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:

As always, the Queerness and Games Conference this past weekend blew me away. I want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who made the event possible. My special, infinite gratitude goes to my amazing co-organizers Christopher Goetz, Chelsea Howe, Diana Mari Pozo, Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer, and Zoya Street, pictured here in our matching Pikachu hats (we’re a very serious bunch) — and to all of those kind people who joined in the standing ovation at the end of the event, which made me feel amazingly loved.

Unfortunately, we don’t have video recordings of the QGCon talks this year, but if you’re interested to see who was speaking, we have a list of all the presenters and their abstracts. Lots of amazing games designers and scholars gave wonderful talks, including our keynotes Sandy Stone and Lindsay Grace. QGCon 2015 also featured a number of wonderful new games in our arcade. If you want to get into the festive QGCon spirit, check out these great photos from the event, taken by our wonderful volunteer photographer Dominic Dagradi. Of course, you can also find great tidbits in our @QGCon Twitter feed.

Thanks again, everybody! I can’t wait to see you at QGCon in 2016.

You may have heard me raving about it on my Twitter feed, but the students in USC’s Interactive Media and Games program are amazing. Not only are they super creative and super smart, they’re also passionate about games as a force for social change. And that’s definitely true of MEGA, the undergrad group I’ve had the opportunity to work with on organizing the upcoming Rainbow Jam: a 24-hour game jam we’re running in conjunction with The Lavender Effect, a nonprofit whose mission is to spread information about the LGBTQ history of Los Angeles. The goal of the jam is to encourage participants to make games that address queer issues, but also to think about how queerness itself might be a mode of game design.

The Rainbow Jam is free and open to the public. We’ll be kicking things off with presentations from Andy Sacher and myself, along with workshops on game-making platforms for students who are new to game design (I’ll be talking about my absolutely favorite little tool, Emotica). We hope you’ll join us!

The Queerness and Games Conference is officially back for 2015! This year’s conference will take place on Saturday, October 17 and Sunday, 18. We received a wonderful batch of submissions for session proposals and we have an exciting new location (the UC Berkeley Alumni House). As always, the event is free and open to the public — because accessibility is key!

You can find more information about QGCon on our lovely, recently revamped website. If you want to snag a ticket for QGCon 2015, here’s the EventBrite site. I hope you’ll join us in Berkeley this October.

One of the many things that makes me super excited to begin my new job as a postdoc at USC’s Interactive Media and Games Division is the chance to design and teach a new upper-level course that focuses on critical game analysis. The course I’ll be teaching for the first time this fall is called “Gender and Sexuality in Video Games.” Here’s the description:

Feminism and queer representation have taken center stage in recent debates around the future of video games. However, gender, sexuality, and identity have long been important to how we experience games and to games themselves. In this course, students will learn about gender and sexuality in video games, game communities, the games industry, and their own media-making practices. Through a combination of creative group projects and analytical writing, students will develop the vocabulary to think critically and speak powerfully about the cultural dimensions of the interactive media they both consume and create.

Topics covered in course will include: representations of women and sexual identity from across the history of video games; issues of gender and sexuality in video-game communities; sexism and homophobia in games and the game industry with an emphasis on progress and social justice; feminist and queer theory as tools for analyzing games; intersectional connections in games between gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability; queerness and gender-inclusivity as game design principles; critical self-reflection and community engagement through games.

I’m very excited to report that, in just a few months, I’ll be headed down to the Interactive Media and Games Division (IMGD) at the University of Southern California as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar. I’ll get the change to work with professors Tracy Fullerton, Richard Lemarchand, and Vicki Callahan, not to mention all the wonderful folk who do queer studies at USC. Oh, and I will be teaching courses on gender and sexuality in games. The position starts in mid-August. I can’t wait!

My sincere appreciation goes out to all the mentors and friends in the Bay Area who supported me through the job market process this past year. It’s been a long journey, but I’ve learned more than I ever imagined, and I’ve ended up in just the right place. Thank you!

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to serve as guest editor for a series of four issues of the wonderful online journal First Person Scholar. First Person Scholar‘s mission is to publish dynamic critical writing on games, so I was very excited to pair up with editor-in-chief Steve Wilcox to bring together six talks adapted from presentations given at the 2014 Queerness and Games Conference. I also got to write an introduction, “Video Games, Queerness, and Beyond,” which makes a case for the importance of talking about queerness when we talk about games.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, I highly recommend checking out the articles! Here is the full list from across the four issues:

– Bonnie Ruberg, “Video Games, Queerness, and Beyond”
– Naomi Clark and Merritt Kopas, “Queering Human-Game Relations”
– Christopher Goetz, “Building Queer Community”
– Jetta Ray, “Consent, Pinball, and the End of ‘Sex as Conquest'”
– Mohini Dutta, “Designing for the Other”
– Margaret Rhee, “On Beauty: Gamers, Gender, and Turing”
– Edmond Chang, “Cards Against Humanity: Playing Up and Playing with Difference in Games”

After years as a games journalist and then years as a grad student, I’ve finally had the chance to return to the Game Developers Conference as a plain old speaker and attendee. Still, that reporting instinct is in my blood, and these days I can’t seem to listen without live tweeting. Those who follow me have seen the torrent of notes on the state of social justice and games.

For me, this year’s GDC felt different from years past. Diversity, accessibility, and change were central to many of the presentations I saw and almost all of my discussions with colleagues. Has something fundamentally shifted? Maybe there truly were more women, more queer folk, more people of color at the conference this year. Maybe I’ve just learned to tune out the noise. Or maybe I’m starting to find my place in the fuzzy landscape between academia and industry, to feel at home.

You can find my full Twitter coverage (and my future conference coverage) by following me: @myownvelouria. I also Storified a few key sessions, including the micro talk panel I lead on creating safe spaces at game events. Video recordings should be hitting the GDC vault soon.

– Creating Safe Spaces at Game Events, micro talk session with Matt Conn, Chelsea Howe, Toni Pizza, and Bonnie Ruberg

– #1ReasonToBe 2015, this year with Brenda Romero, Leigh Alexander, Katherine Cross, Sela Davis, Amy Hennig, Elizabeth LaPensee, Constance Steinkuehler, and Adriel Wallick

– The Problem with Gender and Body Choice in Sunset Overdrive, a report from Aldabert Kinsey’s talk on animating for diverse body types

Well, it’s December, and the 2014 Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) and the accompanying Queerness and Games undergraduate game design workshop have both come and gone. I’m happy to report that both were hugely successful! This was our second year running QGCon, and we didn’t know what to expect. As in 2013 though, our amazing community of game developers and scholars blew us away with their talks, games, and support.

If you’re interested in learning more about the wonderful work that was presented at QGCon 2014, almost all of the sessions have been made available as Youtube videos. The games designed by our Berkeley undergrads have received praise from across academia and the industry, and you can play all five up them for free! At the request of our attendees, we’ve also started a Facebook group (Queerness and Games), which you are very welcome to join. You can also continue to find the QGCon organizers on Twitter as @qgcon.

My co-organizers and I are very proud of the wonderful students who took part in the pilot program of the Queerness and Games Design Workshop here at Berkeley in September and October. Our hope was to put accessible game-making tools into the hands of a diverse group of students, and to bring the work of QGCon to the amazing undergrads on campus. The games that the workshop participants made blew us away. They tackled everyday issues faced by queer students in insightful and exciting ways.

The games from the design workshop are now available to play (for free)! Check them out:

– Ultimate Star Collector: Winner of the Universe. It’s a platformer built in Melon JS that features a protagonist of non-binary gender and some gorgeous retro-meets-watercolor art. As players progress in search of stars, levels become harder and NPCs become more confrontational. Can you make it from childhood to early adulthood while facing increasing levels of misunderstanding and discrimination?

– Hard Mode 101. It’s an RPG built in Unity that re-imagines the daily obstacles of college as a series of turn-by-turn battles. Fight that 9:00 a.m. class with compulsive note-taking. Go to a club meeting and combat problematic language with the power of rainbows. Deal damage at a party by dressing fierce and smashing gender binaries.

– That One Time You Left Everything That You Needed at Home. It’s a text-based game built in Twine that walks players through the hectic life of a campus commuter. Wake up. Face an empty fridge. Dress fast and fabulous. Rush to class. Face impending gender misidentification. Celebrate when your professor cancels lecture (editors note: sad face).

– The Becoming. It’s a point-and-click adventure built in GameMaker. Players start as seemingly genderless and unmarked figures. As they progress through various landscapes, they take on new attributes and clothes. The message: identity and self-presentation aren’t just about how you were born, they’re about your life experiences and who you become. For more, see co-creator Jenn Georgevich’s great write-up of the game and the creative process.

– The Convenience Store Contingency. It’s a JRPG that started in GameMaker but hopped over to Unity. Oh no, you’re out of delicious snacks! In order to make your way to the convenience store, you have to rock-paper-scissors your way past combative acquaintances, frustrating ex-partners, and nosy parents ready to doll out heteronormative prescriptions. Why haven’t you settled down with a nice boy yet?