Queer Game Studies
Queer game studies approaches queerness in video games on many levels, from representation and mechanics to the experience of play and the situatedness of games in political and economic systems. Representation may be an obvious way to approach queerness in games. As it is commonly used, the term representation merges the idea of political stand-ins with aesthetic strategies: for example, a queer Black protagonist in a video game represents an identity-based political group through their visual depiction on screen. Queer representation is important, but a framework of representation is insufficient for a queer study of video games.
Another approach turns to a study of mechanics and rules. Avery Alder and Joli St. Patrick ask what a queer mechanic is and where it can currently be found, and they offer suggestions for queer mechanics in game design (3). They establish queerness as not solely about non-normativity, but about disrupting and resisting normativity. Queer mechanics disrupt normative narratives of heterosexual progress. A mechanically straight game with gay or queer characters, they state, is pinkwashing (4) rather than a truly queer game. They give the example of stats and levels, as exemplified by games like Dungeons & Dragons, as straight, heterosexual, linear journeys of power, with the end result of success and getting what you want (you, the character, and you, the player). With their criticism established, Alder and St. Patrick discuss two ways that game mechanics can be queer. The first draws a direct line between mechanics as written (though perhaps not as experienced) and the game’s politics and meanings—the way that levels in Dungeons & Dragons mechanize heterosexual progress, for example. The second is the “Fruitful Void,” where the game is about whatever is conspicuously missing. They conclude by calling for games that present stories as emergent qualities of communities, rather than individual power fantasies, and for games that build queer worlds rather that populate straight worlds with queer characters.
However, others argue that the emphasis on queer mechanics or queer play is too nebulous. Naomi Clark and merritt kopas tangle with the question of queer games, pushing beyond representation and the nebulous queer mechanic or queer form of play to “refocus on our [queer people’s, I assume] relationship to games and play,” drawing into the discussion an explicitly political understanding of queerness (5). They identify games as a site of tension over productivity and leisure, and they push back against both sides of the binary: on one hand, that games are worthy because of their role in fostering productive members of society—“I cannot see this as queering the system; it’s more like gay-liberating the system”—and on the other, that games are purely entertainment. They argue that queer relationships to play don’t have to be reduced to nonproductive resistance to capital, but that games can “serve as sites for us to gesture towards queer utopias, to imagine alternative ways of being and living.” By centering queer people’s relationship to games and play, Clark and kopas are able to incorporate questions of the location of queerness in games in the actual play of games, presenting nonproductive resistance to capitalism and queer utopia as two possible, non-exclusive modes of queer play.
The debates over the locating of queerness in games belies a larger question of the meanings and locations of queerness and play. Is play an emergent quality of rules, or is play irreversibly constrained by the text? If play is emergent, then there is potential for queer play even in straight systems, while if play is constrained by the text, a queer approach to a straight system yields pinkwashing, as Alder and Joli put it. Beyond questions of representation, queer systems, and queer play, can video games ever be truly queer, given their reliance on binary logics of their technological platforms? Could tabletop games, with their lack of reliance on computers, present a different way forward?
1. Conferences include the Queerness & Games Conference, Different Games, GaymerX, and The Lost Levels “unconference;” games include Dys4ia, Mainichi, and Depression Quest; books include Anna Anthropy’s 2012 Rise of the Videogame Zinesters and merritt kopas’ 2015 Videogames for Humans; online commentary is exemplified by Anita Sakeesian’s Tropes vs. Women.
2. Special thanks to Dr. Teddy Pozo for their insight on the history of the indie queer games scene and its relation to Gamergate and for providing the specific conferences named above.
3. Avery Alder and Joli St Patrick, “Beyond Representation: Queer Mechanics in Tabletop Games,” Buried Without Ceremony (blog), 2013, https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/talks-and-workshops/beyond-representation.
4. “Pinkwashing” is a term used to describe the usage of LGBTQ issues as a façade of progressivism to conceal unjust and violent actions of a corporation, group, or country. It is a marketing and political strategy aimed at promoting an image of gay-friendliness that is fundamentally conservative. The term is often used in reference to the Israel’s carefully-marketed image of LGBTQ acceptance that tries to hide its illegal occupation and apartheid. For more, see Sarah Schulman, “Opinion | Israel and ‘Pinkwashing,’” The New York Times, November 23, 2011, sec. Opinion; Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).