Carl Therrien

Carl Therrien is professor in games & film studies at Université de Montréal. He co-directs research in the context of the LUDOV group (www.ludov.ca). He is the author of the platform studies book The Media Snatcher (MIT Press, 2019). He co-founded the History of games international conference series. His PhD thesis explored the notion of immersion across different media, more specifically cinema and video games. He recently completed the first phase of an ongoing research project on the history of video games, and has published extensively on the topic of critical historiography of games.

Contact information:
carl.therrien at umontreal.ca

Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First-Person Shooter Genre

by Carl Therrien

Abstract:

Documenting, understanding and transcoding the history of games into narrative form is a daunting task. Confronted with such an enormous quantity of traces, historians are naturally inclined to rely on testimonies and subjective accounts for some aspects of their narrative. As Paul Ricoeur pointed out, voluntary witnesses must be confronted with involuntary witnesses

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