NetHui 2020: Queering Games (Tof Eklund)

• Kia ora koutou. Welcome to Queering Games. I’m Dr. Tof Eklund, a lecturer in English and new media studies at Auckland University of Technology. I’m nonbinary transgender. My prounouns are they/them. My talk today is about LGBTQ+ representation in games, including games by and for the queer community, and how those games queer or challenge our understanding of what games can and should be. I won’t be talking about queer subtext in mainstream games today. It may be that Luigi is gay and that Link’s sword is a phallus, but that’s not our concern here. I want to start in the late ‘80s, not just for the proliferation of homophobic and transphobic content in games at that time, but because of C.M.

Ralph’s 1989 “Caper in the Castro,” 00:59 - the first know queer-for-queer video game. The protagonist of Caper is a butch lesbian searching for her best friend - a drag queen. Ralph released this game for free, asking only that players donate to AIDS relief, illustrating how queer games can literally be a matter of life and death. After Caper, there was a slow trickle of queer indie games over the ‘90s and aughts, then the floodgates opened in 2012 with the release of Anna Anthropy’s “Dys4ia,” Porpentine’s “Howling Dogs,” and Christine Love’s “Analogue: A Hate Story.” These games all presented stories of gender nonconformity, alienage, and queer survival in broken worlds, a style I call genderpunk.

01:52 - The following year, Zoe Quinn and her game, “Depression Quest,” would be the first targets of the Gamergate hate movement. The life and death stakes of queer games were never clearer than in the years of death, rape, and torture threats Quinn endured. In the past two years, indie games by an increasingly diverse set of queer creators have posed a genderpunk challenge to mainstream gaming’s obsession with beating and p0wning games and players alike. In Mya Schwartz and Avebee’s “Heaven Will Be Mine,” queer pilots fight cinematic duels, but the player picks the winner. In Ryan Rose Acae and Heather Flowers’ “Genderwrecked,” the player can talk to, fight, or kiss grotesque monsters, but every option is a form of communication.

02:49 - In Flowers’ “Extreme Meatpunks Forever,” a group of “gay disasters” use fleshy bioorganic robots to fend off fascists, but you can’t kill your enemies. Instead, you have to push them out of the literal and metaphorical public arena. Over the same period, Porperntine and Ada Rook’s “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgiest” featured a group of mutant and cyborg trans women living on an irrecoverably polluted trash world, Zoe Quin and Chuck Tingle are collaborating on a forthcoming game in the vein of Tingle’s gonzo gay erotic novel “Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt” and Kiwi-led Skeleteam released “Catacomb Prince” about a reanimated skeleton’s search for love and his killer in a pansexually-inclusive, pseudo-Florentine setting where even the church recognizes gender diversity. You can, in various senses of the word, complete these games, but you can’t really beat them. There’s nothing in them opposed to the player, and only an experience to be won.

04:09 - Contests of skill, where they exist, can be skipped, and bad endings are funny or reflective, not mocking. In an era of esports, leaderboards, integrated social media elements, and rampant disrespect for other players, these games are single-player, small, offline experiences that nonetheless do more to cultivate a meaningful sense of connection and community than any first-person shooter or MMORPG. Thank you. .