Video Games Have Always Been Queer

1) Video games have always been queer. Even games that appear to have no LGBTQ content can be played queerly, and all games can be interpreted through queer lenses. This is because queerness in video games means more than the representation of LGBTQ characters or same-sex romance. Queerness and video games share a common ethos: the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play. From the origins of the medium, to the present day, and reaching into the future, video-game worlds have offered players the opportunity to explore queer experience, queer embodiment, queer affect, and queer desire-even when the non-heteronormative and counterhegemonic implications of these games have been far from obvious. Through new critical perspectives, queerness can be discovered in video games, but it can also be brought to games through queer play and queer players, whose choices to engage with games on their own terms and for their own pleasures can profoundly transform the meaning of games and unleash their queer potential. In this way, playing queer, like queer interpretation and queer game design, can be seen as a transformative practice that reframes and remakes games from the inside out.

2) [All] video games can become platforms for playing at the boundaries of heteronormativity-or for disrupting and dismantling heteronormativity itself. The queerness in a video game may lie in the opportunity to resist structures of power, or partake in alternative forms of pleasure, or inhabit embodied and affective experiences of difference. Queerness can be found in how video games construct or disrupt notions of desire, temporality, success, meaning, life, and death.

3) Pong is a classic arcade game, later brought to a number of home game platforms, inspired by the sport of ping-pong. The original Pong is a rudimentary game; only the paddles, the ball, the net, and the score appear on-screen. It has no narrative, no characters, and certainly no explicitly LGBTQ content. By contrast, Between Men is all about characters, narrative, and what would likely today be called queerness. In her book, Sedgwick uses examples from British novels to articulate a system through which she sees male same-sex bonds forming via a triangulation of desire through women. Video games are not mentioned in Sedgwick's book, and the abstracted forms represented in Pong make for an unexpected match with the detailed stories and dialogue analyzed in Between Men. Despite their many differences, however, these two classics can be seen to speak to one another in powerful ways. The dynamic structures that appear in both works in fact closely mirror one another: the erotic triangle described by Sedgwick and the geometric movement of the ball bounced back and forth between paddles in Pong. Both can be understood as interactive systems through which desire is communicated, connection is built, and queer intimacy takes form.

4) At the end of the long, hard struggle in Portal, there is the promise of cake-a girly prize made by women's labor to reward women's labor-but that cake is the very epitome of deception.

5) Specifically, to de-gamify is to strip away the game-like structures already imposed onto life and to remake the world without the imposition of those structures. This process takes place in three steps. First, de-gamification entails identifying instances in which society has already mapped game-like systems of goals, achievements, points, etc., onto human experience in an attempt to regulate, normativize, and exploit that experience. Second, de-gamification entails breaking down those structures and liberating the human experience that they oppress. Third, de-gamification entails creating opportunities for exploring-and thereby playing with-those experiences outside of the game-like structures that have been imposed upon them. This last step speaks to the complexity and even contradiction within the work of de-gamification. At the same time that de-gamification tears down game-like structures, it also facilitates play, which is itself commonly understood in game studies as being fundamentally bounded by rules.

6) I close by reasserting this intentionally incendiary conjecture: that if we accept failure as fundamental to games and we accept failure as coded as queer, all games become queer, in a non-representational sense. This does not just apply to games in which players willingly blow themselves to pieces. If we accept the premise that no game can exist without failure, then no game can exist without a mode of experience that might be called queerness.

7) When we, as players and scholars, talk only about fun experiences, we exclude from our discussions all of those moments in otherwise enjoyable games when we in fact had no fun. We also shut out of sight all of those games we have picked up and played for only a few hours, even a few minutes, and never played again because we found them boring, frustrating, or bad. These too are meaningful experiences, meaningful games, games worthy of attention, not because they are good but because their badness is itself a rich site of meaning. Attending to no-fun-ness allows us to return to these moments of interaction previously dismissed, discarded, and forgotten.

8) On the surface, it would seem that speedrunning and slow strolling are opposite approaches to playing video games. Speedrunners run; slow strollers walk. Speedrunners play to achieve a goal as quickly as possible, by necessity ignoring the nuances and distractions of the game world; slow strollers take their time, soaking in a game's details and tangents. Yet, crucially, what these forms of play have in common is that they both enact alternative-and indeed queer-relationalities to space and time. Both speedrunning and walking simulators resist the standard logics that determine how players should move through video games and at what speed.

9) If this is the future of video games, the future of video games is queer. Queerness describes a way of remaking the world as well as a way of desiring within it.