Along with some wonderful collaborators here at UC Irvine, I’ve been running a research group that we call the Inclusive Streaming Initiative (@inclusivestream). Its mission is to explore issues of diversity, inclusion, identity, and harassment in video game live streaming. Because of the interests of the group, our focus so far has been on gender and sexuality – especially the experiences of women streamers and the ways that sexuality and embodiment are being used to delegitimize streamers who don’t fit the image of the normative “gamer.”

In just the last couple weeks, our two first peer-reviewed papers from the Inclusive Streaming Initiative have come out — a very exciting start! Here they are, with their abstracts:

– “Nothing but a “Titty Streamer”: Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming,” Bonnie Ruberg, Amanda Cullen, and Kat Brewster, Critical Studies in Media Communication

Since the mid-2010s, live streaming has become an increasingly prominent facet of the cultural and commercial landscape of video games. Twitch, the largest streaming platform, reports that more than two million streamers broadcast on their site monthly. This article addresses gender-based harassment in video game live streaming, a widespread problem, especially for women streamers. Here, we deconstruct the discriminatory discourse that surrounds the bodies of women streamers, with a focus on the term “titty streamer.” “Titty streamer” is a derogatory label applied by detractors to women streamers who are perceived as drawing undeserved attention from viewers by presenting their bodies in sexualized ways. To delineate and critique how this term is being deployed in the cultures that surround Twitch, we perform a qualitative analysis of comments in forum threads in the Twitch subreddit (r/Twitch). Our analysis reveals that the term “titty streamer” is far more than a dismissible, juvenile insult. The term serves as a window onto underlying cultural logics and anxieties from within gamer culture about labor and legitimacy in live streaming, as well as larger issues of how women’s bodies are perceived, performed, and policed in and through video games.

– “Necklines and ‘Naughty Bits’: Constructing and Regulating Bodies in Live Streaming Community Guidelines,” Amanda Cullen and Bonnie Ruberg, Proceedings of the 2019 Foundations of Digital Games Conference

This paper performs a qualitative analysis of the community guidelines of video game live streaming platforms like Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine. Live streaming is becoming an increasingly prominent part of the contemporary landscape around video games, game cultures, and the games industry. Recent research into video game live streaming has explored its financial structures, its potential as a platform for self-expression, and its novel affordances for communication. However, community guidelines also play a significant, behind-the-scenes role in shaping live streaming practices. These guidelines, which shift over time in response to controversies and changing notions of acceptable behavior, set standards for what types of content can be streamed and how streamers present themselves on-camera. Here we assemble, compare, and interpret the community guidelines of a number of top live streaming sites. Our focus is on how these guidelines construct and regulate “legitimate” bodies – both the bodies of streamers and the bodies of in-game characters – especially the sexualized bodies of women. In varying ways, each set of community guidelines attempts to establish rules for how women’s bodies may or may not be presented on screen. Often these guidelines measure and quantify the body, for example by dictating precisely how high the neckline of a streamer’s shirt must be. Through our analysis, we articulate the unspoken yet active cultural work performed by these community guidelines, which try yet ultimately fail to render a definition of the sexualized body in precise, concrete terms. This research also offers new insights into larger issues of video games and gender. It points toward anxieties about the visibility of women’s bodies in gaming spaces and demonstrates that, although live streaming platforms like Twitch present their community guidelines as tools for protecting their community members, these same guidelines often enact the further marginalization of women and other diverse streamers.

I’m super excited to be able to share that the annual Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) is coming back for its 6th year — this time in Montreal at Concordia University on May 23 & 24, 2020. QGCon has been immensely important to me since we started it back in 2013 at Berkeley — when it was just a dream, a scrappy little budget, and a tenacious refusal to be quiet any longer about the importance of queerness and queer people in video games. It’s the best <3.

Here is the official announcement about QGCon 2020.
Here is the Call for Speakers (deadline October 15).
Here is the Call for Games for the arcade (deadline October 15).
And here is info about our two amazing keynotes – Avery Alder and micha cárdenas.

It’s going to be an(other) wonderful, fierce, confront-systems-of-power-and-celebrate-difference kind of year for QGCon and the queer games community!

For the past 3 years, I’ve been organizing and leading a seminar-style summer reading group for PhD students (and some recent grads) here at UC Irvine who work on game studies. It’s been a really great opportunity to build community across departments and focus in on important topics that wouldn’t otherwise be covered in seminars — like race, gender, sexuality, and affect in games, and how we can challenge existing canons of game studies.

This year’s group starts tomorrow (!) and runs through late August. Our topic, as pitched and brought to life by UCI Informatics PhD student Bono Olgado, is “A Summer in the Global South: Regional & Transnational Game Studies.” We’ll be reading texts about game development and player cultures in areas like Southeast Asia, Western Africa, and South America — with an eye toward how game studies has (or has not yet) addressed the relationship between video games and the Global South.

Here is the reading list. Feel free to read along! Thanks again to Bono for taking the lead on assembling materials so we can explore this important topic.

It’s an honor to be part of the “Contested Forms of Digital Game Labor” special issue of Television & New Media, which just came out (online first) just a couple days ago. The issue was edited by the Greig de Peuter and Chris J. Young and it includes work from a truly amazing list of scholars. If you’re interested in labor issues in/around digital games, I highly recommend it.

My piece in the issue is called “The Precarious Labor of Queer Indie Game-making: Who Benefits from Making Video Games ‘Better’?” It’s about how queer indie game developers are being celebrated for making the games landscape (and especially the work of AAA companies) more diverse while going largely uncompensated for that labor. Here’s the abstract.

This article looks at issues of precarious and exploited labor surrounding contemporary queer independent video game making. In recent years, there has been a marked rise in indie games made by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. These games and their creators are commonly lauded for inspiring change in the mainstream game industry and making the medium of video games more diverse and therefore “better.” However, this cultural narrative obfuscates the socioeconomic challenges faced by many queer indie game-makers. Drawing from interviews conducted by the author, this article presents a counter-narrative about the work of developing video games by and about marginalized people. Although such games are often described as “easy” or “free” to make, they in fact entail considerable, and rarely fairly compensated, labor. Simultaneously, value is being extracted from this labor by companies who look to queer indie games for inspiration, which translates into profit.

Thanks to Greig and Chris for including my work in the issue!

Thanks to the folks at the Game Developers Conference — as well as the many people who gave support on social media — for making my 2019 Educators Summit talk free to view online through the GDC Vault. The talk is called “What To Do When ‘Toxic Gamer Culture’ Enters the Classroom” and it’s about strategies for how to thrive as an instructor in the face of discriminatory attitudes from students.

This is a huge problem in games education today, especially for those of us who are queer, trans, women, people of color, or who simply believe in the importance of teaching cultural issues in games classes. One of my biggest takeaways from the talk is that the people we work with (our colleagues, department chairs, administrators, etc.) need to trust us when we say that these problems are really happening. We need allies and advocates to make games education better.

You can watch the full video here on the GDC Vault.

My monograph, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, is now officially out! I’ve been traveling around giving book talks so some folks were lucky enough to snag an early copy, but the book was technically released at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference this year. There was a joint release party with Matthew Payne, who (along with Nina Huntemann) co-edited How to Play Video Games, which came out at the same time. There were cupcakes and champagne. It was lovely.

Here’s the listing for the book on the New York University Press site. If you buy it there, you can use this discount code to get 20% off: BOGAMES20.

Here’s the listing for the book on Amazon. If you read it and you want to leave a little Amazon review, that would be awesome!

Also, if you see me at an upcoming conference or book talk, I’ll likely be carrying around copies of the book in my handy salesperson’s briefcase (pictured here). I can sell you a copy and sign it with a goofy little drawing of Octodad, so don’t miss out on that :).

My article, “Straight Paths Through Queer Walking Simulators: Wandering on Rails and Speedrunning in Gone Home,” was published today (online first) in Games and Culture!

It’s about the queer meaning of movement in video games and how a game like Gone Home can be “straightened” through play — or even uncovered as “straight” through analysis of the game’s spatial design. Here’s the abstract:

This article identifies the limitations of queerness in Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) by exploring the ways in which players’ movements through space in video games can be considered queer or “straight.” Drawing from Sara Ahmed, I demonstrate how the potential for queer in-game movement in Gone Home has been straightened both by the game itself and by elements of its player reception. Gone Home is widely seen as exemplifying a current shift toward increased LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) representation in video games. The game is also associated with queerness through its status as a “walking simulator,” a genre with ties to the queer flaneur. Indeed, Gone Home’s gameplay seems to encourage queer wandering, moving not straight but instead meanderingly. Yet, a closer analysis of its interactive elements reveals that Gone Home is far less queer than it may initially appear. The player’s path is rigid and linear, much like in a “rail shooter.” The potential for queer movement in Gone Home has been furthered straightened by speedrunners who play the game along the straightest possible paths. This article argues for player movement as an important site of meaning in video games and calls for an increased engagement with the tensions that surround queerness and video games.

As always, thanks to everyone doing related scholarship — on walking sims, speedrunning, the cultural meaning of spatiality and movement in games, etc. — for informing and enriching my work!

My monograph, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, is coming out next month (!) from NYU Press. It’s now available for pre-order, either from Amazon or the NYU Press website. It definitely recommend going with the paperback, which is only $30 — plus it comes with this awesome cover featuring original art by illustrator Jett Allen. The official book release is at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Seattle this March, but in the meantime, go on and pre-order…

Here’s the link to the paperback on Amazon.
And here’s the link to the paperback on the NYU site.

Thank you in advance for buying and (more importantly) reading my book! So exciting!

It’s been two years in the making, but it’s finally out! It’s the “Queerness & Video Games” special issue of Game Studies. The issue is co-edited by myself and the wonderful Amanda Phillips and it features 11 original, peer-reviewed articles, as well as one (pretty badass, if I do say so myself) introduction. Game Studies is one of the most venerated, visible journal in the field and we are thrilled to bring so much humanistic and often radical work to this venue.

This issue was made possible through the hard work of many, many people — including the authors, the reviewers, the Game Studies editors, and our supportive network of colleagues in queer game studies and queer game communities. Amanda and I are really proud of the issue and our thanks go out to all.

Here’s the full table of contents:

– “Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games” (introduction), Bo Ruberg and Amanda Phillips

– “Queer Games After Empathy: Feminism and Haptic Game Design Aesthetics from Consent to Cuteness to the Radically Soft,” Teddy Pozo

– “Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect,” Kara Stone

– “When (and What) Queerness Counts: Homonationalism and Militarism in the Mass Effect Series,” Jordan Youngblood

– “‘theyre all trans sharon’: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction,” Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler

– “Queering Control(lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices,” Jess Marcotte

– “Coin of Another Realm: Gaming’s Queer Economy,” Christopher Goetz

– “Daddy’s Play: Subversion and Normativity in Dream Daddy’s Queer World,” Braidon Schaufert

– “Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gaming,” Matt Knutson

– “The Affectively Necessary Labour of Queer Mods,” Tom Welch

– “Queer Easter Eggs and their Hierarchies of Play,” Eric James

– “Engineering Queerness in the Game Development Pipeline,” Eric Freedman

After taking spring 2018 off from the conference circuit, I’m excited to be heading back to the Game Developers Conference this coming March 2019 in San Francisco. I’ll be giving a talk as part of the Educators Summit, which takes place on Monday and Tuesday of GDC week. I love the Educators Summit because it’s a great community of folks who make and/or study games, all brought together around their commitment to teaching.

In the past, I’ve given talks at the GDC Educators Summit on topics like creating safer spaces in game classrooms and teaching students to make socially-responsible games. This year, I’m taking on another tough issue – “What To Do When ‘Toxic Gamer Culture’ Enters the Classroom.” The Educators Summit committee has asked me to talk for full hour because this is such an important and pressing issue. I’m honored!

Here’s the talk description from the GDC website. More info coming soon on the schedule: