book highlights from the queer games avant-garde by bo ruberg

Introduction

“While many LGBTQ players have celebrated these gestures (increased LGBT representation in mainstream games) toward inclusivity, others remain rightly wary of corporate attempts to cater to non-straight, non-cisgender players: such attempts typically operate under the neoliberal logic that “diverse” players constiture an untapped consumer market and that increasing diverse representation will also increase profits”

“Videogames are far more than a mere entertainment medium; like all forms of cultural production, they reflect and react to the society around them. It is no coincidence that the rise of the queer games avant-garde is taking place alongside the rise of the alt-right or the election and government of a president who is unapologetic in his racist, sexist, antigay, antitrans agenda”

“avant-garde games rework contemporary, popular game practices to propose an alternative, or ‘radical’, game design. Such games are designed for artistic, political, and social critique or intervention, in order to propose ways of understanding larger cultural issue as well as the games themselves. In this way, avant-garde games offer a careful examination of social , cultural, political, or even personal themes”

“The avant-garde challenges or leads culture. The avant-garde opens up and redefines art mediums…Avant-garde games are distinguished from mainstream ones because they show how the medium can manifest a greater diversity of gameplay and be creatively engaged in more kinds of ways by more kinds of people. They redefine the medium, breakimh part and expanding how we make, thing, and play with games. The avant-garde democratizes games, and makes the medium more plastic and liquid” - Brian Schrank, Avant-Garde Video Games: Playing with Technoculture

“The queer games avant-garde explores queerness beyond representation. The popular discourse that surrounds “diversity” and video games often focuses on increasing the on-screen representation of marginalized people. However, many of the artists in the queer games avant-garde are committed to thinking beyond surface-level inclusion. These games makers move beyond representation into the mechanics, aesthetics, interfaces, and development practices of games, asking “How can these be queered?“.

“The queer games avant-garde is interested in how games feel. These game makers explore affect, embodiment, experience and intimacy”

“For contemporary queer indie game makers, experiences of queerness cannot be separated from experiences of race, socioeconomics, mental health, disability, access, religion, nationality, and numerous other factors of identity, privilege, community, and disenfranchisement”

“We’re not a single-issues people because we don’t live single-issue lives”

” ‘developer’ brings to mind the production paradigms of the larger game industry’”

“To say that today’s queer indie video games are leading the way toward a ‘better’ future for LGBTQ folks and their place within the medium runs the risk of instrumentalizing queer art in the name of mainstream change. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the power of the queer games avant-garde is not in making the mainstream video games more inclusive but rather in destabilizing the very notion of them instead”

“The future represented by the queer games avant-garde embraces change but also resists tidy narratives of progress. In this way, it preserves the transgressive spirit of queer game-making as a deeply radical art”

Dietrich Squinkifer

“As I got older and understood storytelling better, I realized that an abrupt, unresolved ending can be so powerful, especially if you want to connote a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about the future”

“It’s really queer to respond to tragedy with silly, proud, ostentatious work”

“People ask me ‘Why do you make games? Why do you make games now? Aren’t there more useful things you could be doing?’ It goes back to the this idea of joyful resistance. That’s why we make art. Across history, people have been making art in all sorts of harrowing situations”

“I like to stay that my work is loved by tenured professors and disliked by ‘gamers’. In my opinion, that’s a good thing. The difference in people’s reactions has to do with their expectations about what a game is supposed to offer. People who are interested in the weird, experimental possibility of interactive media like my work. That’s in part because it doesn’t require as much mechanic skills as a lot of video games do…My material is challenging, but what makes it challenging is form, structure, and storytelling, not mechanical dexterity”

“Historically, what made some ‘deviant’ was not engaging in hetero-normative relationships and not getting married or having children. It was the not-doing that raised flags”

“The idea of an ‘avant-garde’ is complicated though. Normally that’s something that someone calls you after the fact, and I’m not sure we know yet what effects queer game will have in a larger historical context.”

Robert Yang

“Short work is more interesting to me because it doesn’t waste time. I think about Ezra Pound, who cut down is writing mercilessly to find the essence”

“I try to mime what literary depth looks like, where you can analyze a text from all these different angles”

“Personally, I don’t care much about my games being recognized as ‘art’. I used to, but I’ve learned to survive without that. That’s not why I make games, anyways. I make game because some part of me still buys into the utopian premise of technology. I make games because that’s my way of talking to a lot of people who I otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Through my game I can have a conversation with them”

“What I’m actually going for is more ‘inside baseball: gay people laughing with themselves. So, I wouldn’t call these games jokes because that opens them up to a dominant, hegemonic interpretation of all gay culture as a joke’”

“these straight gamer dudes performing their gay panic really do annoy me. It’s not that they would spit on gay people, but they go on YouTube and demonstrate their disgust because it helps them asset their own heteronormativity.”

Aevee Bee

“Queer characters must remain complex, says Bee, and they cannot be stripped of their sexual desire in order to make them acceptable to an implicitly homophobic audience”

“I like videogames the most of all the possible mediums for storytelling because they can have all those elements like imagery and characters, without really having a plot. The plot is just the sequence of events that happens - just you walking though the space. You are the plot”

“Why are we making stuff for these people who don’t understand, who don’t want to understand or who are actively trying to attack us for doing this sort of work? We don’t need to talk to them. Rather than putting all of your energy into trying to convert the one person who is really angry on the internet, why not take that time and create work for people who actually matter”

“I am creating this thing for myself and you are invited to participate. I am asking you to open yourself and leave behind certain assumptions”

“People were saying ‘We, the gamers, want to take games more seriously than anything else, and also we don’t want them criticized in any serious way.’ I think a lot of indie game creators have a similar problem, which comes from a place of insecurity - this fear that games are not taken seriously as art. They’re seen as juvenile entertainment, so we grab for things like literary references to seem intelligent and so people will take us seriously. We have genre shame ”

“representation can’t just be a list of identity categories. It’s not really representation unless you’re creating complexity; without complexity, characters feel insincere and incomplete”

“Focusing on identity, especially identity without experience, reduces everyone to an abstraction”

“It’s so much healthier to have a diversity of aesthetics and voices and influences so it’s not this mall group of queers all reference the same things”

“The world of people making queer video games is way bigger. It’s not a clique. It’s getting larger and harder to categorize, and that’s a good thing”

Laura McGee

“To be artistically successful as a game designer. it’s about not giving in to the pressures to conform. Instead of trying to make something as good as a studio with millions of dollars, find a creative solution. Style is just intentionally cutting corners”

“Rather than a game designer, I see myself foremost as an artist and writer”

“I want to keep changing, trying different things, pulling inspiration from new places. With video games, there are so many possibilities beyond what people are already doing. My plan is to keep exploring and to keep making glorious messes”

Andi McClure

“When you’re thinking about games, you’re supposed to be thinking about mechanics and narrative. But when I’m making games, I’m usually thinking in terms of designing an experience. I think about things like tempo, pace, and mood. I used to make music. It was very experimental and strange. When I worked on it, I was thinking, ’ What is the mood of this piece? what does it make you feel’ When I’m making games, I’m interested in the same questions. How does this experience feel and how does it change over time”

“I get my best work out of letting the machine drive - just sort of poking at the machine and seeing what it can do. Once I’ve got a sense of the possibility space, I can start trying to bend it towards something. I let the machine do what it wants and I try to figure out how it makes me feel”

“Someone on the forum website Neogaf used the term ‘waggle-tastic fagatronics’ to describe Wii games. I was like ‘Holy shit!’ That sounds like everything I want to be part of.”

“When I play a video game, I’m doing it for artistic inspiration or to feel a certain mood. All this other stuff, the connective tissue of scores and goals and achievements, those are the parts that are between me and the experience I want to have. Music is made of sounds; cinema is made of images. Games are made of experiences. But you can’t just have an experience in isolation. When I play Shadow of the Colossus, for example, the parts that are really powerful to me are those individual moments. They only last for a fraction for a second, but they wouldn’t have meant anything without having having the game structure to contextualize them. The game is what you wade though to get to the deeper things that is buried inside it. Acknowledging that is a way to reverse the idea of gamification.”

Liz Ryerson

“I want to make art that is good by any standards, not just the standards of me being trans”

“The moment you impose this idea on yourself about what kind of art you’re supposed to make, you limit your potential”

Loren Schmidt

“Games can be a wonderful political tool. They’re great for building empathy. At the same time, I’m really adamantly opposed to the sort of empathy voyeurism that you’re seeing in early virtual reality work, for example. It’s disgusting and exploitative. A lot of it boils down to whose story you’re telling. The VR pieces that I find myself objecting to are built on ideas like being a refugee in a cam or being subjected to drone attacks” These pieces strip away an experience that belong to someone else and invalidates it by recontextualizing it. I think you have to be really careful about that. If it’s not your story to tell, tread carefully. That’s an important piece of the politics of games.‘

Naomi Clark

“When people talk about how video games need to include more diverse representation, I’m like, ‘That’s fine, but it doesn’t address the most pressing creative questions.’ We need to move people out of their comfort zones and toward something deeper. Queerness can’t just be about making Final Fantasy XV but now it has more women, people of color, and LGBTQ people in it. That doesn’t really change anything. I understand why there is pressure on the industry to increase representation. In my opinion, representation is especially important so that queer kids who are coming into gaming don’y feel alienated. But there are also much harder questions we have to answer, like how do games satisfy us, what is the role of entertainment, and how do queer practices disrupt those things? As far as I’m concerned, if queers are not disrupting what is considered normal, then why even use the world ‘queer’”

“If you’re really interested in queering games, you can never rest, because as soon as your queer practices are successful, they will get recuperated by a hungry crowd of creators. Queer people are the avant-garde because we’re willing to do things other people aren’t. We have a legacy of being outsiders. We take the work of disrupting systems farther than other people can”

Kara Stone

“Sometimes it’s not the right answer to put your healing energy towards something that doesn’t love you back”

“More than trying to enact social change, I make art to affirm myself and others who might be experiencing similar things”

“the whole world is already directed at white, straight, hetero, cisgender men. The act of being like ‘Who else can this be for? Let’s direct our art at those in a loving way that is not educational but allows them to see something of themselves’ - that’s really powerful.”

“There are times when I feel peaceful about making art that takes a lot of time, and other times when I wonder if I should just stop. The process if very emotional. Even when it’s hard, I see all these feelings as important resources that an artist can tap into - misery and depression and joy and happiness. I see the bad but I also see the possibility”

Mattie Brice

“I’m not so tied to the idea of games. I just express myself creatively, and that can happen in different mediums…To me, worlds like ‘games’ or ‘artist’ are just labels that are necessary for others to understand who I am, not necessary for me. I’m just engaging with the world and I do that in different ways. There’s no good term for that”

Tonia B******

“Queer mechanics are more about building connections and breaking down categories”

Nicky Case

“Creating rich sensory experiences is important for making technology accessible for people with disabilities. The more senses you incorporate, the more options there are for using your other senses if you’re missing one”

“Mostly what inspires my games is not other games. I really believe that it’s important to get inspired by things outside your field. Go see art. Go to an aquarium and look at an octopus and then turn that into a game mechanic. Go outside and live life and get that into your games”

“Putting a smile on someone’s face is one of the most noble things I can do for another human being. That’s what gives us the energy to fight back in the face of political oppression”

Nina Freeman

“I want to tell human stories, and sexuality is an important part of the human experience”

“The poets that I was studying in New York, people like Frank O’Hare or Allen Ginsburg, their work is about moments. Take Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘In the Waiting Room’, for example. It’s about her, as a kid, in a doctors office waiting room when she finds na issue of National Geographic with photos of women with big, bare breasts. The whole poem is just about that one moment. That’s the kind of thing that inspires me. The idea for ‘How Do You Do It? came from a poem I wrote after college. One stanza from the poem was this vignette about how I remembered playing Barbie dollhouse with my friend and pretending that her Ken doll wand my Barbie doll were having sex, but she did it too wildly and ripped the Ken doll’s leg off. That one moment is where the whole game came from”

“Almost all my games are about women, because that’s who I am. But that’s not the only thing I’m about. The media conversation about women’s work unfortunately gets boiled down to ‘This person’s work is interesting because she’s a women.’ I’m like ‘No, my work stands for itself’”

“I want to be known as a game designer, not as a person who made one specific game. That’s what drives me to make so many small, weird things”

Alvery Alder

“if you want something to exist in the world, you have to make it”

“I’m interested in anticlimax, in ending on an unresolved, uncertain note. As a culture, we are obsessed with telling a very particular type of story: a story that has a portagonist with clear goals and escalating natagonism, that culminates in a climax and wraps up neatly. Telling only these heavily structured stories is really toxic. It says that the only thing we value about ourselves is winning conflicts”

“it (The Quiet Years) rejects the familiar division in storytelling between powerful, freestanding heroes, weak people who need rescuing, and outsider bad guys. That whole framework is based on a very patriarchal vision of power that centers on dominance and individualism”

“These days to me, queerness means an. otherness from dominant narratives and from dominant modes of exchanging power - an otherness that relates to desire, the body, and gender. Queerness is a feeling where you move between anger about and celebration of marginality. Queerness aspires to break down binaries”

“…games are not made queer because they have queer representation. Games are made queer when they have structural queerness. Structural queerness is fundamentally about challenging the frameworks for how stories get told. It’s about subverting systems though queer mechanics and creating new ways of seeing desire”

Kat Jones

“I’ve played games that have profoundly affected me because I’ve played them with my whole, bodily self. With gender and sexuality, which are so connected to the physicality of the body, interactions between people in the same physical space can tap into different emotional experiences than digital games can”

“For me, embodying characters and being able to interact face-to-face is what is most powerful”

Mo Cohen

“With characters of color, I need to ask myself questions like ‘What is this characters cultural identity? What is their family heritage?’ Those are things that a lot of game makers never think about. Their characters aren’t influenced by the past. They’re only influenced by what the player does. They use white-dude characters like blank slates, because they have the privilege of not needing any background. To me, that is a real failing of character development”

Heather Flower

“I want to make art that expresses how it feels to be trans, queer, and mentally ill, to feel like something at your very core is broken because you’re assembled from scars and broken glass and pieces of trash, so that others who feel the same way can take away the lesson that they are not alone in this world”

“I make games for people who feel like they’ve been crushed by the systems beyond their control, people who find themselves at odds with their own bodies, people who are filled to the brim with trauma…much of my work is about chasing these moments of love and hope in a world that often seems to lack both: love letters inside a brutalist hellscape, moments of relief and confidence in a society built on shame, music after the end of the world. The juxtaposition is what drives most of my work”

Santo Aveiro

“Usually my games contain a lot of unanswered questions. In life, we generally don’t have the answers to everything. We might never have the answer. That’s okay”