170742 UE Queer/Game/Studies. The plurality of queerness and queer theory in the context of digital games (2024S)

Immediately after beginning her transition in the early 2020s, 3D-artist Leona Faren encounters only a lack of understanding, toxicity, and transphobia from her former employer (Bethesda), until she leaves the company. At the very same moment, this studio and distributor merges its logo with the rainbow flag for pride month, seemingly without given it another thought. Another story: During the launch period of Bethesda’s new long-anticipated RPG Starfield in the fall of 2023, an enraged video by the YouTuber “Heel vs Babyface” goes viral. In this, he declares the game asking for the preferred pronouns of the avatar and giving one the option to play as “they/them” to be greatest scandal of all time. For the lucrative cottage industry of right-wing (mostly male) gamers, such a case is a great opportunity to produce heteronormative “content” with queerphobic language and to make easy money. Thusly, in a quite short amount of time, a self-declared anti-LGBTIQA*-mod was created to put an end to any inquiries regarding one’s preferred pronouns in the game – “unfortunately”, this mod switched off “he/him” and “she/her”-pronouns so that, in the end, all avatars appeared to be non-binary (“they/them”). A Freudian slip of heteronormativity?
One studio, three years, and varied perspectives on queerness. From queerness as lived experience and identity politics to queerness as structures of power, from the commodification of queer identity to (the unconscious) subverting of (hetero-)normativity. As Judith Butler put it in one of the earliest publications of the then young queer theory, the very openness of the term hides immense subversive potential. And it is this very openness we want to discuss in this introduction to queer theory. On the hand we will look at and discuss the term „queerness“ from different perspectives of power in general and, naturally, multiple (quite often canonized) queer-theoretical approaches; on the other hand, we will reflect queer theory and its diverse paradigms and critically deploy them in the field of game studies. From queer reading of homosociality in first-person-shooters to the homonormativity of The Sims and queer-subversive game designs such as Robert Yang’s cruising simulator The Tearoom: as a discursive field, digital games, gaming and gaming culture(s) are filled with moments where we can find queerness, discuss its different meanings and which we can deconstruct with queer-theoretical approaches, as well.
In the introductory units of this course, we will critically reflect and discuss elementary theories and approaches of game studies, gender studies, and queer theory. In the second part, we will focus on queerness from different approaches such as (commodified) identity politics, subversive reading practices (queer reading), (homonormative) representations of sexual and romantic relationships, crip theory, and queer understandings of gaming itself. In the final units, we will shift our perspective towards the online discourse of digital gaming and the (violent) in- / exclusions regarding power structures.