Queerness in Play

This volume examines the many ways in which queerness of all kinds - from a common understanding of queer as 'LGBT' to other, less well-covered elements of the queer spectrum - intersects with gaming. While the culture of gaming is currently a fractious battleground over issues of diversity, more creators from every segment of the spectrum of queer identity are producing content than ever before. However, this unprecedented visibility comes at a time when resistance to the presence in games of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm feels as if it's at an all-time high. Including work on gameplay, design, deployment, and intertextuality in addition to examining representation, this volume broadens and deepens understandings of how queerness and queer issues play out in games. Taken together, the essays in this volume not only critically engage the ways game cultures and industries help to reproduce limiting binary formations with regards to sex and gender (male vs. female, straight vs. gay, etc), but also introduce the fields of game studies and queer studies up to more inclusive formations of identity, sexuality, and games.

Todd Harper is Visiting Professor in the Division of Science, Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore, USA. He previously served as Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Game Lab. He is the author of The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice (Routledge, 2013). His work has been published in Games and Culture, Convergence, and the Journal of Communication. Meghan Blythe Adams is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Their work has been published in such venues as First Person Scholar and Loading.: Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association. They serve as Essays Co-Editor and Editorial Board member for First Person Scholar. Nicholas Taylor is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University, USA. His work has recently appeared in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, Convergence, Feminist Media Studies, Games and Culture, and Journal of Computer-mediated Communication. He is also the co-director of Circuit Studio, a collaborative research studio and makerspace at North Carolina State University.