Playing Queerness Across Time and Space: The Mobile Mutability of LGBTQ Game Content

• In Event: Queer Media Mobilities

Abstract

The mobility of digital games could be considered from multiple perspectives: from the mobility of play practices to transnational flows of the global gaming labor. Although much has been written on the multinational structure of the game industry (Bernal-Merino, 2015; Consalvo, 2016; Kerr, 2006) or on games as products of particular cultures (King and Krzywinska, 2006; Penix-Tadsen, 2016), little work has looked at how specific types of representation in games move: temporally, culturally, and globally. Drawing on project collecting evidence of LGBTQ content in games from the 1980s to 2000s, this presentation considers how representations of queerness and transness in games move across contexts. Much of the primary data on the history of LGBTQ content in games comes from players, but not all of it comes from players who are from the same temporal, cultural, or national context as the game. In some cases this leads to what we might consider to be “misinterpretations” of game content, i.e. labeling characters as transgender or gay when that was not the intent of the creators. These are important instances to help us unpack the mutability queerness and transness, and the contextual specificity of genders and sexualities.

Author

• Adrienne Shaw, Temple U