Episode 36 – Queer Games

Meaningful Play Podcast

Queer games? For pride month? Ground-breaking. This episode Sian and Heather chat about queer game design and the growing body of scholarship from writers including Bo Ruberg and Xavier Ho on queer games and the way queer games reimagine and play with the video game form. We catch up on what we’ve been working on and playing recently, including robobarbie’s Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful! We talk about some of our past research with the LGBTQIA+ Video Game Archive and queer representation in English-language romantic games. We discuss some queer games we find interesting including Lookouts and I was a teenage exocolonist. Lastly, we close with a discussion of some of Jack Halberstam and Bo Ruberg’s work on queerness and failure, and the provocative questions their scholarship asks about form and the status quo.

Ludography

Airdorf Games. (2022). FAITH: The Unholy Trinity. New Blood Interactive. https://new-blood.itch.io/faith-the-unholy-trinity

Akabaka. (2022). Sucker for Love: First Date. Dread XP.

Angela He, Robobarbie, Destini Islands, Allie Vera. (2024). Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful! Itch. https://zephyo.itch.io/stop-burying-me-alive-beautiful

Dino999z. (2019-2022). Vincent: The Secret of Myers. Itch. https://dino999z.itch.io/vincent-the-secret-of-myers

ParanoidHawk. (2022). Lookouts. Itch. https://paranoidhawk.itch.io/lookouts

Dreamfeel. (2014). Curtain. Itch. https://dreamfeel.itch.io/curtain

DigiTales Interactive. (2021). Lacuna. Assemble Entertainment, WhisperGames, Mayflower Entertainment. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1364100/Lacuna__A_SciFi_Noir_Adventure/

Northway Games. (2022). I was a teenage exocolonist. Finji.

References

Arasu, P. (2023). Lovecraftian Games: The Afterlife of Cthulhu on Valve’s Steam Client. Games and Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231217538

Bernevega, A., & Gekker, A. (2022). The Industry of Landlords: Exploring the Assetization of the Triple-A Game. Games and Culture, 17(1), 47-69. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211014151.

Blakey, H. (2023). I was a teenage exocolonist is a posthuman childhood odyssey. GamesHub. https://www.gameshub.com/news/reviews/i-was-a-teenage-exocolonist-review-2606796/

Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.

Ho, X. (Ed.). (2023). Pride at play. Jump to Glide.

Ho, Xavier, Remedios Perez Escobar, and Natalie Tran. 2022. ‘Queer Indie Games on Itch.Io, 2013-2022’. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. FDG ’22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555881.

Ruberg, B. (Ed.). (2020). The queer games avant-garde: How LBGTQ game makers are reimagining the medium of video games. Duke University Press.

Ruberg, B. (2019). Video games have always been queer. New York University Press.

Ruberg, B., Halberstam, J., & Juul, J. (2017). The Arts of Failure: Jack Halberstam in Conversation with Jesper Juul. In B. Ruberg & A. Shaw (Eds.), Queer Game Studies (pp. 201–210). University of Minnesota Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1mtz7kr.23

Tomkinson, S. (2024). “This kind of life has no meaning”: Neru’s Vocaloid album CYNICISM. M/C Journal, 27(2). https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/3037