Special Issue -- Queerness and Video Games
Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games (Introduction)
by Bonnie Ruberg, Amanda Phillips
The place where queerness meets games is a site of radical potential. This introduction, and this issue, ask how we can push queer game studies beyond desires for inclusion and representation and instead embrace a queer tradition of rejecting the status quo. [more]
Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft
by Teddy Pozo
This article re-contextualizes debate in queer game studies over "empathy games," within debates over empathy in feminist theory. New terms for haptic game design aesthetics such as consent, cuteness, and the radically soft emerge from readings of Curtain, Hurt Me Plenty, SABBAT: Director's Cut, and The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter. [more]
Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect
by Kara Stone
This essay uses a personal account of the process of creating a videogame to explore themes of queerness, disability, and labour. It intermixes theories of queer time with crip time to detail possible approaches to a queer, accessible art practice that takes seriously social inequalities yet moves towards healing. [more]
When (and What) Queerness Counts: Homonationalism and Militarism in the Mass Effect Series
by Jordan Youngblood
This paper examines how two BioWare-developed titles--2010’s Mass Effect 2 and 2012’s Mass Effect 3-- integrate various depictions of LGBTQ-affiliated characters into a larger systemic process of thinking about populations as “war assets” to be expended, rendering queer identity as useful only when considered as a “positive” resource in the fight. [more]
“theyre all trans sharon”: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction
by Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler
Video game fans use fan fiction to critique video game narratives that exclude or misrepresent diverse gender identities in their design. Fans also recraft the video game narrative to include the representation they want to see, providing insight into how marginalized and minority players respond to diversity in games. [more]
Queering Control(lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices
by Jess Marcotte
This article makes the case that control and controllers are a key entry point into altering the status quo of mainstream game design. In it, I analyze and subsequently queer five core aspects of control in videogames. Examples are drawn from the work of queer creators, including my own, in order to queer each aspect. [more]
Coin of Another Realm: Gaming’s Queer Economy
by Christopher Goetz
This essay explores gaming's "queer economy," joining intimate frameworks based on the study of affect and individual psychology with wider, systemic and economic analyses of the cultural and economic meaning of videogame play. [more]
Daddy’s Play: Subversion and Normativity in Dream Daddy’s Queer World
by Braidon Schaufert
This article argues that the popular indie game Dream Daddy renormalizes the subversive gay daddy figure by replacing boundary-pushing depictions of sex with the positivity, joy, and optimism of the suburban upper- middle class. Attending to negative feelings, or “bad dreams,” in the game can wake players up to messier, kinkier, and queerer worlds. [more]
Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gaming
by Matt Knutson
Applying Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity to play, this article examines time in high-stakes, professional play as a normative structure against which to recognize a set of queer temporalities, including backtracking, rewinding and resetting. A discussion of Life Is Strange illustrates both queer content and queered time in games. [more]
The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Mods
by Tom Welch
This article examines queer videogame modifications as a specific form of free and affective labour. Drawing on multiple modders, I describe the varying relationships between queer players, developers, and the game object through mods. [more]
Queer Easter Eggs and their Hierarchies of Play
by Eric Andrew James
Some of the earliest queer representations in mass-market games are Easter eggs, hidden artifacts that often present queer experiences as zany and noncanonical. Contrasting Easter eggs with representational politics that emphasize player choice, this article instead advocates for ambivalent design that confronts players with queer irresolvability. [more]
Engineering Queerness in the Game Development Pipeline
by Eric Freedman
With its focus on video game engines, this essay proposes how a queer analysis of the labors and technologies that undergird the work in progress might strengthen more generalized discussions of the representational politics of video games, their audiences, and their production communities. [more]
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