Queer Game Studies

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Queer Game Studies

Author : Bonnie Ruberg
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452954631
Total Pages : 355 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Queer Game Studies by : Bonnie Ruberg

Download or read book Queer Game Studies written by Bonnie Ruberg and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games have developed into a rich, growing field at many top universities, but they have rarely been considered from a queer perspective. Immersion in new worlds, video games seem to offer the perfect opportunity to explore the alterity that queer culture longs for, but often sexism and discrimination in gamer culture steal the spotlight. Queer Game Studies provides a welcome corrective, revealing the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games. These in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. Demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world, they establish an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture. Queer Game Studies covers important subjects such as the representation of queer bodies, the casual misogyny prevalent in video games, the need for greater diversity in gamer culture, and reading popular games like Bayonetta, Mass Effect, and Metal Gear Solid from a queer perspective. Perfect for both everyday readers and instructors looking to add diversity to their courses, Queer Game Studies is the ideal introduction to the vast and vibrant realm of queer gaming. Contributors: Leigh Alexander; Gregory L. Bagnall, U of Rhode Island; Hanna Brady; Mattie Brice; Derek Burrill, U of California, Riverside; Edmond Y. Chang, U of Oregon; Naomi M. Clark; Katherine Cross, CUNY; Kim d’Amazing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Aubrey Gabel, U of California, Berkeley; Christopher Goetz, U of Iowa; Jack Halberstam, U of Southern California; Todd Harper, U of Baltimore; Larissa Hjorth, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Chelsea Howe; Jesper Juul, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; merritt kopas; Colleen Macklin, Parsons School of Design; Amanda Phillips, Georgetown U; Gabriela T. Richard, Pennsylvania State U; Toni Rocca; Sarah Schoemann, Georgia Institute of Technology; Kathryn Bond Stockton, U of Utah; Zoya Street, U of Lancaster; Peter Wonica; Robert Yang, Parsons School of Design; Jordan Youngblood, Eastern Connecticut State U.

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Author : Bonnie Ruberg
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479843741
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Video Games Have Always Been Queer by : Bonnie Ruberg

Download or read book Video Games Have Always Been Queer written by Bonnie Ruberg and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

The Queer Games Avant-Garde

Author : Bo Ruberg
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478007303
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Queer Games Avant-Garde by : Bo Ruberg

Download or read book The Queer Games Avant-Garde written by Bo Ruberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve “diversity” in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center. Interviewees: Ryan Rose Aceae, Avery Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Aevee Bee, Tonia B******, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Heather Flowers, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagen, Kat Jones, Jess Marcotte, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang

Queerness in Play

Author : Todd Harper
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319905422
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (199 download)

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Book Synopsis Queerness in Play by : Todd Harper

Download or read book Queerness in Play written by Todd Harper and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds—from queer as ‘LGBT’ to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum—intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games—as a culture, an industry, and a medium—help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games.

Gaming at the Edge

Author : Adrienne Shaw
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452943443
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Gaming at the Edge by : Adrienne Shaw

Download or read book Gaming at the Edge written by Adrienne Shaw and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology

Author : Tison Pugh
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 1496217616
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (962 download)

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Book Synopsis Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology by : Tison Pugh

Download or read book Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology written by Tison Pugh and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tison Pugh examines the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, pointing to the ways in which the blurred boundaries between game and narrative provide both a textual and a metatextual space of queer narrative potential. By focusing on these three distinct yet complementary areas, Pugh shifts understandings of the way their play, pleasure, and narrative potential are interlinked. Through illustrative readings of an eclectic collection of cultural artifacts—from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise, from Edward Albee’s dramatic masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy novels—Pugh offers perspectives of blissful ludonarratology, sadomasochistic ludonarratology, the queerness of rules, the queerness of godgames, and the queerness of children’s questing video games. Collectively, these analyses present a range of interpretive strategies for uncovering the disruptive potential of gaming texts and textual games while demonstrating the wide applicability of queer ludonarratology throughout the humanities.

Gamer Trouble

Author : Amanda Phillips
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 9781479870103
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Gamer Trouble by : Amanda Phillips

Download or read book Gamer Trouble written by Amanda Phillips and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicating perspectives on diversity in video games Gamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems. By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect, Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. She embraces the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.

Play like a Feminist.

Author : Shira Chess
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262360446
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Play like a Feminist. by : Shira Chess

Download or read book Play like a Feminist. written by Shira Chess and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important new voice provides a riveting look at why video games need feminism and why all of us should make space for more play in our lives. "You play like a girl": it's meant to be an insult, accusing a player of subpar, un-fun playing. If you're a girl, and you grow up, do you "play like a woman"--whatever that means? In this provocative and enlightening book, Shira Chess urges us to play like feminists. Furthermore, she urges us to play video games like feminists. Playing like a feminist is empowering and disruptive; it exceeds the boundaries of gender yet still advocates for gender equality. Feminism need video games as much as video games need feminism.

Playing with Feelings

Author : Aubrey Anable
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452956812
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

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Book Synopsis Playing with Feelings by : Aubrey Anable

Download or read book Playing with Feelings written by Aubrey Anable and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How gaming intersects with systems like history, bodies, and code Why do we so compulsively play video games? Might it have something to do with how gaming affects our emotions? In Playing with Feelings, scholar Aubrey Anable applies affect theory to game studies, arguing that video games let us “rehearse” feelings, states, and emotions that give new tones and textures to our everyday lives and interactions with digital devices. Rather than thinking about video games as an escape from reality, Anable demonstrates how video games—their narratives, aesthetics, and histories—have been intimately tied to our emotional landscape since the emergence of digital computers. Looking at a wide variety of video games—including mobile games, indie games, art games, and games that have been traditionally neglected by academia—Anable expands our understanding of the ways in which these games and game studies can participate in feminist and queer interventions in digital media culture. She gives a new account of the touchscreen and intimacy with our mobile devices, asking what it means to touch and be touched by a game. She also examines how games played casually throughout the day create meaningful interludes that give us new ways of relating to work in our lives. And Anable reflects on how games allow us to feel differently about what it means to fail. Playing with Feelings offers provocative arguments for why video games should be seen as the most significant art form of the twenty-first century and gives the humanities passionate, incisive, and daring arguments for why games matter.

The PlayStation Dreamworld

Author : Alfie Bown
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1509518061
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis The PlayStation Dreamworld by : Alfie Bown

Download or read book The PlayStation Dreamworld written by Alfie Bown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

Queer in Translation

Author : Evren Savci
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012854
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Queer in Translation by : Evren Savci

Download or read book Queer in Translation written by Evren Savci and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Queer in Translation, Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

Queer Voices

Author : F. Jarman-Ivens
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230119557
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Queer Voices by : F. Jarman-Ivens

Download or read book Queer Voices written by F. Jarman-Ivens and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that there are some important implications of the role the voice plays in popular music when thinking about processes of identification. The central thesis is that the voice in popular music is potentially uncanny (Freud's unheimlich), and that this may invite or guard against identification by the listener.

A Play of Bodies

Author : Brendan Keogh
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262345447
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis A Play of Bodies by : Brendan Keogh

Download or read book A Play of Bodies written by Brendan Keogh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other. Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies, this corporal engagement goes both ways; as we touch the videogame, it touches back, augmenting the very senses with which we perceive. Keogh investigates this merging of actual and virtual bodies and worlds, asking how our embodied sense of perception constitutes, and becomes constituted by, the phenomenon of videogame play. In short, how do we perceive videogames? Keogh works toward formulating a phenomenology of videogame experience, focusing on what happens in the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame, and anchoring his analysis in an eclectic series of games that range from mainstream to niche titles. Considering smartphone videogames, he proposes a notion of co-attentiveness to understand how players can feel present in a virtual world without forgetting that they are touching a screen in the actual world. He discusses the somatic basis of videogame play, whether games involve vigorous physical movement or quietly sitting on a couch with a controller; the sometimes overlooked visual and audible pleasures of videogame experience; and modes of temporality represented by character death, failure, and repetition. Finally, he considers two metaphorical characters: the “hacker,” representing the hegemonic, masculine gamers concerned with control and configuration; and the “cyborg,” less concerned with control than with embodiment and incorporation.

Queer Technologies

Author : Katherine Sender
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351838806
Total Pages : 142 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis Queer Technologies by : Katherine Sender

Download or read book Queer Technologies written by Katherine Sender and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer media studies has mostly focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) visibility, stereotypes, and positive images, but media technologies aren’t just vehicles for representations, they also shape them. How can queer theory and queer methodologies complicate our understanding of communication technologies, their structures and uses, and the cultural and political implications of these? How can queer technologies inform debates about affect, temporality, and publics? This book presents new scholarship that addresses queer media production and practices across a wide range of media, including television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. The authors consider how LGBTQ representations and reception are shaped by technological affordances and constraints. Chapters deal with critical contemporary concepts such as counterpublics, affect, temporality, nonbinary practices, queer technique, and transmediation to explore intersections among communication and media studies and cutting-edge queer and transgender theory. This collection moves beyond considering LGBTQ representations as they appear in media to consider the central role of technologies in understanding intersections among gender, sexuality, and media. Even the most heteromasculine technologies can be queered, yet we can’t assume queerness works in the same way across different media. Emergent media technologies afford queer worldmaking, but these worlds are forged between normalization and niche marketing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Open World Empire

Author : Christopher B. Patterson
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 147988636X
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Open World Empire by : Christopher B. Patterson

Download or read book Open World Empire written by Christopher B. Patterson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2021 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology. Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest. Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.

Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures

Author : Jenny Sundén
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780415719704
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (197 download)

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Book Synopsis Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures by : Jenny Sundén

Download or read book Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures written by Jenny Sundén and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do gender and sexuality come to matter in online game cultures? This book is about female players' passionate encounters within the online game World of Warcraft and its player cultures. Through a "twin ethnography," the authors develop two parallel stories of "straight" versus "queer" cultures of play.

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Author : Bonnie Ruberg
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479859982
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Video Games Have Always Been Queer by : Bonnie Ruberg

Download or read book Video Games Have Always Been Queer written by Bonnie Ruberg and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.