There are many ways to tell the story of queerness and games. Queer lives, queer voices, and queer desires are rising up to resist the status quo of games. On the academic front, the new paradigm of queer game studies is rapidly gaining speed. Events like Different Games, GaymerX, and the Queerness and Games Conference have created spaces that are explicitly and unapologetically queer. Dozens (if not hundreds) of LGBTQ independent developers are creating games about, by, and for queer people. Over the last half a decade, we have seen this revolutionary work taking place in areas of game making, game community organizing, and game scholarship. It is because queer people are destabilizing and reenvisioning games from the bottom up. This is not because mainstream video games are becoming more diverse, or because the game industry is becoming more inclusive, or because discriminatory “gamerbros” are becoming more empathetic, as many have enthusiastically claimed (Riley, 2018).

We are standing now in the midst of a crucial shift in the relationship between games and queerness. At this intersection stands the invitation to radically reimagine games and play: their forms, their meanings, their politics, and their place within the world. The place where queerness meets games is a site of radical potential. Special Issue - Queerness and Video Games Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games (Introduction) by Bonnie Ruberg, Amanda PhillipsĬontent note: This introduction includes references to, but not explicit descriptions of, online harassment, queerphobia, and sexual assault. Her book, Gamer Trouble, is under contract with NYU Press You can find her work in Queer Game Studies, Games and Culture, Digital Creativity, and Debates in the Digital Humanities. Justice in video games and the digital humanities.

She teaches game studies and game design and writes about death, race, gender, and social They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York University Press, 2019), the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and the co-lead organizer of the annual Queerness and Games Conference.Īmanda Phillips is Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University and Chair of the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus. is an assistant professor of digital games and interactive media in the Department of Informatics and the Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Queer Game Studies by Bonnie Ruberg