André Bourbeau
Hi, everyone!
I'm André, a first-year Master's student in Cinema and Media Studies at York. There is not a whole to say about me personally. I was born in 1996, I'm from Ottawa (where I lived until I moved to Toronto this past September), and I did my B.A. in Film Studies at Carleton University.
Although my background is in cinema studies, my graduate research is about games, specifically theories and popular discourses around the notion of the gaming artist and, by extension, the games-as-art question (I'm glad we're reading Bogost this week, because a lot of his writing is pertinent to these topics). I'm relatively new to game studies, and have absolutely zero game development experience, but I'm looking forward to seeing where the creation and theoretical components of this class will change how I see, and study, games.
What about games?
I have always been a lifelong game-player. My first console was the Nintendo 64, and, from what I remember, my first game was StarFox 64. I played mostly PC games as a kid (Age of Empires and the Battle for Middle-earth games were favourites), and as an angsty male teenager, played mostly online first-person shooters. I like to think of myself as a bit more rounded now: I love puzzlers, third-person action-adventurers, survival horror, open-world role-playing-games, stealth games, and I have a strange affinity for first-person "walking simulators". The most recent game I completed was Spec Ops: The Line, which was shocking and brilliant in equal measure. The way that game subverts expectations of the military-shooter genre, and makes you question your avatar's actions through its design, is fascinating. Some of the player choices are agonizing. It's certainly worth a play-through if one has the time.
Other interests of mine in relation to games include things like game sound, cutscenes and other "non-game" elements in games, procedural generation, and game "feel".
In my spare time, aside from gaming, I love biking, playing and watching basketball (go Raptors!), reading history, and futzing around with photography and videography.
