For your theoretical consumption, Game Studies 18/3 special issue on 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]
This article re-contextualizes debate in queer game studies over “empathy games,” represented by the games EMPATHY MACHINE (merritt k, 2014), Empathy Game (Anna Anthropy, 2015), and empathy machine (Mattie Brice, 2016), within debates over empathy in feminist theory. New terms for haptic game design aesthetics such as consent, cuteness, and the rad[more]
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]
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]
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]
In this article, I make the case that control and controllers — the peripherals which players use as extensions of their bodies and minds to operate videogames — are a key entry point into the project of altering the hegemonic status quo of mainstream game design. Concepts from queer game studies, intersectional feminist theory, and critical design practices (particularly, the reflective game design framework) are brought together in order to analyze and subsequently queer five core aspects of control and controllers in videogames. I make use of examples from the work of queer creators, including my own, in order to queer each aspect.[more]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]