A professor descends into horror
The serious business of studying scary video games
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Bernard Perron |
James receives a letter from his wife, supposedly dead for three years. The letter contains a chilling request to come and find her in a house in a shady neighbourhood. To save his wife, James will have to vanquish her captors: cruel, bloodthirsty zombies. James is afraid to go, but he will.
This is the story of one of the most popular horror video games, Silent Hill 2. “It’s a miniature masterpiece. It took me about twelve hours to get through it. It’s intense, particularly at the end,” reports Bernard Perron, a professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies.
Perron is a horror video game fanatic, but he is also a respected academic, with a doctorate in comparative literature from Université de Montréal and a master’s in cinema studies from the Sorbonne. Perron is in charge of the Narration et jeu vidéo course in the new certificate in game design program. He speaks at conferences, directs the Ludiciné research group (cri.histart.umontreal.ca/ludicine) and publishes peer-reviewed scientific articles. In 2003, he supervised the publication of one of the first books on the theory of video games, The Video Game Theory Reader (New York, Routledge). “The video game industry is a twenty billion dollar business that’s on its way to displacing movies and television in certain audiences,” he says. “Our role as academics is to try to understand this phenomenon.”
Working at the Centre de recherche en intermédialité, Perron specializes in “ludology,” the study of pleasure, and the relationship between image, narration and the spectator’s emotions. When he meets his doctoral students, Carl Therrien, Martin Picard, and Dominic Arsenault, Perron relates with a smile, “Before we talk business, we talk play. How did you get rid of the monster? How did you get to the next level? It’s really important to get to know the subject you’re studying.”
Aren’t these games violent? “Absolutely,” Perron agrees. However, he insists that playing them does not lead to violent behaviour. “There has been a lot of talk about their influence since the Dawson shootings, because the killer loved them. I don’t think it’s a worry. We all played cowboys and Indians when we were children, and it didn’t turn us into killers.”
