For the very first time this past week, we tried a new approach to the Queerness and Games Conference! Now that I work at USC’s Interactive Media and Games Division (IMGD), we decided to bring a mini version of the conference to my new academic home. We called it QGCon Local. It was a one-day event featuring talks from awesome QGCon 2015 speakers like Richard Lemarchand and Chelsea Howe and new voices like Kris Ligman and Andy Sacher. Students from my “Gender and Sexuality in Video Games” course and the Rainbow Game Jam I helped organize were also there presenting their work, which was inspired by the LGBTQ history of Los Angeles. You can read more about the QGCon Local talks here.
Thanks to support from IMGD and the presence of folks who had traveled to LA for IndieCade the weekend before, the day was a huge success. In fact, our collaborators at The Lavender Effect made a really cool video about the work that USC students are doing to address queerness in their games. Check it out! I’m in there saying good stuff about the future of queer games — but the students are the real stars:
