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About me
This is my humble abode on the web, and this page in particular is the little corner where I introduce myself. My name is Dominic Arsenault (that's
). You can check out my academic résumé. It's in French, but I think you can manage to see the big picture anyway. If you ever need some precise translation, send me an e-mail.
I am a ludophile
Well this one is pretty easy, and assuming you paid minimal attention to the address bar and the funky logo while the page was loading, you probably already knew. I love games. Board, War, and tabletop Role-Playing games (Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun mainly), but most of all video games. I like to play them of course, but also to read about them, see how they're made, browse FAQs for games I already know well to further my understanding of their mechanics or see the different possibilities they offer which I wasn't aware of, and all that jazz. I also write a lot about games.
I am a student
Enrolled in the Ph.D. in Film Studies, at the Université de Montréal. In practice, this does not mean much. I picked seminars by considering their potential to help me better understand video games, my advisor works on video games, and he employs me on his research project on video games. If there was a game studies degree, I would be doing my work from within it. For the time being I just do it from the outside, surfing along the waves. My main research interests are:
- The role and nature of narration and storytelling in games
- The mechanisms stimulating or hindering immersion
- The formation, evolution and function of video game genres
- Gaming theory. That is, theory focused not on the game as a system of rules or object, but on the process of playing a game. This basically recoups all my other research interests. Questions I want to address through the development of "gaming theory" include how the player picks up and organizes the signs presented to him to construct meaning, how his or her expectations (driven partly by genre knowledge and categorization, partly by past experiences, and partly by a number of common desires, among which performance and fiction seem to be the most common) shape the experience, etc.
...because I am interested in learning more about playing video games as a form of fiction. That's what a narratologist is to me. I do think games can tell stories (which of course does not mean they have to do so like every other medium, nor that they can be reduced to only that dimension), and have worked out the hows and whys in my Master's thesis. I like adventure games a la Maniac Mansion and story-heavy japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy. I usually grow tired of any FPS within a couple of hours unless there's an interesting story going on.
I am a ludologist
...because games are games first and foremost, even though I personnally cannot ignore their fictional side, and I am interested in various game design issues. I like strategy games, be it Real-Time, Turn-Based, or Tactics-style, and Simulation games, and I cannot stand to have a story get in the way when I play these types of games. To me, a ludologist is someone interested in studying the formal aspects of games. This doesn't exclude other practices or interests, it's just a focus.
In short, I am having the ludology versus narratology debate all the time, by myself.
I am a digital native
I forgot what the age requirement is - under 30? Or is it now 32? But in any case, I am well under that. In case you are not sure what I'm referring to, here is the very readable paper introducing the concept of digital native versus digital immigrant. When I was a kid, people asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up. I would reply "I want to be a video game scriptwriter!". So much for firemen, policemen and pilots, eh.
I
I (somewhat) fulfilled my childhood dream by working for two years as a game writer for a small independent Montreal-based video game developer called Evillusion. I think there are some old interviews floating around if you're interested to learn more. (for the record, I am not part of any religious cult, nor do I have anything against the vast majority of them. Eon of Tears was not about propaganda.) I even think the old official website is still up, though it's been long abandoned. (I wonder who pays the hosting bills anyway?) I came to game studies from this writing perspective to better understand the nature of the grandly hyped "interactive narrative", and I fell in the game studies soup, so to speak. I also like designing games, though I seldom get past the design per se. I would like to somehow get a project going on as part of my future work.
I am a Québécois
I was born and raised speaking and reading french in Quebec City (I now live in Montreal...that's the green arrow on the satellite view of the world below). English is my second language, and I never speak it except at international academic conferences, while travelling, and the likes. In case you didn't know, french is the (only) official language in Québec.
You probably heard a bit about Québec during the referendum of 1995 or at some other time. You can read up on "La Belle Province" on Wikipedia (I haven't verified all the info, but Wikipedia is just so convenient).
I played the bass in a couple of metal bands, the biggest by far being Dreamcatcher Soulcaged, and I write original music for my own 8-Bit Metal project, as a hobby. Each song is based on one particular video game and is made of a combination of speed metal electric guitar and NES sounds. Check the Melomania section on the left-hand navigation menu to access my works. I do not make any promise of quality about my music since I am a hobbyist with no formal training in the field.
Since I have been asked for this in the past, I am available for doing music for films, games, commercials, or whatever else, and for live performances in video game festivals or other events. Contact me using the address scribbled in the top-left corner to discuss your project(s).
I am not a cinephile
Despite the fact that I have a Masters degree in Film Studies and will soon have a doctorate, I do not watch that many movies and am relatively disconnected from the film industry (directors, actors, producers, majors, salaries, and whatnot). I love Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the original Star Wars trilogy (I am a huge SW geek, too - and yes, The Empire Strikes Back is the best), and a few movies here and there. I own less than a dozen DVDs.
I am not a literary buff
This is typical of my "digital native" status. I read a lot of scientific literature and papers, but I do not read even one novel per year. Unfortunately for book publishers, I like science-fiction and fantasy because of their world-building ability, and video games excel in doing just that. My recent readings are Robin Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy, and Douglas Coupland's jPod.