Hello, I’m Dr. Andrei Zanescu! I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Communication Studies, as well as Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. I currently coordinate the daily research activities of a Games for Change project, partnered with Concordia and the Doris Duke Foundation studying representation and harmful portrayals in video games.

My personal research focuses on three key areas at the intersection of games and film. First, I study the legitimation of games through the staging of “global” or American awards (The Game Awards / The Spike VGAs / VGX / Cybermania ‘94 / DICE / BAFTA), festivals (SXSW / IGF) and the composition of their member/jury bodies. Second, I examine the cultural formation of blockbuster games (often called AAA or AAAA games) in the American context, and how these games rely on or make use of resonance as design orientation. Both halves of my work are focused on the continuous invocation of American blockbuster cinema (from the 1950s to today).

This overlap includes hit films, like Ben Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Avatar (Cameron, 2009), popular directors like Christopher Nolan and Jordan Peele, as well as on-screen stars such as Al Pacino and Harrison Ford. This research is due out this year in Convergence, for the first critical assessment of Cybermania ’94 (the first televised game awards show), and for a hybrid film/games account of blockbuster games in Epistemic Genres: New Formations in Digital Game Genres (Bloomsbury, 2025).

The third main branch of my work focuses on (de)colonial approaches to representation in games, primarily on the Balkans (see balkanism), as well as the Mediterranean locale (especially Egypt and Greece), and the “tropics.” This work was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, Blockbuster Resonance in Games, and will appear as a chapter in Video Games between Postcolonialism and Communism (De Gruyter Brill, 2025).

Last up, I am also a co-author of Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025), and the first franchise-level study of gender representation in Assassin’s Creed (Games & Culture, 2024), as well as cutting edge research on games distribution models like battle passes, microtransactions and gamblified structures (New Media & Society, 2020; Journal of Consumer Culture, 2021).

For more info about aspects of my background, classes, research, publications and ongoing projects, check out the top of this page! If you’d like to get in touch, you can find a e-mail contact tab above, or reach me on LinkedIn or BlueSky.