After roughly three years in the works, I’m honored to say that my article “Representing Sex Workers in Video Games: Feminisms, Fantasies of Exceptionalism, and the Value of Erotic Labor,” was published yesterday with the fabulous journal Feminist Media Studies! It’s a pro-sex-worker take that challenges the misconception that sex workers are by definition “objectified” in games. Instead, it looks at how AAA video games devalue sexual labor and why we need space for multiple feminisms within game studies.

Here’s the abstract:

This article critiques the representation of sex workers in “AAA” video games, with a focus on the devaluing of erotic labor. Existing feminist commentary has interpreted these representations as examples of the objectification of female game characters, perpetuating harmful misconceptions of sex work as fundamentally exploitative. By contrast, taking cues from feminist media studies, porn studies, and sex workers rights activism, I argue that what makes these representations of sex workers problematic is not their engagement in erotic labor but the ways that the games in which they appear devalue that labor, through both dialogue and interactive elements. Across their many appearances in AAA games, it is strikingly common for sex workers to offer their services to player-characters for free or at a discount, or for games to allow players to take their money back after erotic labor has been performed. This contributes to a gendered fantasy of exceptionalism in which a player-character’s masculinity is tied to being too attractive or too powerful to pay for sex. Critiquing these representations demonstrates how AAA video games prompt players to reenact widespread cultural biases against sex work. It also points toward the need for a diversity of feminisms within game studies.

If you have institutional access, you can read the article on the Feminist Media Studies site — or you can go here to access the article as a PDF.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally updated the two most circulated pages from my “resources” section: “Queer Game Studies 101” and “Getting a PhD in Game Studies.” Thanks to all those who have contributed to these resources in the past, and who are sending me suggestions for the early 2018 updates as we speak!

“Queer Game Studies 101” is a helpful guide/crash course in the growing paradigm of scholarly research at the intersection of LGBTQ issues and video games. I wrote the first version back in the spring of 2016 when I was seeing lots of new voices enter the field — which was super exciting, except that some of them didn’t seem to realize that there was already a vibrant, rich array of work happening in this area. And so the 101 guide was born! Since then, lots of great new queer game studies work has been published (and a lot more is in the works) and the 101 list continues to grow…

“Getting a Game Studies PhD: A Guide for Aspiring Video Game Scholars” is a resource for students and other folks who want to pursue doctoral research in games, but aren’t sure how to approach the field or selecting a program. It includes a list of Ph.D. programs where students can study with game studies faculty (even if they can’t get a games-specific degree). The first version of this list was also written in 2016. In the intervening years, faculty have moved around and new programs have been born. Feel free to get in touch to let me know who I should add and what I should tweak!

It’s been just about a year since Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press), the landmark anthology co-edited by myself and Adrienne Shaw, officially hit shelves in the spring of 2017. Since then, the collection has been doing great, with nearly a thousand copies sold and colleagues across the country adopting the text into their classrooms. Plus, we’ve been seeing reviews of the anthology published in all kinds of venues–from academic journals to pop culture blogs.

Here are just a few of the reviews of Queer Game Studies that have come out this year. Check out what people have been saying about this exciting collection, and then consider picking up a copy for yourself…

– “Gaming Gone Queer,” Marcus Tran Degnan, Los Angeles Review of Books
– “‘Queer Game Studies’ Edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw,” Alex Tunney, Lambda Literary
– “Re-Imagining the Borderlands: A Review of Queer Game Studies,” E. Deshane, First Person Scholar
– “‘Queer Game Studies’ Aims to Break Entrenched Binaries,” Mantas Krisciunas,
– “Queer Game Studies – an Alternative Lens for Reading Videogames,” Greg J. Smith, Creative Applications Network
– “Queer Game Studies,” Charley Reed, Critical Studies in Media Communication

Another book draft goes off into the world….

Last spring, I conducted twenty long-form interviews with twenty-five amazing queer indie game devs for my book project The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game-Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Now, many months later, after hours of transcription (thanks to my wonderful research assistants) and editing, and after writing a hefty introduction, the full book manuscript is ready to send off to my editor at Duke University Press, where the project is under official consideration.

And so the wait begins for review. Dear academic gods, may my reviewers be honest but kind, and may they dig the idea of a book composed of voices from amazing queer folks doing radical digital media work.

Thanks so much to all the wonderful queer indie game-makers who took part in interviews with me. Here’s the full list of interviewees (in the order they appear in the book), to get you excited for when The Queer Games Avant-Garde makes it to shelves, hopefully sometime in late 2019…

– Dietrich Squinkifer
– Robert Yang
– Aevee Bee
– Llaura McGee
– Andi McClure
– Liz Ryerson
– Jimmy Andrews and Loren Schmidt
– Naomi Clark
– Elizabeth Sampat
– Kara Stone
– Mattie Brice
– Seanna Musgrave
– Tonia Belgari and Emilia Yang
– Nicky Case
– Nina Freeman
– Avery Alder
– Kat Jones
– Mo Cohen
– Jerome Hagan
– Sarah Schoemann

Now entering its fifth year (!), the annual Queerness and Games Conference is back for 2018. QGCon is a one-of-a-kind event that brings together academics and game makers to explore the intersection of LGBTQ issues and video games. For the first time this year, under our new fearless and fabulous leadership, the conference will be headed to a new part of the world — Canada! That’s right, QGCon 2018 will held in Montreal at Concordia University on September 29 & 30 .

If you want to learn more about past QGCons, there’s tons of info and a whole bunch of talk videos on our website. Stay tuned for more info coming soon about a Call for Papers and a Call for Games for the arcade. I hope we’ll see you there…

Aaaaaaaaaaaand submit!

I’m excited to report that the revision of my monograph, which the editors at New York University Press have cleverly re-titled Video Games Have Always Been Queer (I’m into it), has been officially submitted. I’m feeling super grateful to my reviewers, who were both super supportive and generous–as well as constructively critical–with their feedback. The revision process took me longer than I liked, due to some medical issues I ran into over the summer, but I’m thrilled to be sending the little-queer-game-studies-book-that-could off into the world.

Here’s the very beginning of the introduction, to pique your interest. You can also check out the table of contents to learn more about what the project covers. Hopefully Video Games Have Always Been Queer will be hitting shelves spring, 2019…

Video games have always been queer. Even games that appear to have no LGBTQ content can be played queerly, and all games can be interpreted through queer lenses. This is because queerness in video games means more than the representation of LGBTQ characters or same-sex romance. Queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play. From the origins of the medium, to the present day, and reaching into the future, video game worlds have offered players the opportunity to explore queer experience, queer embodiment, queer affect, and queer desire—even when the non-heteronormative and counter-hegemonic implications of these games have been far from obvious.

Through new critical perspectives, queerness can be discovered in video games, but it can also be brought to games through queer play and queer players, whose choices to engage with games on their own terms and for their own pleasures can profoundly transform the meaning of games and unleash their queer potential. In this way, playing queer, like queer interpretation and queer game design, can be seen as a transformative practice that reframes and remakes games from the inside out. Amidst a dominant games culture that has proven itself to be openly hostile to diversity, the politics of queer play echo outward across games communities, games history, the games industry, and into wide-reaching contemporary concerns around identity, marginalization, and agency in digital media.

After four wonderful years as the lead organizer of the annual Queerness and Games Conference, I’m honored to be passing the leadership torch this year to my longtime collaborators and friends Teddy Pozo and Dietrich Squinkifer. Teddy and Squinky have been co-organizers of the event for years themselves, and I can’t think of two more amazing humans to take on the long and hard but super rewarding task of making QGCon happen.

You can read more about Teddy and Squinky, as well as this year’s plans for QGCon, over at our website. Many hearts to the new Queerness and Games Conference lead organizers, and thanks to all the wonderful folks who have worked with me to make this event possible over the years <3.

I’m really looking forward to flying off to New England at the end of this month for the “Gaming Representation” symposium that fellow game studies scholar Jen Malkowski is hosting at Smith College. The symposium is inspired by the exciting recent release of Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games–a collection featuring work by yours truly, but also lots of other amazing folks doing scholarship at the intersection of video games and identity.

I’ll be in some great company for the symposium at Smith. Other speakers will include Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, and TreaAndrea Russworm–plus, I get to hang out with one of Jen’s undergrad classes the day before the symposium itself, when I’ll be talking with them about queer time in games.

New England autumn and the liberal arts, I’ll see you soon!

I was honored to receive an invitation this week to head back up to Stanford — right across the Bay from my alma mater, UC Berkeley — to give a talk as part of the “Digital Aesthetics” workshop series. The workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, so it will be a really nice opportunity to strike up a dialog with my fellow humanists (who can sometimes feel far away here at UC Irvine, since they’re literally on the other side of campus).

I’ll be speaking about my forthcoming monograph, which pairs queer theory and game studies to argue for the inherent queer potential of video games, but I’ll also be exploring some new work — possibly my book-project-idea-in-the-works about video games and the politics of affect.

Thanks to Shane Denson and Jeff Nagy for the invite! More info coming soon on exact dates…

Summer is a time to kick back, relax, and read a whole bunch of game studies scholarship, right?

Starting in a few weeks, I’ll be facilitating a summer game studies reading group for our Ph.D. students here at UC Irvine, many of whom already study games or are just getting into the field. We’ve got folks from Informatics, my department, but also Anthropology, Visual Studies, and more. The goal is to meet once a week and build a shared vocabulary around games by reading and discussing texts together.

Inspired by Adrienne Shaw’s presentation here at the UC Irvine Critical Game Studies Conference in the spring, our topic for this summer’s reading group is “canons and counter-canons.” Here were my design goals in putting together reading list, as they’re laid out on our community document:

1. To offer grad students a crash course in the big names of game studies — not so that they can replicate longstanding issues of citing and re-citing the same limited (and privileged) voices, but so that they can be conversant and therefore “legitimate” in the field, and building from that legitimacy disrupt and reimagine game studies in their own work. We might call this the “canon” of game studies, but definitely note the air quotes.

2. To highlight the work of key voices in game studies whose work has often gone overlooked or undervalued, with a special emphasis on non-cis-male scholars, scholars of color, queer scholars, and others invested in social justice — with the hope of encouraging students to see game studies as a field that is diverse, complex, and ripe for dissent. We might call this a counter-canon of game studies: not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.

3. To bring a selection of contemporary works addressing culture, history, identity, social justice and (broadly speaking) the social contexts and meanings of video games into dialog with these earlier works.

Hopefully the UCI summer game studies reading group will become an annual tradition!