Publications

Book Chapters

Blockbuster Games: Industrial Strategy Meets Genre in Epistemic Genres: New Formations in Digital Game Genres (Approaches to Digital Game Studies) - Vorhees G. A., Call J., & Wysocki M. (eds). - November 27th, 2025.

This anthology brings together scholars from around the world to theorize and explore "epistemic genres" of digital games, which are defined by the social uses and meanings attributed to different constellations of games by the communities the play, make, and study them.

Game studies has experienced a cultural turn in the last decade, centering the social dimensions of games and play. What resources for theorizing game genres emerge from this cultural turn? How might the critical theories of race and culture, intersectional feminism, queer and trans theory, eco-criticism, and post-colonial and decolonial interventions of the past decade suggest new ways of thinking about game genres? The chapters in this edited volume make a case for epistemic genres that are distinguished primarily by their social context and use. The notion of epistemic genre centers the player's experience and the meanings that emerge from distinct communities as they engage with games. Epistemic game genres are those constellations of games that overflow and cut-across the genre boundaries of the commercial game industry and mainstream gaming culture.

The first section examines epistemic genres as they are constituted by different scholarly lenses. Here, the contributors consider how certain scholarly theories allow us to see the connections between seemingly disparate games. The second section examines epistemic genres as products of specific material and discursive contexts. The third section examines epistemic genres defined by the specific interpretive frames of communities of players that share a cultural lexicon, symbol system, or grammar. Overall, the chapters in this book make the case for understanding game genres as formations shaped more by play that the qualities of the games themselves.

Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch - Consalvo, M., Lajeunesse, M., and Zanescu, A. - February 2025, MIT Press.

An in-depth investigation of the Twitch streamers who make up the largest population on the platform: those streaming to small audiences or even no one.

The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us, Mia Consalvo, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals.

For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.

“A timely and insightful study of the millions of people left out of popular narratives about livestreaming: those who broadcast to just a handful of viewers, or even to no one at all."

Bo Ruberg, Professor, Department of Film & Media Studies, University of California, Irvine; coeditor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

“Through an exploration of microstreamers' motivations, practices, and experiences, this book invites us to rethink contemporary theories and practices about authenticity, liveness, and theorycrafting.”

Larissa Hjorth, Distinguished Professor and Director of Design and Creative Practice, RMIT University, Melbourne; coauthor of Screen Ecologies and Ambient Play

Blockbuster Resonance in Games: How Assassin’s Creed and Magic: The Gathering Simulate Classical Antiquity - Zanescu A., Supervised by Consalvo M., Committee Members: Acland C., McKelvey F., French M. & Mukherjee S., Chaired by Neves J. - April 2023.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, AAA game studios have refined corporate strategies for the adaptation of real-world cultures in analog and digital game technologies, as commodities met with enormous success. Among these, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed and Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering series have burgeoned from novel experimental projects into multi-decade franchises that constitute their brand backbone. Each franchise provides audiences with regular, unique, instalments simulating specific cultures, while also celebrating technological innovation. Further, the industrial strategies of each company have led to the formation of what this project theorizes as blockbuster resonance: a corporate strategy based on closely matching the perceived expectations of core audiences, overdetermined by motifs present in broader cultural trends and legacy media successes, articulated through technical maximalism and persistent marketing.

Prior scholarship on Assassin’s Creed has focused on individual installments’ stakes, while research on Magic: The Gathering has centered on the audience formations around the game, to great effect. However, this dissertation argues that each company’s franchises development unfolds over a decades-long span, where articulated resonance is instantiated at a macro level and requires the analysis of multiple titles to understand how resonance is sought and deployed. That level deals with the development of a technical structure of simulation. Therefore, this project also circumscribes resonant simulation, an applied simulation form simulation (in a cultural studies sense), arising from adherence to blockbuster logics, which reconstitutes cultures through references to legacy media and entrenched institutions.

To discuss the twin concepts of blockbuster resonance and resonant simulation, this project centers four case studies as mirrors inside and in-between each franchise: Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Amonkhet and Theros: Beyond Death. These examples examine the reconfiguration of Egyptianness and Greekness: iconic simulations of Ancient Egypt and Classical Greece, themselves often juxtaposed in imperialist manners across legacy media, classical history, and museum exhibition, and here through photorealistic and systematic renditions popular culture references. The purpose of this juxtaposition is to demonstrate how each culture is simulated anew, according to the resonance present in today’s popular media, along orientalist or exceptionalist lines, for the enjoyment of modern Western audiences.

Dissertation