Queer Game Studies

New media brought new possibilities for marginalized communities and authors,  including videogames. Even though concept of queer scene is not without its problems,  the decreasing skill-barrier needed for making their own game and emergence of new,  user-friendly game-building tools, a new kind of videogame wave emerged amidst the  tranquil sea of mainstream. Autobiographical titles speaking from previously unheard  from positions began to flower.    What interests me is the intersection of those two movements. Autobiographical games  such as Dys4ia or Mainichi shows how videogames can be used by transgender people  to express themselves. Yet there exists too little insight into how those work in context  of minority mediascape, along personal blogs or self-help community message boards. 

Games like World of Warcraft have been called "inherently queer," providing gamic spaces where gender and sexuality seem fluid and customizable. Although the provocation is exciting and revisits many of the arguments made about the liberatory potential of cyberspace, this article hopes to antidote the assumption that the virtual is "inherently" queer and to unpack what I call the "interactive fallacy," the further assumption that video games offer players unlimited power and control. Through a close reading and close playing of two massively multiplayer games-Zynga's casual game FrontierVille and Blizzard's World of Warcraft-I hope to identify and interrogate the ways that gender and sexuality (even race) in games are both normative and subversive. In other words, in games about fantasy and fun, how and where and why might real world queerness, gender, and race be rendered, negotiated, and disrupted? Is that even possible? Games like FrontierVille and World of Warcraft offer beginnings for gendered and queered play, allowing players to imagine and enact a range of desires, but ultimately both games narrow these choices and possibilities, rendering them algorithmically inconsequential, and restore them to heteronormative ends. Looking at character creation, game play, and game narratives, this article argues for the productive opportunity in the play of, with, and play in sexuality and gender and race to discover what Lisa Nakamura calls "disruptive moments of recognition and misrecognition" that can offer subversive and queergaming potential and practices. Perhaps more important, this article also uncovers the ways that logics of digital games limit and norm players, narratives, and play itself.

How might we think about ways to play games and make games that take advantage of the affordances of digital computers as well as the happy accidents, workarounds, and transformations that provide alternative practices, opportunities, and endgames?  How might we think about what Alexander Galloway calls countergaming, which does not simply identify “alternate formal strategies” of gaming but actively employs and gleefully explores those strategies (Gaming 111).  By extension, how might we imagine queergaming, ways of playing against the grain, against normative design, and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well.  Queergaming embraces the possibilities of nonproductive play, the uncertainty of glitches and exploits, and the desire for queer worlds as opportunities for exploration, for different rules and goals, and even for the radical potential of failure.  Looking at a range of games, from mainstream bestsellers to independent titles, this paper hopes to define the need for more than queer content or window dressing in games but for queer(er) design, practices, and play.

Videogames are becoming an important means of expression for marginalized communities. Despite the growing body of research in queer game studies, transgender identity remains under-researched and lacking in empirical data. By using an experimental approach coupled with grounded theory and informed by current game and queer theory, this study aims to illuminate how transgender-identifying persons approach autobiographical videogame depiction of transgender experience.
    Ten participants were asked to play influential independent videogame Dys4ia, which depicts the author's hormonal replacement therapy, and semi-structured interviews were conducted. Their responses were coded, and a preliminary model of how Dys4ia works in the context of transgender media ecology was constructed. The term Procedural-autobiographic multimodality is introduced to describe an assemblage of interactive affordances, distinctive aesthetics and situatedness of Dys4ia in structures of minority media while considering video game-specific theories.
This study attempts to empirically ground transgender queer game studies, suggesting avenues for future research and proposing a model of how videogames as procedural artefacts work alongside vlogs and other expressive means within transgender mediascape.

Este artigo visa contextualizar o conceito de empathy game a partir de sua popularização pela indústria e crítica de jogos independentes, e sua subsequente alienação do movimento queer, responsável pelos jogos digitais que iniciaram esse movimento. Por meio da comparação entre dois artigos que abordam os empathy games em momentos diferentes da década de 2010, e sob perspectivas fora e dentro do movimento queer, este trabalho expõe as razões pelas quais entender esses jogos do ponto de vista da empatia é problemático.

This article provides quantitative analyses of trends in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) content in digital games released between 1985 and 2005, including 162 games and 283 instances of content. We contextualize these findings within the literature on LGBTQ media representation and emphasize the unique forms this content takes in games. We also demonstrate the importance of looking beyond the game text in isolation in coding sexual and gender identities. We explore the statistical association among variables, including the intersection of race and character role with LGBTQ identities, country of origin, and year of release. Moreover, we demonstrate trends in this representation over time. In addition, we discuss the limitations of quantitative analysis of game content, particularly for this sort of historical analysis. Still, we can point to interesting quantitative trends in LGBTQ representation, which offer important context for understanding what ideologies are being replicated in digital games.

This dissertation addresses the intersections of queer and technology to rethink the posthuman as raced, gendered, and queered as co-constituted through and by technology. Given technoculture's appropriation of queerness as yet another identity category subject to individualist manipulation and the near invisibility or silence of technology in queer theory, this dissertation theorizes the "technoqueer," building on the pioneering work of Donna Haraway's cyborg, Roseanne Allucquere Stone definition of the technosocial subject, Nina Wakeford's cyberqueer, Lisa Nakamura's cybertype, and N. Katherine Hayles on the posthuman. This project looks at cyberspace and bodyhacking technologies-real or imagined-to show how technology is never neutral or simply a tool. On the one hand, the metaphor of cyberspace and the reality of online "synthetic worlds" rely on ideologies of configurable identities, disembodiment, and freedom of exploration and expression. On the other hand, bodyhacking or the ability to shape, manipulate, enhance, and transform the body offers similar promises of escaping biological destiny, of self-improvement and selffashioning, and possessive individuality. Given the popular narratives of technologies like the Internet, bionics, and gamification as liberating humanity from the prison of the "meat," v this dissertation deploys a comparative study of literature, video games, and body modification technologies in order to articulate alternative readings of technologicallymediated race, gender, and sexuality foreclosed or overlooked by contemporary posthumanism. Looking to figures like Alan Turing or the Bionic Woman and looking at texts like William Gibson's Neuromancer, George Schuyler's Black No More, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Irrational Games's Bioshock, and Zynga's Facebook game Frontierville, this project demonstrates the ways technology is imbricated with race, gender, and sexuality and how liberation from one set of embodiments or identities often means the stabilization or policing of others. The technoqueer then reveals and challenges the structures of the near ubiquity of technological mediation and penetration into twenty-first century life-the technonormative matrix-in order to theorize alternative futurities and embrace technoqueer ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Thomas Foster, who gave me the right chemistry of guidance and freedom to help me find my voice and perspectives as a scholar and writer. I would like to thank my other committee members Kate Cummings and Eva Cherniavsky for their invaluable questions, advice, and insight. I would also like to thank the Department of English at the University of Washington for their support and belief in me, in particular Gary Handwerk, Brian Reed, and Kathy Mork. Moreover, thanks to the Department of Comparative History of Ideas and Phillip Thurtle for the opportunities to grow my scholarship and pedagogy. I would like to thank Kathleen Woodward and the Simpson Center for the Humanities for their sponsorship of my academic and professional pursuits. Thanks are due as well to the Department of English at the University of Maryland who started me on this heroic journey, specifically Michael Olmert, Jack Russell, Kandice Chuh, Verlyn Flieger, Linda Coleman, Marilee Lindemann, and Theresa DiPaolo. Finally and most importantly, thank you to my family, my partner, Greg, and my friends for their continued love, understanding, conviviality, and support. Special thanks to Tim Welsh, Jane Lee, grad pub at the College Inn, the Critical Gaming Project, the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate interest group, my Tellings table past and present, and Archaea here and there. Again, thanks to all, without which none of this would have been possible.

This paper addresses the narratives of four Twine games, developed by queer identified people, to compare the LGBTQ representation in them to overall representation in the medium, focusing on transgender people. The game industry is dominated by the views of heterosexual, cisgender men, and LBGTQ people represent a small minority of the game developers. Analyzing the textual presence of LGBTQ characters and themes in video games, it was possible to notice that they are very rarely the main actors in the narratives presented, and regarding transgender characters, they are often victims of prejudice. The narratives on the four Twine games, in opposition, have queer characters at the center of the story, and even though they may present instances of prejudice, it is either viewed from the oppressed character's perspective and condemned, or presents negative consequences to the player inside the game's structure. They also manage to bring up relevant issues regarding the inclusion of LGBTQ people inside game spaces and also in society. There are plenty of ways video games can discuss queer related issues, and Twine productions present themselves as a successful example for doing so.

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to cast a critical eye on an arguably conservative aspect of so-called ‘walking simulators’ -- their walking simulation -- and, second, to position viral browser game QWOP (2008) as an intervention into dominant paradigms of video game walking control. The first half discusses how walking simulators inherit and share a ‘grammar of action’ for simulating walking with a number of other games (Galloway). I argue this grammar of action constitutes the reification of a particular subject position ‐- one associated with a normative bodymind -‐ in video gameplay via a combination of representations, control procedures, and player ‘embodied literacy’ (Keogh). The second half considers QWOP’s alternate grammar of walking simulation and how this precipitates a different relationship between player and video game, prompting questions about distributed cognition, intentionality, failure and what it means for a game to be critical.

"We are the future cunt" and "the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix"-these iconic sentences from "A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century" (1991), with whichas the familiar narrative has it-an important chapter of cyberfeminism began, are well known. Drawing on Donna Haraway's canonical essay on cyborgs and women, the Australian artist collective VNS Matrix (pronounced "Venus Matrix") supplied more than just the vocabulary for an ironic confrontation with the heteronormative technoculture of the 90s. While the British cultural theorist Sadie Plant was working on a feminine archaeology of the computer, artists Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Julianne Pierce, and Josephine Starrs were developing a series of text-, image-, and code-based works to challenge the still male-dominated cyberworld. Their projects aimed to penetrate the smooth surfaces of virtual worlds with feminine technophilia and breath life into the viscera of the internet with plenty of bodily fluids, vaginal secretions, knowledge, and pleasure.

遊戲模組相關的研究方興未艾，但不論是何種模組，相關討論大多聚焦在物 理層面，而忽略情感模組所能帶給玩家的滿足。作為一個經典 AAA 級電子遊戲， 《闇龍紀元》系列在玩家與其他角色戀愛關係的循路文本設計原就相當開放，刺 激許多遊戲模組在此基礎之上萌發而出，形成多性別認同、多 P 的豐富情慾世 界。然而，情感相關的模組從首部作品《序章》到第三部《異端審判》數量大幅 下滑五倍，其間的差距如何直接或間接反映出遊戲開發者吸納並轉化這些玩家參 與內容創作的過程？玩家與 NPC 的互動模式又產生何種質與量的轉變？同時， 又有什麼元素維持不變？透過分析知名遊戲模組社群網站 Nexus Mods 的資料， 本文考察系列作中從首部到第三部作品的情感模組融入遊戲小敘事的過程，先從 酷兒時間、空間與對反遊玩的概念出發理解模組的文化實踐，再以對反遊玩方向 的負向轉移現象來理解其間的轉變，試圖把握這些模組如何使酷兒認同成為可能 或不可能，又如何折射出使用者/創作者的滿足與限制。

關鍵字：闇龍紀元、情感模組、酷兒、對反遊玩、Nexus Mods

We invite proposals for chapters on tabletop roleplaying games in relation to utopia and utopianism. The theme may be construed broadly, encompassing for example hopepunk, solarpunk, and other -punks, transformative justice and anti-carceral feminism, queer publics and queer world-making, colonialism and decoloniality, Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurisms, climate change and ecological crisis, critical humanism and posthumanism, dystopia and heterotopia, imaginary voyages and philosophical novels, or counter-mapping and radical cartography. Please submit proposals by 1 February 2021 to [email protected], along with a brief bio (or a CV). Innovative formats and approaches and informal queries are very welcome.

This article offers an interpretation of Naughty Dog’s shooter game The Last of Us: Part II (2020). Taking Judith Butler’s critique of war discourses and Mieke Bal's theory of focalization as points of departure, I show how the game recalibrates gender norms, undermines conventions of the shooter genre, and invites critical scrutiny of violence and escalation. I show how the game unveils the destructive dynamics of violence and introduces queer and trans characters as a natural part of the game world, thereby issuing an inclusive and progressive political message.

The main body of text is in Norwegian.

This brief paper outlines the design and development challenges of a critical design affection game. Affection games require players to flirt, kiss, hug or make love to meet their goals. The game described, named Stolen Kisses, allows players to kiss a wider variety of individuals. The game is played by placing your lips on a mobile device and balancing long kisses with short kisses across one of eight gender and racially diverse characters.

While the phrase “queer aesthesis” suggests a concern for how a game’s queerness resonates sensorially with players, I want to use it here to talk about what can be queer about a video game’s relations to what intermedialist Eric Méchoulan has called the greater intermedial milieu of any given media object (that is, the intertextual and intermedial web an object is always already part of and enmeshed with). For my purposes, then, “queer aesthesis” designates, first and foremost, the affective dimension of a specific readerly or analytical attitude towards all elements of a game and not just its manifest content. By creating a back and forth between a singular object-turned-theoretical tool and its greater intermedial milieu, such an attitude, I argue, necessarily operates by setting up an intertextual and intermedial framework of analysis, on the one hand, and allowing, on the other hand, that reciprocal theoretical moves that occur between the general and the particular can be useful and valid.
Specifically within this paper, then, “queer aesthesis” designates the combination of interdisciplinary and intermedial lenses that I deploy in order to shed light on one particular game’s queer(ing) mechanisms. The game I have chosen for my case study is NYU-based artist, indie game maker and academic Robert Yang’s endurance sex game Marathon, which he developed in just six hours for Nordic Game Jam 2018. As will become clear as the paper unfolds, however, I also take “queer aesthesis” to designate the medial relationships that connect Yang’s video game to other time-based media objects. While this presentation is too short to explore all of these, after outlining the larger video gamic landscape wherein Yang’s game situates itself, I will show how focusing primarily on Marathon’s relation to earlier experimental films that explore interconnected experiences of queer time and pleasure is absolutely crucial to gaining a clear grasp of the game’s mechanisms, and more importantly still, of its contributions, as both an object and a theoretical tool, to the sorts of intermedial relations that video games entertain with prior media texts.

This poster was presented at Clash of Realities 2017 (at CGL 6-8 November) in Cologne, Germany. In this work, I tried to shed the light on "gayming" in Japanese video game culture, especially focusing on speed-run videos. Although this is an ongoing project, the current result shows quite an interesting fact: queer gaming or a combination of queer and gaming are getting to be popular these days, but this movement is led by homophiles and homophobias.

This dissertation’s objective is to research the conditions of possibility for the existence of a digital gaming indie queer cultural scene. Taking into consideration that white, straight cisexual men are recognized as the digital games’ public – and that this exclusivity gaming is an important statement for the industry and the maintenance of a “nerd identity” alike – this project inquiries about viable possibilities for access and production of other subject positions within this cultures. The cis-heteronormativity is an organizing entity that regulates discourses and visibilities, creating subjectivation processes and material possibilities that produce heterosexuality and cissexuality as the only legitimate and privileged subject positions. However, being these processes and possibilities contingent positions, the possibility of living at its margins is to both negotiate and subvert the legitimacy gender / sexuality norms. Being so, this project investigates the San Francsico Ba...

Johanna Drucker in "Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship" articulates as a key transformation (and bone of contention) in the variegated and interdisciplinary terrains of the digital humanities, saying, I am trying to call for a next phase of digital humanities [that] synthesize method and theory into ways of doing as thinking […] The challenge is to shift humanistic study from attention to the effects of technology […] to a humanistically informed theory of the making of technology. 1

Presentation paper at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Chicago, Illinois, March 2017. Several colleagues asked to see this paper. If you wish to use my arguments presented here in your own work, a sample citation is provided at the top of the document of the paper presentation.