Hello, I’m Andrei! I’m a part-time assistant professor of communication studies at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada.

My current research focuses on two key areas at the intersection of games and film. First, I examine the cultural formation of blockbuster games, often called AAA or AAAA games in the American context, and how these games rely on resonance with audiences. Second, I study the legitimation of games through the uses of “global” or American awards (The Game Awards / The Spike VGAs / VGX / Cybermania ‘94/DICE/BAFTA), festivals (SXSW/IGF) and trade shows (E3/Gamescom/Summer Game Fest). 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 Timothée Chalamet, 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).

Otherwise, I am also a co-author of Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025). I have also collaborated on the first franchise-level study of gender representation in Assassin’s Creed (Games & Culture, 2024), as well lead-authoring research on games distribution models like battle passes, microtransactions and gambling (New Media & Society, 2020; Journal of Consumer Culture, 2021). Finally, the last branch of my work focuses on (de)colonial approaches to representation in games, primarily on the Balkans, as well as the Mediterranean locale (especially Egypt and Greece). This work has been the subject of my dissertation, Blockbuster Resonance in Games, as well as a chapter in the forthcoming Colonial Intersections in Video Games (De Gruyter, 2025).

For more information about aspects of my research, publications and ongoing projects, check out the other dedicated pages on the site! If you’d like to get in touch, you can find a e-mail contact tab above, or reach me on BlueSky or LinkedIn.