I’m really looking forward to my upcoming talk at Stanford on January 5th, part of the speaker series for their GAIMS group. Thanks very much to Henry Lowood and Ingmar Riedel-Kruse for inviting me to speak. The talk is called “Queerness and Video Games: Identity, Community, & Design.” Here’s the abstract. It should be a great time!
Video games represent today’s fastest-growing and arguably most expressive digital medium, rich with the potential to tell stories of difference. Yet games, games culture, and the games industry often remain hostile to those who do not fit the profile of the traditional gamer. In the wake of recent online harassment campaigns, it is now more important than ever to turn our attention to the the power of games as a platform for expressing diversity. To this end, this talk looks at the burgeoning movement of queer games. For decades, LGBTQ people have been underrepresented in mainstream video games. In the last three years, however, we have seen a blossoming interest from mainstream game studios in increasing queer inclusivity, queer games events like GaymerX and The Queerness and Games Conference have flourished, and queer game-makers from across the country have been leading the vanguard in the new wave of small-scale, personal games. Queerness in video games is more than a matter of who we see on-screen; it’s also a matter of identity, community, and game systems. Thinking about games from the perspective of queerness offers us valuable lessons about design itself.
