Queerness in Play

Todd Harper, Adams Meghan Blythe Adams, Nicholas Taylor

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.