Our team
Bernard Perron is a full professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies. His approach has always been ‘bottom-up.’ Whether it’s a film, video game, comic book, or novel, it is first and foremost the work itself that fuels his thinking. Much more of a formalist and cognitivist than a hermeneutist, and more interested in reception than production, he strives to understand how the work is understood and how emotion is felt. This explains his keen interest in a popular genre such as horror, which exacerbates the oldest and strongest emotion felt by humans, namely fear (according to Lovecraft). If video games have taken up so much space in his research, it is because they remain a machine for making people think, act and feel. He co-edited The Video Game Theory Reader (Routledge, 2003), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (Routledge, 2009), and The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (Routledge, 2014, 2nd edition in 2023), Fifty Key Video Games (Routledge, 2022), as well as Figures de violence (l’Harmattan, 2012), The Archives: Post-Cinema and Video Game Between Memory and the Image of the Present (Mimesis, 2014), Z pour Zombies (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2015) and Video Games and the Mind. Essays on Cognition, Affect and Emotion (McFarland, 2016). He also edited Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (McFarland, 2009). He wrote Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (The University of Michigan Press, 2012), The World of Scary Video Games: A Study in Videoludic Horror (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Le jeu vidéo: la peur au service de la jouabilité (Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascale, 2021). He is co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the online magazine Sciences du jeu.
Dominic Arsenault is a professor in the Department of Art History, Film and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal. His research on video games focuses on narrative and script; graphics and music; history and industry. He also practices music creation with his project Multi-Memory Controller, which hybridizes the sounds of metal music and retro video games, and video game creation under the name Arsenic Domino.
Carl Therrien is a Professor of Games and Film Studies at Université de Montréal. His research explores immersion and affective ecologies, topics central to his Ph.D. dissertation and further examined in States of Immersion Across Media (co-edited with Philippe Bédard and Alanna Thain, Amsterdam University Press, 2025). He has published extensively on the current challenges of video game historiography through the study of specific genres such as visual novels, horror games and first-person shooters. In The Media Snatcher (MIT Press, 2019), Therrien conducts a comparative study of the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, confronting American and Japanese perspectives of this expansive technological platform. He has co-founded the History of Games international conference series and has contributed to the annual Game history symposium in Montreal since 2014.
Auxiliaires de recherche
Cédrick Bergeron-Hamel
Cédrik Bergeron-Hamel is a MA student in cinema in the Department of Art History and Cinema at the Université de Montréal. Working under the supervision of Bernard Perron, his international experience has fueled his research into the impact of videogame temporalities on gamers’ conceptualization of game time, by analyzing the discursive metaphors used to render this experience in reviews. His academic interests intersect with his creative projects, where he explores the creation of reflexive videogame experiences, combining narrativity and temporality.
Roxanne Chartrand 
Histoire internationale du jeu vidéo (SHAC)
Roxanne Chartrand is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. Her doctoral research, carried out under the supervision of Dominic Arsenault and Maude Bonenfant (UQAM), focuses on the theory of possible worlds, agentivity and, more broadly, the metaphysical and meta-ethical implications of the videogame experience. Her other research interests include alternative and queer video games and science fiction. In addition to participating in the Sensibilités Queer laboratory at the Université de Montréal as a research assistant, she is also founder and coordinator of the Collectif XP, the videogame research and experimentation group for graduate students in video game studies at the Université de Montréal.
Dany Guay-Bélanger [Deadplay]Histoire internationale du jeu vidéo (SHAC)
Dany Guay-Bélanger is a FRQ and SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, Film and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal and holds a master’s degree in Public History from Carleton University. He created a podcast that explores the development and application of Deadplay, a methodology favouring a holistic approach for the preservation and study of videogames as cultural heritage artefacts. His research aims to perfect and concretise the methodology developed during his master’s in order to allow players and researchers, present and future, to access videogames from every eras of this medium’s history. Dany is the Francophone representative of the Canadian Game Studies Association, a member of the History of Games conference steering committee, and an affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.
Kevser GüngörHistoire internationale du jeu vidéo (SHAC)
Kevser Güngör is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Art History, Cinema and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal. Her PhD research, carried out under the joint supervision of Dominic Arsenault (UdeM) and Arnaud Regnauld (Université Paris 8), focuses on the android in science fiction, primarily in video games, but also in literature, cinema and TV series. She specifically studies the place occupied by the “radical” android in contemporary fictions, its ontological and reflexive role, from an intermedial and philosophical point of view, through trans-, post- and metahumanism, moral philosophy and ethics, the question of avatarity, embodiment, agentivity, and so on. Her other research interests include queer, orientalism and the (de)colonial representation of characters inspired by South-West Asia and North Africa (i.e. the “Middle East”) in independent video games (Laboratoire Sensibilités Queer) and fantasy/science-fiction role-playing games (GORR).
Jessica Harvey
Jessica Harvey holds a bachelor’s degree in cinema from UDEM and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in cinema, research-creation profile, under the supervision of Dominic Arsenault (UDEM). She is also a teaching and technical assistant in the Department of Art History, Film and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal. Her main areas of research focus on scriptwriting, as well as the representation of otherness and diversity in various media (video games, cinema, TV series), particularly in the context of works created by authors in a position of privilege. She is also interested in video shooting and sound recording, both for short films and interviews.
Samuel Heine
Critique vidéoludique
Samuel Heine is a doctoral candidate in film studies at Université de Montréal. He previously completed a master’s degree in history at Université de Sherbrooke, during which he worked on the representation of Montreal’s Chinatown in the press. Using an interdisciplinary approach, he is now continuing his research on media representations of minority populations by studying video games and video game magazines. His projects focus in particular on the issue of ethnicised spaces, diversity in video game magazines and the question of race in fantasy worlds.
Francis Lavigne Critique vidéoludique 
Genres vidéoludiques et communautés discursives
Francis Lavigne is a PhD candidate in film studies in the Department of Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. He is also coordinator of the video game laboratory. As part of his master’s degree, he focused on the history of video game recordings (on YouTube in particular). As part of his PhD project, he is interested in the history and forms of video game criticism in North America, through a study of the Castlevania game series.
Julien Pepperall
Julien Pepperall est étudiant à la maitrise au Département d’histoire de l’art et de cinéma de l’Université de Montréal. Dirigé par Bernard Perron, il s’intéresse aux choix narratifs sous l’angle cognitiviste, cherchant à comprendre le rôle du sentiment de risque et de la structure des arborescences narratives dans la création de l’engagement chez les joueurs. Ultimement, son approche vise à analyser le cinéma interactif et à évaluer son rôle dans l’écosystème ludo-narratif.
Samuel Poirier-Poulin [Site]Histoire internationale du jeu vidéo (SHAC)
Samuel Poirier-Poulin is a PhD candidate and course instructor in game studies at the Université de Montréal. His doctoral research investigates trauma-like gaming experiences and draws on affect theory and phenomenology of media. His second field of research explores the recent developments in sexuality studies and focuses on romance and queer desires in visual novels. His work has been published in several academic journals, including Journal of Games Criticism, G/A/M/E: The Italian Journal of Game Studies , and Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, and in the anthology Video Games and Comedy. Since 2022, Samuel is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Press Start.
Michelle Raby
Michelle Raby is a master’s student in video games at the Université de Montréal. Under the supervision of Bernard Perron, she is mainly interested in ludonarratology and the role of the tactician in the Fire Emblem series. Her other interests include gamer emotions and the study of video game series. Having previously studied digital music (UdeM) and worked in sound design (Super Splendide), she has also explored the mechanical and aesthetic functions of audio in video games and virtual reality.
Christopher RavenelleCritique vidéoludique
Christopher is a doctoral student in cinema in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Bernard Perron and Natalie Doonan (Department of Communication). After focusing his master’s thesis on simulation as an expressive medium in survival games, his doctoral thesis currently examines the sources of motivation and engagement processes of players in open worlds. His other research interests include the study of fan communities, the observation of amateur productions, and the links to be made with the evolution of the industry, as well as the application of qualitative and quantitative methods in game studies research.
Hugo Remy
Hugo Remy is a research assistant for the project ‘1967-2020: Over 50 Years of Video Game History in Quebec’. He began his education in film studies at Sorbonne Paris 1, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in Cinema: Practice and Aesthetics. He finished his final year of his bachelor’s degree as an exchange student at Concordia University, after which he completed a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies at the same institution. He then worked on several film productions. Alongside his studies, Hugo wrote and directed his own short films. He continues this activity today. His latest film, Fil Manquant (Missing String), is now available to watch online and has been selected and awarded at several festivals. Hugo Remy is currently completing a master’s degree on the relationship between cinema and horror video games.
Salima Toumi
Salima Toumi is a PhD candidate in Video Game Studies in the Department of Art History, Cinema and Audiovisual Media. She previously obtained a master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology, under the supervision of Lilia Othmen Challougui, during which she explored video games as rites of passage and their role in identity and intersubjective construction. She is now pursuing her research under the supervision of Carl Therrien. Her thesis focuses on the reconfiguration of identity and the relationship to otherness in a posthuman context, using the video game NieR: Automata and the animated series Pluto as case studies.her work lies at the intersection of human and social sciences, cognitive sciences and philosophy. A proponent of a holistic, transdisciplinary approach, her research emphasizes the interconnection of knowledge and the need to rethink modes of thought in order to better understand contemporary reality.
Visiting Researchers
Jessica Aldred
Jessica Aldred was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal (2013-2015), where she worked on the concepts of transmedia franchising, character, and convergence between cinema and digital games. Through this project, she examined the challenges of translating characters from the world of film into the realm of video games. Jessica teaches courses on digital cinema, transmedia franchising, and gender issues in gaming. She recently founded a production company (Rule of Three Productions) that explores the intersections between documentary, narrative cinema, and digital gaming. Her work has been published in An Interdisciplinary Journal, Games and Culture, and The Oxford Handbook for Sound and Image in Digital Media.
Christophe Duret
Christophe Duret is a postdoctoral researcher at Université de Montréal (LUDOV Laboratory) and the Université de Limoges (Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles). He holds a Master’s degree in Communication and a PhD in French Studies from the Université de Sherbrooke, where he has been a lecturer in Communication since autumn 2016. He has managed the Paidia mailing list, dedicated to French-language game studies, since 2015. He also co-edited a book on intertextuality in video games (Contemporary Research on Intertextuality in Video Games). Finally, he has published several articles in journals such as Sciences du Jeu, Recherches en communication, Communication & Organisation, Itinéraires: Littérature, Textes, Cultures, and Loading. His research interests focus on mesocriticism as applied to the analysis of video game objects, intermediality, transmediality, and procedural and spatial rhetoric.
Thibault Philippette
Thibault Philippette is a professor at the School of Communication at UCLouvain in Belgium. He is a researcher with the Groupe de Recherche en Médiation des Savoirs (GReMS) and co-founder of the Louvain GameLab. Following a thesis on the coordination activities of players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), his research has focused on the relationship between (video) games and learning (education in and through games), ludoliteracies (evaluation), media ludology (discourse) and ludification (design). More generally, he is interested in the processes of social appropriation of technologies. He recently co-edited, with Sébastien Genvo, the collective work Introduction aux Théories des Jeux vidéo.
François-Xavier Surinx
François-Xavier Surinx is a PhD candidate financed by the FNRS-FRESH fund, in French and Romanic languages and literature at the University of Liège, under the co-direction of Sémir Badir and Fanny Barnabé. He is a member of the Liège Game Lab (LGL) and the Centre de sémiotique et rhétorique (Ceserh). His research project focuses on the generic categorization of video games through the online discourses of male and female gamers, notably via formats such as wikis, tags, forums or tests. He has previously worked on the perception of emotions aroused by video games, and in particular on the means employed by text to induce effects of fear within this medium. He completed a research stay at LUDOV from September 2024 to February 2025 to discover other perspectives on generic video game studies.
Lars de Wildt
Lars de Wildt is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven, with a Master’s degree in Literature from Leiden University. His main project combines interviews and analyses of video games to discover how and why games, players and developers play with religion in a supposedly secular age. He has been a visiting researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne and at LUDOV (2019), where he interviewed game developers in Montreal about their work on Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. Lars has published with Information, Communication & Society; the British Journal of Sociology of Education; the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Games & Culture; and others. Favourite fact: Super Mario World is the best game ever released.
Ea C. Willumsen
Ea C. Willumsen is a doctoral student at the University of Bergen in Norway, where she works with the Media Aesthetics Research Group. Her doctoral project focuses on the theoretical exploration of the relationship between avatars and game worlds. Her time at Ludov in 2018 facilitated her research on 100 different video games used to explore avatar configurations across a variety of platforms and genres. She holds a master’s degree in Game Analysis from the IT University of Copenhagen and a bachelor’s degree in Communication and Computer Science from the University of Roskilde.
Associate Researchers
Simon Dor is an assistant professor in the Teaching and Research Unit in Creation and New Media at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue in downtown Montreal. He is particularly interested in strategy games, approaching them from the perspective of their playability, history, competitive or narrative experience, the cognition they involve, and the representation they induce. However, his research and teaching have also led him to take an interest in e-sports, immersion, ethics, and game design. He has been blogging about his research for many years (http://www.simondor.com) and uses video game broadcasting tools — Twitch and YouTube — to better understand what these new objects mean for gaming culture and to disseminate his research.
Hugo Montembeault [Academia] [Youtube] [SoundCloud] [Tumblr] Critique vidéoludique Genres vidéoludiques et communautés discursives
Hugo Montembeault holds a PhD from the Department of Film Studies at Université de Montréal, where he also lectures in video game studies. He teaches courses on game aesthetics, immersion, culture and methodology. His main research focuses on the transgressive nature of glitches from the perspective of media archaeology in order to critique their noisy participation in the political economy of game design and video game culture. Throughout his collaboration with the ‘Video Games Observation and Documentation University Lab’ (LUDOV), he has participated in two funded research projects, one on video game genres and the other on game criticism. His other contributions touch on narratology, the historiography of games, the discourse of the specialised video game press, and the aesthetic experience of walking simulators. He recently launched a two-year research-creation project as a postdoctoral fellow at TAG (Concordia University). Through the creation of a glitch-based gaming experience, he is exploring, tinkering with, and mapping the procedural rhetoric of glitches from a game design perspective.
Martin Picard [Site] 
Cinéma interactif 
Jeu vidéo d'horreur
Martin Picard is a visiting professor and associate researcher in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In 2012–2013, he held a research fellowship in Japanese studies from the Japan Foundation at Wako University in Tokyo. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University and obtained his PhD in literature and cinema from the Department of Comparative Literature at Université de Montréal. He teaches the history and aesthetics of video games, game design, and animation methodologies for the Art and Science of Animation programme at the School of Design at Université Laval. He also teaches Japanese and Chinese cinema, and Japanese literature and culture in the Department of East Asian Studies at Université de Montréal. His research focuses primarily on the history and culture of Japanese video games, but also on national and digital cinema, as well as popular culture in its transmedia and transnational manifestations. He is the co-founder and executive committee member of the annual Symposium on the History of Games (sahj.ca) and is also co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Kinephanos (kinephanos.ca).
Jean-Charles Ray holds PhDs in both Cinematographic Studies (Université de Montréal) and Comparative Literature (Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle), and is a lecturer at Université de Montréal and Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue. He is the author of Le Grimoire et le monstre – Penser le jeu vidéo par la littérature fantastique (Pix’n Love, 2024) and co-founder of the Roleplaying Research and Observation Group (GORR). His main areas of research are horror, game scriptwriting and tabletop role-playing. He is also a scriptwriter and creator of role-playing games.
Guillaume Roux-Girard is a visiting professor at the UER in Creation and New Media at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (Montreal campus). His current research focuses on listening to video games.
Gabrielle Trépanier-JobinHistoire internationale du jeu vidéo (SHAC)
Gabrielle Trépanier-Jobin is a professor of video games at the School of Media at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and co-director of the Homo Ludens research group. As part of her PhD in communication at UQAM and her postdoctoral studies at MIT, she focused on the representation of women in video games and its impact on players’ gender identity, as well as video game parody and other forms of appropriation of this interactive medium. Her current research focuses on player immersion, diversity and inclusion in the video game industry, and the potential of feminist and eco-friendly games to raise awareness and consciousness.