What can I find here?
If you’re here, you might be curious about my upcoming or already published written work. Here, you’ll find some quick-fire explanations about all the work I publish through more academic or institutional channels, as well as information about project goals and how these papers came to be. At the top, there’s work-in-progress, and below there’s published work (organized by recency). These are some informal accounts of these projects from my perspective, which is particularly important where collaborative projects are at stake. So, I tend to focus on my work, thoughts and processes.
Work in Progress - Monographs & Books
Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch - Consalvo, M., Lajeunesse, M., and Zanescu, A. - February 2025, MIT Press.
This publication has been a long time coming, and is slated for early 2025 (done edits and is now in production). Originally, this was a project that Dr. Mia Consalvo started in 2015, with the express aim of studying marginalized streamers on Twitch. This meant observing and interviewing folks who streamed a variety of activities on Twitch, and who were themselves women, people of color, queer folks, people living with disabilities (to name but a few). I entered this project, along with Marc Lajeunesse in early 2017, as the focus of the project began to center the experiences of smaller streamers (who we refer to as microstreamers) in terms of viewer count, as a distinguishing factor in how their daily activities play out. To be clear, this wasn’t a slight on our respondents, due to their viewer metrics, but rather an engagement with the fact that the vast majority of Twitch streamers are often broadcast to a handful of viewers, or often to no one, and that their lived experiences are distinct.
Back then, I had the opportunity to attend TwitchCon 2017 and to be at the ground floor of a range of announcements, like the Twitch affiliate system and the achievements that would pipeline creators towards partnership. Here, I got to meet a lot of folks from artisans at their kioks, local Canadian streamers, non-profits like AbleGamers, big names signing autographs like Zizaran and press folks who were also covering the event. There was, even then, a sense that audiences, non-affiliate streamers and the newly minted affiliates were somehow measurably distinct from partners. Likewise, partners were not all measured equally, with some folks having a few hundred viewers and others like Dr. Disrespect turning up with a Lamborghini to great fanfare, despite controversies surrounding his content. Morover, the bulk of the emotional support labour was conducted by affiliates and these more modest partners, running panels about mental health, disability, racism, work-life balance, cyber-security, etc. They were were constantly trying to help newcomers understand that Twitch had a darker side that entrants needed to guard against. TwitchCon was the formative contact I had with the platform aside from an interface on my screen, or content.
Over the next five years, we would engage in a variety of study methods to understand early contacts like these. Ethnographic observation, long-form interviews, platform walkthroughs and more. As we split the work between each other, I ended up leading writing on the autoethnographic approach we took in a later chapter. We streamed ourselves streaming for around 3 months with regular schedules, personas, goals, chosen games, and so on. We each had differing experiences ranging from performance anxiety (me!), loneliness, technical issues and just pervasive exhaustion. I was then a novice with autoethnography, and in many ways I still consider myself to be one, but I am proud of how that book section turned out. In retrospect, I believe that trying (and failing) to approximate streamers’ lived experiences as much as possible opened up our eyes to minute details we would’ve missed otherwise. Likewise, writing this chapter, I ended up feeling like the platform itself was constantly antagonizing streamers, so I also spun off a chapter about the platforms and systems that structure affiliate and partnership tracks: A constant bombardment of messaging to work nonstop, with structured processes that will guarantee success, which in fact do nothing of the sort.
Overall, there’s much more to say about this book and I can’t wait to share it with folks, but for now, I’ll have to settle for this small preview!
Betting on DOTA 2’s Battle Pass: Gamblification and productivity in play - Zanescu, A., French, M., and Lajeunesse, M. - 2021, New Media and Society.
Times They are A changin’? The Evolution of Female Protagonists in the Assassin’s Creed Franchise - Eklund, L. and Zanescu, A. - 2024, Games and Culture.
This has been a recent collaboration, coming out of FDG 2022, and some of the game industry/cultural representation keynotes and panels that took place in Athens. Particularly, Dr. Lina Eklund had spoke at the conference as part of a first day keynote with folks from other countries about the specific intersections of regional game studies, cultural imperialism (especially the impact of NA industry actors in smaller locales). I had gone to the conference to discuss my dissertation work on Magic: the Gathering and Assassin’s Creed, with the card game being the core focus of that talk. So, it seemed like an easy fit to merge Dr. Eklund’s interest in regional game studies, feminist studies and work on museum curation, with my work on simulation, cultural imperialism and blockbuster games.
This project provides a broad franchise overview of the inclusion and representation of women across every Assassin’s Creed title, focusing on the macro-level improvements and stagnation in representation. There are some fantastic single-title analyses, like those featured in Women in Classical Video Games (Draycott and Cook, 2022), so we wanted to really trace just how much female representation there has been across the franchise, how shallow or deep it is, how it maps onto the gameplay and how women interact in the games (especially from the vantage point of player and non-player characters). I can give you a short answer to these questions: it has been extremely limited overall, though the post-2017 period has seen a rapid expansion in terms of depth (though not without its own set of challenges and issues). This is, aside from the piece written by de Wildt and Aupers (2021), the first franchise-wide article on the now 15 years-old franchise, which also opens up the framework used by them for analyzing religious representation, towards new avenues. Likewise, it’s the first peer-reviewed academic piece to discuss Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Mirage in any way. Another aspect of this piece, is that it is woven into a broader timeline of gender-centric conflicts in the Euro-American AAA games industry, gaming culture and fan spaces. These include the too hard to animate scandal that Ubisoft invited when discussing AC Unity, the Gamergate campaign that followed, as well as the #metoo shockwaves that hit multiple Ubisoft studios, and led to the eventual arrest of Tommy Benoit and Serge Hascoet.