. When the individual installment incites traversal into a narrative universe, the player can construct the universe from installments through a hyperdiegetic, intermedia, or crossmedia engagement, depending on the reliance on medium specificity. Ultimately, this article provides a model for audience interaction in the transmedia age.
LINK
This paper investigates whether students change their entrepreneurial entry preference if they are presented with different options. We propose that students’ entry preferences are mediated by concepts proposed by threshold theory: choice options, opportunity costs and psychic income. This study is exploratory in nature, analyzing a small sample of 31 student essays both quantitatively and qualitatively to test our propositions. Though lacking a control group, enrolment in a six-week module on entry mode options by a group of third year Bachelor students at a Dutch university resulted in some interesting changes—in particular, toward greater clarity in the entrepreneurial entry mode preference as well as a shift toward takeover options (including firm acquisition and family succession). However, thematic analysis of students essays reveals that the perceived ability to act on such preferences may still be limited by opportunity costs (i.e., the higher need for financial capital) and a self-perceived lack of human capital (entrepreneurial or management experience).
DOCUMENT
This article reports an experimental Delphi study of expert attitudes to management contracts in the Dutch hotel industry. The study was prompted by appreciation of the apparent trend towards the divesting of property by international hotel companies, which is also explored here. The purpose of the research reported was to ascertain expert views of the implications of such a trend for the Dutch hotel industry, which has a history of risk aversion and aversion to management contracts as a model for hotel operations. The Delphi approach allowed access to a variety of experts regarding different groups and stakeholder perceptions. The findings of the study, which is the first of its kind to address this question in the Dutch hotel industry context, suggest that there is an expectation of greater diversity in the financial arrangements for managing hotel operations, but no inclination to radically change the business practices that have hitherto characterised the Dutch hotel sector.
LINK
Whereas most continents see circulation of newspapers drop, Latin America is one of the few areas in the world with rising newspaper circulation. A substantial part of this rise is caused by the introduction of free newspapers in a dozen countries on the continent. We map this development, discuss possible reasons for the rapid growth and try to answer whether this introduction has substitution effects on paid newspapers. The growth of this new format is most probably caused by economic growth while we conclude that substitution is low, meaning that free dailies serve a new reading audience in Latin America
DOCUMENT
This study will examine how branded games in the LEGO Ninjago franchise communicate the brand narrative through their mechanical, semiotic and referential design. Digital games as communicative tools facilitate a new paradigm of marketing focusing on experience creation through integrated marketing communication plans. The LEGO brand creates highly successful games that communicate the brand effectively. To explore the possibilities and counteract the simplistic use of branded games, this study introduces an innovative framework to formally analyze branded games and their communication of a brand narrative through mechanical, semiotic and referential layers. This framework introduces formal game design to advertising studies, while dragging game studies into branded ecosystems. Using the framework, we analyze LEGO Ninjago the Movie – The Videogame, to identify how this paid digital game expands the Ninjago universe and fulfills specific marketing purposes oriented to LEGO toy sets. Our analysis shows that on a mechanical and semiotic layer, the game presents a standalone experience catering to the universe of the Ninjago movie and the values of the Ninjago brand narrative. However, by framing the whole game as LEGO – in its materiality and interactable objects – the LEGO brand narrative of creative construction informs the act of play. The referential design in these games makes use of playful disruption of rules to instill additive comprehension in the player related to purchasable sets and content.
DOCUMENT
The world is changing in many ways. Digital developments follow each other in quick succession and have an impact on many existing structures. The future may be uncertain, but we can still learn from what has happened in the past. We usually know what we don’t want, but few of us know yet what we do want. Still, this is something we can only discover for ourselves, I think. Who are we? To what extent are we individuals and to what extent are we part of a collective? Remarkably, in these questions we can also find parallels with the Middle Ages.
LINK
The Internet is changing the way we organise work. It is shifting the requirement for what we call the ‘schedule push’ and the hierarchical organisation that it implies, and therefore it is removing the type of control that is conventionally used to match resources to tasks, and customer demand to supplies and services. Organisational hierarchies have become too expensive to sustain, and in many cases their style of coordination is simply no longer necessary. The cost complexity of the industrial complex starts to outweigh the benefits and the Internet is making it redundant.
DOCUMENT
Als Turks-Nederlandse ondernemer weet Atilla Aytekin als geen ander hoeveel doorzettingsvermogen je als ondernemer nodig hebt om te kunnen slagen. Om andere ondernemers met een biculturele achtergrond te helpen, besloot hij met zijn Dutch Dream Foundation een traject te starten waarin gedurende een jaar ervaren topmanagers aan ondernemers worden gekoppeld om ze te ondersteunen en te motiveren. Willem Klijnstra en Annemien van der Veen volgden het traject. De interviews met de ondernemers en managers leverden zeer interessante, leerzame en vaak ook ontroerende verhalen op. Het leidde tot het idee om de verhalen te bundelen in een boekje, zodat andere ondernemers en studenten in opleiding voor een internationale carrière zich erdoor kunnen laten inspireren.
DOCUMENT
Deze presentatie is onderdeel van het project 'Het Open Gesprek'. Dit project is onderdeel van het onderzoeksprogramma Duurzame Bedrijfsopvolging.
DOCUMENT
