Bonnie Ruberg – Video Games Have Always Been Queer

1 – Amidst a dominant games culture that has proven itself to be openly hostile to diversity, the politics of queer play echo outward across games communities, games history, the games industry, and into wide-reaching contemporary concerns around identity, marginalization, and agency in digital media.
2 – As I argue throughout this book, placing video games in dialogue with queer theory reveals the deep-seated resonances between queerness and games: from their emphasis on world-building, to their denaturalization of the normative body, to their invitation to rethink the mechanisms of desire. Throughout this analysis, queer theory serves as a guiding framework, pointing toward a future for the study of video games that foregrounds gender and sexual expression in its many forms. The medium of video games has immense queer potential. At the same time, the exploration of queerness in games must remain grounded in the lived realities of the LGBTQ players, game-makers, and scholars who call games their own. Queer people have always belonged in video games, no matter how often we have been made to feel like outsiders, because video games have always been queer.
9-10 – For this reason, though the question of how to define a game may sound rhetorical, it in fact serves as an active example of how social biases are shaping what work is or is not permitted to enter the conversation around video games. This is why defining video games as digital media objects that “understand themselves” as games is a political statement. It asserts the right of games and game-makers to set the terms of their own identities.
- We me say the same thing about defining DH?

Tags: Digital Humanities

paul kelley vieth

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Bonnie Ruberg – Video Games Have Always Been Queer

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