Jonathan Lessard, PhD
Associate Professor, Design and Computation Arts
Primary Investigator (LabLabLab)

Office: |
S-EV 6781
Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex, 1515 St. Catherine W. |
Phone: | (514) 848-2424 ext. 4717 |
Email: | jonathan.lessard@concordia.ca |
Website(s): |
Portfolio LabLabLab |
Education
- PhD Cinema Studies (Université de Montréal)
- MA History (Université de Montréal)
- BA Arts and Humanities (Université de Montréal)
Research interests
Game design; game history; interactive storytelling; emergent narratives, natural language interaction
Areas of expertise
Game design, history, and theory; Emergent narratives; 3D modelling and rendering; Interactive storytelling; Natural language interaction

Publications
Recent publications
Lessard, J., & Paré-Chouinard, S. (2022). Dramatic Situations for Emergent Narrative System Authorship. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Santa-Cruz
Lessard, J., & Beauchesne, A. (2022). Automatic Interactive Documentation for Emergent Story Discovery. Foundations of Digital Games. Athens.
Lessard, J. (2022). Natural Language Interaction for Games and Gamification. 7th International Conference on Gamification & Serious Games. Geneva.
Lessard, Jonathan (2022) . « Adventure » in Perron, Bernard; Boudreau, Kelly; Wolf, Mark J.P.; Arsenault, Dominic (eds). Fifty Key Video Games. Routledge ..
Lessard, Jonathan ; Carl Therrien. « Indies de province : Deux développeurs de jeux indépendants dans le Québec d’avant Internet ». Loading 14, no 23 (2021).
Lessard, J., & Kybartas, Q. (2021). Blabbeur—An Accessible Text Generation Authoring System for Unity. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Tallinn.
Lessard, J. (2021). How Chess Became Hardcore: A Short Game Design History. XXIII Board Game Studies Colloquium- The Evolutions of Board Games, Apr 2021, Paris, France.
Khaled, Rilla; Lessard, Jonathan; Barr, Pippin. « Documenting Trajectories in Design Space: a Methodology for Applied Game Design Research » (2nd best paper) In Foundations of Digital Games. Malmö, 2018.
Games
LabLabLab Games
Research-oriented games made at the LabLabLab can be found here: https://www.lablablab.net/
-SimProphet (2015)
-A Tough Sell (2014)