What We Do
Connecting to Game started with a simple question: How could we produce content about games that is sometimes more academic, and sometimes more accessible? We decided that we could produce content in as many formats as we felt necessary, without the constraints of the daily news cycle, or the release schedule for games and media at large.
Connecting to Game’s main goal is to bring you (the readers, the listeners, and the viewers) longer form articles, podcasts (including produced episodes and interviews with academics and games industry folks), video essays and game streams covering a wide variety of topics.
Starting with our Humour and Games podcast, we’ve tried to approach the meeting point between humour, culture and games from both the academic side, and the industry side where professionals operate day by day.
The plan going forward is to continue approaching games (analog and digital) with that same mindset, while providing you with high quality reflections and analysis.
Welcome, and please get ready, we’re Connecting to Game!
Who We Are
A perpetual child of the late 80s, Andrei’s first experience with games was picking up a Sega Genesis in 1992 and staring at Sonic running across Chemical Zone. It’s all been downhill (or uphill depending on how you look at it) from there!
Andrei’s 4th year PhD Candidate in Communications at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He’s a co-author on the forthcoming Microstreaming on Twitch (under contract with MIT Press). Elsewhere, Andrei’s research has covered a wide range of topics from culture in games, stereotyping of Eastern Europe. He’s also published on monetization models and the increasing overlap of gambling and game technologies.
Marc Lajeunesse
Marc learned to read by playing the first Final Fantasy on his mother’s lap. Throughout his life games and play have been fundamental to his experience of the world. After living several different lives playing music and teaching in Japan, Marc has dedicated this phase of his existence to understanding games, and helping others understand how games have become woven into our modern lives.
Marc’s academic research focuses on toxicity in online games. He is driven to understand toxic phenomena in order to help create more positive conditions within games with the ultimate hope that we can produce more equitable and joyful play experiences for more people. He has published on the Steam marketplace and DOTA 2, and is a co-author of the upcoming Microstreaming on Twitch (under contract with MIT Press).
Scott Dejong
Scott has been creating games since he was a child. By playing and making games, he has always used them as a way to understand the world around them. Between running games with children at summer camps, teaching with them in the classroom, or constructing them for research projects, games and play are part of Scott’s natural chaos.
After having an existential crisis trying to define play, he began to pursue a PhD in understanding how play exists inside and outside of a game. Building from his past in creative work and personal concerns with disinformation, he is exploring how information can be playful. While it hurts his head, it has led to a series of publications, and the upcoming release of the game Lizards and Lies.