Media Resonance
Like many other broad media concepts, resonance is simultaneously difficult to define in its uses, yet seems to surround us in marketing, reviews, and broadcasts. In our everyday lives, we might hear people say “that resonanated with me” or “I found that resonant” when discussing a book or movie they’ve recently discovered. We might even tune in to a director interview or a games trade show and hear an expression like “we wanted something that would resonate with audiences.”
Resonance is meant to piggyback on what audiences already know or expect. It’s meant to access deeply held feelings or emotional equity about the subject on the screen. It’s meant to be meaningful to a viewing audience. It’s meant to provide legible and moving combinations of words, notes, and rhythms for listeners. It’s meant to provide pizzazz and to hook players. Broadly, resonance is meant to engage audiences, move listeners, and hook players on the basis of what creators expect the audience to want to play, hear, and see.
What We Do
The Media Resonance Network takes a holistic approach to thinking about media that considers film and television, music, and games not as distinct media units, but as forms that resonate together at the levels of production, consumption, style, and culture. We take high-level concepts informed by academic and professional sources and accessibly apply them to articles, video essays, and podcasts to bridge a gap between professional, scholarly, and public approaches to thinking about the various media that we care about. The core team hopes to offer a platform for a range of voices to publish work unique to their expertise and interests that most align with their unique feelings and insights about the media they consume. Contributors work on what they’re most excited to discuss: what resonates with them. Most importantly, though we have an editorial team, The Media Resonance Network is a place where authors — from young and emergent scholars to industry professionals — are encouraged to produce work that is informed by scholarship and professional experience while maintaining the unique expressiveness of their own authorial voices, driven foremost by their passions for media.
Our Core Team
A child of the late 80s, Andrei’s first experience with games was picking up a Sega Genesis in 1992 and staring at Sonic running across Chemical Zone. Most days though, he can be found ranting about game awards shows and the industrial circuit of game legitimation.
When paid to rant, Andrei’s a part-time assistant professor in Communications, and a Postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He’s also a co-author of Streaming by the Rest of Us (MIT Press, 2025). Andrei’s other published research covers a wide range of topics from cultural resonance, AAA game industry logics, monetization and the overlap between games and film.
Marc Lajeunesse
Marc learned to read by playing the first Final Fantasy on his mother’s lap. Throughout his life games, play, and music have been fundamental to his experience of the world. After living several different lives playing music and teaching in Japan, Marc has dedicated this phase of his existence to understanding the personal and cultural connections and attachments we form with the media we love and hate.
Marc’s academic research focuses on community, toxicity, and unique practices in online and multiplayer games. He has published work on the Steam marketplace and DOTA 2, and is a co-author of Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming on Twitch and the forthcoming Their System, Our Game: Homebrew and the Worlds of Pathfinder. Marc is the Coordinator of TAG, the Technoculture, Art, and Games Research Center, as well as part-time faculty in the English department at Concordia University.
Safa Hachi
Safa is a writer, movie enjoyer, and music lover studying communications and cultural studies. Her interests live at the intersection of personal feeling and critical analysis, especially when it comes to identity, media, and the internet.
Safa is drawn to emotional, cultural, and political forces behind what we consume and create, as well as how they influence our sense of self and meaning-making.
Elizabeth Eraña
Elizabeth is a freshly minted graduate student pursuing an MA in English Literature by examining Disco Elysium's narrative in juxtaposition with its literary predecessor, "Sacred and Terrible Air." When not replaying Disco Elysium, she is interested in persistent world roleplaying online video game servers; namely how the dynamic between source material, game masters, and players create paradigms of what is believable in a make-believe setting.
Outside of academia, she is really, really into Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition and can't stop playing wizards. To date she has accrued 13,143 hours in Neverwinter Nights.
The Past and the Future
The Past - After years of water cooler debates and rants while waiting in line for coffee, we decided it was time to put our discussions down in writing and record them, and we started our website Connecting to Game. Originally, we started with the Humour & Games Podcast, which focused on talking to game makers and scholars outside of conference settings. The pod was much more successful than we anticipated, and yet we felt like we still weren’t putting our discussions out there. So, we kicked off Have You Played?, to work through our nostalgia for games and to connect with other critics and hear about their experiences. We also started toying with Connecting to Game Weekly, where we could have conversations about emerging topics as they broke. And still, we felt like we were hamstringing ourselves to talk about games only, when our conversations and interests moved across media lines.
The Future - For us to really have the ability to cover games in a way that felt authentic to our own interests and the current media landscape, Connecting to Game had to change, and so we became The Media Resonance Network. The old game-focused podcasts would stay alive, but it couldn’t be all we were doing. We wanted to cover music, film, tv and popular culture without being medium specific. We also felt like just Marc and Andrei, as core voices, wasn’t enough. We started reaching out to new people for new projects. That’s partly how Sonic Subcultures came to be. Now, no longer limited to being a “games site” we’re pushing beyond conventional approaches to media scholarship and bringing media studies to the masses based on the drive of our editorial team and the interests of our contributors.