Queer Failure in Video Game Novels

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2020-08-27 Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Game Novels

Brooks, Laura

Brooks, L. (2020). Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Game Novels (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/112479 master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Failure is the Name of the Game:

Queer Failure in Video Game Novels

Laura Brooks

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2020

Abstract

Considering the important process of using queer theory as a mode of resisting the ableist white cisheteropatriarchy of mainstream video games, Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer

Failure in Video Games Novels seeks to bring this work into the literary sphere. I use the theoretical frame of queer failure to examine a quickly expanding subgenre of fiction, the video game novel, where video games serve as key elements of a novel’s plot and setting. Each chapter examines a phenomenon of real-life video games and compares how these phenomena have manifested themselves or been challenged in literature. Chapter One challenges the persisting heteronormativity of classic video game culture to queer Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game by proving that there is reparative queer content in these otherwise heteronormative texts. Chapter Two examines the heteronormative impulse of e-sports through the example of Riot Games’ League of Legends and how Marie Lu’s Warcross queers this gaming genre. Finally, Chapter Three examines the racism embedded in Blizzard

Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre and explores how Brittney Morris’s SLAY responds to this tradition by creating a gaming space for only Black players which begins to empower Black transgender gamers. Ultimately, my thesis demonstrates that not only have video games always been queer, as games scholar

Bonnie Ruberg suggests, but so have video game novels. I assert that video game novels and the practice of reading video game novels queerly should become part of the conversation surrounding queer game studies. Further, I argue that these literary works have the potential to provide direction to real-life video games as the genre begins to imagine answers to the issues of the dominant gaming community and the development process to create alternative worlds and futures for video games.

iii

Preface

This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Laura Brooks.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the following individuals for their support throughout the writing of this thesis:

1. My thesis supervisor, Dr. Derritt Mason, who was an inspiring and generous mentor throughout this project. I have grown considerably as a writer and researcher thanks to his guidance.

2. My thesis defense committee, Professors Rain Prud’homme-Cranford and Ben Whaley.

3. The University of Calgary and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for their financial support.

4. My community at the University of Calgary; Trynne Delany, Leah Van Dyk, Shuyin Yu, and

Sean Bristowe. Their continued friendship and support has helped me to develop strength and bravery I did not know I was capable of.

6. My family. I would like to especially thank my mother who was my constant ally throughout the writing process. I am so grateful for the numerous late nights she spent with me.

To my brothers Rob and Dave – without you I never would have picked up a controller.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Preface ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Dedication ...... v

Introduction: A Literature Review of Queer Video Game Failure ...... 1

1. Video Games and Failure ...... 5

2. Queer Theory and Radical Failure ...... 9

3. Queer Game Studies, Failure and Inherent Queerness in Games ...... 15

Chapter One: Let’s Play it Gay: A Reparative Queer Reading of Ender’s Game and Ready

Player One ...... 24

1. Ready Player One and the Queer Secret of the OASIS ...... 28

2. Ender’s Game, Failure, and Queer Pacifism ...... 39

Chapter Two: The Queer E-Sport: Marie Lu’s Warcross, League of Legends, and the Queer Potential of Hacking ...... 52

1. League of Legends and the Heteronormative Standardization of E-Sports ...... 57

2. Warcross, Queer Hacking, and Failure ...... 64

Chapter Three: The Limits of Queer Failure: Brittney Morris’s SLAY and Black Transgender Gaming ...... 80

1. World of Warcraft and White Cisheteronormativity ...... 83

2. Brittney Morris’s SLAY and Queering Character Creation for Black Transgender Gamers .92

Conclusion: The Queer Video Game Literary Avant-Garde ...... 104

Works Cited ...... 110

Introduction

A Literature Review of Queer Video Game Failure

The inaugural Queerness and Games Conference in October of 2013 marked the beginning of a pivotal intersection between video games and queer theory. The “Arts of Failure” session drew upon the coincidence of video game scholar Jesper Juul and queer theorist Jack

Halberstam both publishing books on failure entitled “The (Queer) Art of Failure.” Juul’s The

Art of Failure (2013) explores the many ways that players experience failure while gaming and why they continue to play despite these “failings.” He makes no reference to the potential queer implications of these findings. Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011) explores how accepting failure corresponds with alternative modes of being outside capitalist heteropatriarchy.

Despite using failure as a frame to analyze cartoons and works of visual art, Halberstam never mentions video games.

Despite having never previously spoken, when the two authors were asked to put their work into conversation, significant similarities began to arise. Juul argues that in video games

“people do strange things a lot of the time. They don’t necessarily play for the goal, or they goof around in various ways” (“The Arts of Failure” 204). Indeed, as Juul outlines, there’s a vast tradition of playing video games outside of their win conditions, for example, playing a shooter game like Grand Theft Auto, while refusing to fire a single bullet or break a single traffic law.1

These alternative ways of playing a game can all be defined as “failing” from the game’s perspective. Similarly, Halberstam notes that “in a homophobic context, the queer fails to be straight, literally … there are two responses you can have to that. One is to try and play the game

1 See Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer for this example. Ruberg highlights how players can find alternative enjoyment or even purposeful pain in video games by intentionally playing the game improperly or by “losing.”

2 as it’s been written … or you refuse the game” (“The Arts of Failure” 202). As Juul suggests, queer people “do strange things a lot of the time” according to heterosexual standards.

Halberstam suggests that the queer subject fails to “play the game” of heterosexuality in a similar way to how a player can fail to play Grand Theft Auto by being a law-abiding citizen. In fact, many video games have literalized Halberstam’s findings in games where passing as cisgender or straight is part of the game’s mechanics.2 In the “Arts of Failure” session,

Halberstam makes explicit the queerness within Juul’s work, stating that the “idea that you want to play to win, and that only winning will do, is not simply wrong about games, it’s wrong about the human. That feels to me to be a very queer insight” (204). Not every human wants to “win” in the eyes of society, including “winning” by being straight. Instead, gamers and queer people explore alternative pains and pleasures and work against the games presented to them.

Simultaneously, as video games and queer theory continue to find fruitful connections, video games are becoming an increasingly popular literary theme. A recent “boom” has occurred in the “video game novel” genre, wherein video games function as a key part of a novel’s setting or plot.3 For example, the protagonist might be a competitive gamer, or the novel could take place in a virtual reality video game. While this genre can be dated back as far as 1985 with the release of Ender’s Game, video game novels have recently surfaced in the public literary consciousness in significant ways. In addition to the continued popularity of Ender’s Game, both

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, published in 2011, and Marie Lu’s Warcross, published in

2017, enjoyed time on the New York Times Best Sellers list (“The New York Times Best

Sellers”; “Young Adult Hardcover”). Ender’s Game and Ready Player One were popular enough

2 For example, merritt kopas’ Lim and Mattie Brice’s Mainichi. See Chess for an analysis. 3 These novels should not be confused with the novel adaptations of pre-existing video games, for example, The Assassin’s Creed novels.

3 to receive Hollywood movie adaptations. More recently, Brittney Morris’s SLAY was named one of Publisher’s Weekly Best Books of 2019 in the young adult category (“Best Books 2019:

Young Adult”). Ultimately, video game novels are occupying an increasingly large portion of the popular media landscape.

Although queer theorists have written about failure in other mediums, and video game theorists have discussed failure in video games, the function of queer failure in video game literature remains relatively undiscussed in scholarly circles. Video game novels self-reflexively respond to the dominant ideologies of video game culture and game-making, and therefore I argue that they should be considered in conversations about queering video games. Additionally, as of mid-2020, I have been unable to find a video game novel with a queer protagonist, only side queer characters; therefore, reading for queerness in this seemingly straight genre is valuable. In this thesis, I propose to put video game literature into conversation with video games and video game trends to examine how failure creates queer potential in these texts. Indeed, I hope to not only center queerness in a genre where it is sidelined, but also prove that queerness has been implicitly central to this genre all along. To borrow from Bonnie Ruberg’s Video

Games Have Always Been Queer, it is not only video games, but also video game literature that has always been queer. Further, video game novels can actually extend this conversation by imagining alternative ways queerness can be fostered in gaming spaces because they are not bound by the realities of game creation such as hegemonic game production models and culture.

Failure is integral to the creation of this potential ludic queerness because failure, on the part of the player or developer, can illuminate alternative ways of existing outside of what is purported as normative or constructed as “successful.”

Before using several video game novels to demonstrate the ways this genre has always been queer and, in so doing, respond to some key issues in the video game industry, this introduction will briefly outline the branches of theory I will be putting into conversation. By providing a deeper understanding of how video game theorists view failure, how queer theorists view failure, and how queer video game theorists have combined these two understandings, I will illustrate what contributions queer video game failure can bring to video game literature.

While applying video game criticism to literature will create formal dissonances, it is exactly these dissonances and harmonies between video games and literature that will generate productive conversation.

Using video game criticism to analyze a game is different from using video game criticism to analyze a representation of someone playing a game. These moments of mediated gameplay in video game literature create a hybrid moment where the reader becomes a spectator to what makes video games a fundamentally different media form. This is where we must begin to examine what failure means for video game criticism. As Katherine Isbister claims in How

Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, “games differ from other media in one fundamental way, they offer players the chance to influence outcomes through their own efforts” (2). With some exceptions, such as interactive television experiences like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), video games are the only media form where the audience enters input that changes how the work unfolds. Players are offered choices for how they want to act and because these actions have consequences, they feel responsible for the game’s outcome.

Isbister notes how this affords games a unique opportunity to create emotions in their audience. For example, a player can be made to feel guilty about their actions if the full implications of their choices are not revealed until later in the game. As an example, Isbister

5 provides Brenda Brathwaite Romero’s Train, a table-top game where players unknowingly gather people to put onto trains to Auschwitz (10). The implications of game’s affective power in terms of game failure are not explicitly made in How Games Move Us, but they are a logical conclusion to Isbister’s argument. In Train, winning the game by completing the task provided to the player feels like a failure because success goes against the player’s morals. The failure to understand what was happening causes the player to feel guilt and shame. While engagements with game failure are much more varied than this example, as we shall explore, players become implicated in video games by design more so than any other media form.

However, the dimension of choice and emotion is lost for the reader when they are reading about players making choices and reacting rather than doing that themselves. Instead, we as readers can only apply models of gameplay and in-game choice to the novel’s events and keep these moments of character progression in context with the larger novel. Literature and games begin to interact significantly when failure in a game or a failure in gaming culture allow a literary character to inhabit different modes of thought than they would otherwise or disrupt a system of power. To begin exploring these alternative ways of thinking, let us examine how failure is understood by video game theorists more broadly.

1. Video Games and Failure

In video game studies, scholars who examine failure explore what players spend much of their time doing while playing. As Juul purports in The Art of Failure, “every day, hundreds of millions of people around the world play video games, and most of them will experience failure while playing” (2). Gamers continue to interact with a medium that supposedly reminds them repeatedly of their inadequacy. Juul suggests in The Art of Failure that a certain amount of failure is needed for a game to be perceived as enjoyable. In an experiment, Juul had players rate

6 a game of his own creation from 1-10; the study found that the players who completed the game while losing some lives rated the game more highly than both players who completed the game without dying, and those who did not complete the game (35). This suggests that failure ultimately contributes to our feelings of enjoyment when playing. To explain these findings, Juul proposes an “eventual success” model of failure where “failure … concretely pushes [players] to search for new strategies and learning opportunities in a game. Failure reveals strategic depth to us, and players of single-player games in particular often need to be pushed toward that experience” (116). In this model, failure is imagined to improve player experience and enjoyment because, after failing repeatedly and learning from these failures, players seem to value success more.

This model of failure is widely reflected in mainstream gaming communities where notoriously difficult video games are currently enjoying a period of popularity and prestige.

From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, for example, won The Game Award’s Game of the

Year award in 2019 (Thier). The game has been described as being so difficult that it “feels like the video game equivalent of digging your way through concrete with a spoon” (Webb). Yet,

Sekiro and From Software’s other insanely difficult titles, including the cult-famous Dark Souls franchise, are extremely popular. In Real Games, a book that explores what counts as a

“legitimate” video game, Mia Consalvo and Christopher A. Paul describe how difficult games generate dedicated community spaces. They describe environments where difficult games

“become popular in part due to their perceived difficulty as they reward players… [who] work diligently to master systems in order to succeed … but the point … is also to provide a surface for discussion and analysis” (81). Again, like Juul, Consalvo and Paul’s model sees failure in games as something that must be overcome and that works to heighten the positive emotions of

7 eventual victory. This is further increased by the social and performative element of these games in online gaming communities. Players discuss strategies and can display their skills to others, which provides its own sense of validation. The positive emotions associated with both individual and shared victory supposedly outweigh the negative emotions of repeated failure.

However, this simple model of “losing in order to eventually succeed” fails to acknowledge the many ways that gamers have meaningful gaming experiences without ever succeeding.

One line of criticism in video game theory argues that failing in games can teach the player a larger truth about the outside world. Shuen-shing Lee demonstrates that because failure is uncomfortable to confront, to have no other option than to fail is a potentially powerful force.

In particular, he argues that unwinnable video games with political stances have the power to

“morph the player from an in-gaming loser into an off-gaming thinker” (Lee). Through analysing unwinnable “political” video games, where the game attempts to teach the player a truth about global affairs, Lee suggests that players will learn through their own ludic helplessness. Lee explores games including Gonzalo Fransca’s Kabul Kaboom, a simulation of 2002 US military strategies against the Taliban, where the player is an Afghan civilian who inevitably fails to simultaneously dodge US airstrikes and airdropped food. Lee argues that in being forced to lose, players realize that “there is no winner in a situation in which buildings are toppled or bodies are turned into ‘hamburgers,’ and the form reflects and strengthens this message” (“I Lose,

Therefore I Think”). Players are forced to realize, through the game’s design, that there are scenarios they cannot master; they are prompted to reflect on the ethics of treating war as a situation you can “win.” Losing is thus not an obstacle to the goal of the game, but rather the point and the message of the game itself.

Ian Bogost supports these claims in Persuasive Games, in which he asserts that political video games can convince players of political positions through procedural rhetoric. Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representation and interactions” (ix). A game convinces its players of something through a constructed power system as represented by its rules and mechanics (the ways that the player interacts with the game). Bogost identifies a subcategory of procedural rhetoric he calls the “rhetoric of failure” where “the represented procedural system fails to perform the service it alleges to provide. One cannot play and hope to succeed” (88). Video games can use their rules and mechanics to create a system of play which cannot possibly achieve the goal the game sets out for the player. The player is forced to become aware of the way systems of power are presented and learn to be critical of how they present information. The developer can incorporate pointed political critique by representing the inadequate systems present in our own society.4 While Bogost articulates his argument through the lens of rhetoric, he makes a similar claim to Lee that video games can be designed specifically to create fail states that prompt the player into political thought.

In Playing with Feelings, Aubrey Anable most clearly articulates the political power of losing. Unlike Lee and Bogost, Anable illustrates the specific affective reasons why losing can be so effective. She suggests how structuring games to be unwinnable counteracts the internalization of shame normalized in a capitalist society. According to Anable, capitalism controls how its subjects perceive failure by “rel[ying] on our putting an optimistic spin on failure or wallowing in self-loathing and shame so as not to experience failure as a compelling reason to revolt” (104). The “optimistic spin” corresponds to the “eventual success” model of

4 Bogost takes Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12 as an example, where the player uses an inaccurate missile launching system for the task of killing terrorists in an unnamed Middle Eastern town. The player inevitably kills civilians in the process, which causes the game to turn the mourning civilians around them into terrorists.

9 failure, which can be applied to both video games and life, where the pain of failure is softened by the promise of a future victory.5 In the case where victory cannot be obtained, where the situation is “unwinnable,” the capitalist subject is prompted to see the failure as their fault and thus to feel ashamed. According to Anable, unfair or unwinnable video games disrupt the process of internalizing blame. Video games that use mechanics to make it impossible or nearly impossible to win “might reverse the individualization of failure and deflect it back onto the failings of larger systems” (Anable 116). Games hold a radical potential because they can teach their players that sometimes failure is not their fault and, in fact, sometimes systems are designed against them. While Lee and Bogost theorize this same political effect of game failure, Anable describes the affective reasons why this process works.

What these views of failure in video games lack is a willingness to embrace failure’s disruptive power more broadly. Lee, Bogost, and Anable all suggest that failure could be a radical presence in video games if they are purposely designed to make players fail or if the game has inadequate systems for solving the problem it presents. Forcing players to experience failure is indeed powerful; however, it fails to acknowledge the host of other ways players fail and choose to fail. I argue that queer theory illuminates how failure is a much more pervasively radical (and queer) experience in gaming than this criticism allows.

2. Queer Theory and Radical Failure

Video game theorists admit that failure is more than just something that happens along the way to beating a video game. In fact, game failure interrupts normative logics of pain and power. When looking to queer theory, one can begin to see how this disruptive potential links to queer understandings of the world. In queer theory, failure has been an important way through

5 For a more detailed explanation of manufactured hope in capitalist systems, particularly for marginalised populations, see Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.

10 which theorists have reclaimed agency in heteronormative society. By embracing failure, rather than claiming one’s failures as successes, queer theory seeks to topple heteronormative standards of acceptability and challenge its hierarchies rather than gain a place at the top. Thus, to begin to understand how queer game failure may prove a useful frame in literary criticism, we must first understand the importance of failure in queer theory.

This project takes a particular view of queerness, where to be queer extends beyond one’s sexual and gender identity and into how one inhabits the world. This view of queerness is succinctly summarized by Ruberg and Phillips in “Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and

Video Games” where they define “the spirit of queerness as both an umbrella term for LGBT people and an ethos: a way of living differently in the world that resists heteronormative prescriptions related to sexuality and gender.” Ruberg and Phillips expand the definition of

“queer” beyond a designation for LGBTQ2IA+ people and into the ways that queer people combat the hegemony of cisheteropatriarchy through various methods of resistance. While this resistance is always ultimately tied to sexuality and gender, “queer” denotes an activist position as well as a sexual identity. In their definition, Ruberg and Phillips explicitly invoke the call expressed by David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz in their introduction to the

“What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” issue of Social Text. Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz articulate that the popular acceptance of certain gay and lesbian identities “demands a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent” (2). In this call, Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz express the need for the queer political project to be aware of the way in which queer identities intersect with other modes of difference such as race, class, gender identity, or disability. Ultimately, they call for the

11 queer community to be critical of straight society only embracing “acceptable” queer presentations which tend towards white, cisgender, middle-class, and able-bodied queer people.

Thus, this project takes into account the ever-present need to keep queerness political as well as attuned to these considerations of intersectional identities.

The queer method of resistance that I will be focusing on is failure, due to its applicability to video games. Halberstam’s definition of failure in The Queer Art of Failure illuminates how failure aligns with queerness as a political project. Failing in a queer sense means that “rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of [the] standards of passing and failing,

The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live … Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well” (2-3). To

Halberstam, to be queer means to fail in ways that question the integrity of existing hierarchies of capitalist cisheteropatriarchy. Halberstam and Ruberg and Phillips all define queerness in terms of a position of opposition. To articulate how failure specifically functions as queer resistance, Halberstam compares “the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, [heterosexual and nuclear] family, ethical conduct, and hope” to “other subordinate, queer, or counterhegemonic modes of common sense [which] lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive life styles, negativity, and critique” (89). Therefore, succeeding in a capitalist society is constructed as providing for one’s heterosexual nuclear family and finding happiness through one’s relatively privileged position in capitalism’s hierarchy. While other positions of marginalization must be accounted for, capitalism and heterosexuality combine into a matrix of success. Therefore, to be queer means failing to fulfill the straight successful ideal. Moreover, the queer subject uses that failure to

12 actively critique the sexual and economic systems which they are failing to appease. A sexual label, here, combines with a resistant political identity.

As Halberstam describes, queers fail to embody the straight capitalist ideal. But what alternative ways are there of becoming? Queer failure is also deeply interested in queer understandings of time and alternative ways of growing up. In failing to meet the milestones of heterosexual happiness (eg. going to prom, getting married and having kids) and refusing the regulation of time, Elizabeth Freeman argues that queer subjects can explore alternative ways to inhabit their bodies and their desires. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories,

Freeman describes how “chrononormativity is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches inculcate…forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege” (3). Through chrononormativity, the timing of heterosexuality becomes naturalized as a bodily imperative. However, Freeman offers an alternative view in imagining “temporal alterity and its vision of how temporal dislocation might produce new orientations of desire”

(16). By conceptualizing time differently, the queer subject fails to master their body as society prescribes and instead allows space for non-straight desires and non-linear progressions or lingering.

Kathryn Bond Stockton conceptualizes queer time and failure in a different sense by focusing on the institution of “growing up” and the inherent queerness of children. To Stockton, all children are queer as they have yet to be assimilated into straight modes of sexuality and desire. According to Stockton, some children progress through life and adopt heteronormativity, while others “grow sideways” rather than growing up. In her introduction to The Queer Child, or

Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, she defines “growing sideways” as “ways of

13 growing that are not growing up”, referring to “a host of unexplored temporalities, theories of metaphor, moving suspensions, shadows of growth, and oddly anti-identity forms” that apply to queer children (14). Queer children fail to go through the sort of milestones that Freeman describes and find alternative modes of inhabiting time. Queer adults continue in this way and are often infantilized as they have not “grown up” in the eyes of heterosexual society. Queer adults fail to outgrow the queerness that is supposed to phase out after childhood and thus they fail to grow up at all. Both Freeman and Stockton theorize queer ways of experiencing time which result in a failure to become a heterosexual adult. Both views fundamentally challenge the naturalization of the heterosexual timeline and assert that there are alternatives to this normalized state.

However, as much as queer theory provides alternative ways of growing and inhabiting one’s desires, much of queer theory’s understanding of failure is rooted in embracing negativity.6

Similar to some of the video game criticism I have discussed, queer theory often views failure as a powerfully negative affective force. However, unlike its use in video game criticism, failure is inherently radical in queer theory, rather than conditionally radical. For example, Anable describes the ways that video games can be utilized to radical effect if they are properly designed to maximize failure’s potential. However, in The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed deviates from this understanding by noting how failure has always been a part of the queer literary tradition where unhappy queer endings were historically mandated by the publishing industry

(88-89). In fact, Ahmed’s understanding of negative affect is particularly useful because of the way it parallels but extends the arguments made about failure in game studies.

6 For a deeper exploration of the embrace of queer negativity and negative affect see Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive as well as Heather Love’s Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

Ahmed’s discussion specifically addresses “unhappiness,” but I contend that this

“unhappiness” can also be thought of as a failure in the way Halberstam describes living in opposition to heterosexual capitalist success. One is unhappy because they fail to be like the cisgender straight white people who have disproportionate access to traditional happiness. In embracing this failure to assimilate to straight society, Ahmed notes the activist potential that comes from identifying the injustice that happy society rests upon. In her analysis of Radclyffe

Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Ahmed notes an important externalization that happens after the main character, Stephen, gives up her lover, Mary, so that Mary can be married to a man. In her despair, Stephen begins to hear calls to action from the other unhappy marginalized people that she has met and finds that “they possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation” (Hall 447). Ahmed describes this process as an “image of revolution: the walls that contain the misery are brought down; an un-housing that is not only a call for arms but a disturbance in the very grounds for happiness” (102). Even though Stephen knows her claims to happiness will fail, being part of the larger political collective making the pain of failure visible still holds queer potential. Embracing unhappiness, or embracing the failure to fit the mould of happy straightness, pushes past despair and into indignation. What

Ahmed describes with The Well of Loneliness is an intersectional angry assertion that happiness is built on the unhappiness of others. This reversal from internal unhappiness to external anger reflects strongly Anable’s assertion that video game failures cause us to turn our internal shame outwards to begin challenging larger hegemonic systems. However, Ahmed moves beyond

Anable’s externalization in how anger is seen as a core part of the queer experience and the queer political project. Rather than a constructed political statement like the games Anable and

15 other game scholars champion, to be queer is to always fail and to always use one’s negative affect against dominant straight systems.

Therefore, queer failure is a way of living alternatively within cisheteropatriachy. Failure not only resists this system but begins to dismantle it by revealing its own flawed structure. This mode of resistance brings important radical potential to game failure not fully realized by video game criticism alone. Thus, queer theory begins to fill in the gaps of video game theory by more fully acknowledging the inherent disruptive presence of failure, rather than containing this power in conditional arguments.

3. Queer Game Studies, Failure, and Inherent Queerness in Games

By combining the insights of video game criticism and queer theory, queer video game studies draws upon the potential of failure in ways that neither discipline could do alone. Queer video game theory argues that because games are so steeped in failure, they are inherently queer.

However, it must be noted that these queer interventions into video game criticism exist in relation to and in defiance of the continued misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism of the mainstream gaming industry. The danger of these exclusionary voices was most readily represented by an event known as “#GamerGate,” during which video game critic Anita

Sarkeesian was so severely harassed for collecting money via Kickstarter for a series of feminist video game videos that she had to move in fear of the legitimate death threats leveled against her.

While Gamer Gate was one of the most extreme manifestations of misogyny in the gaming community, it was only a largely publicized version of the normalized harassment faced by women and queer people in the industry. Adrienne Shaw articulates how these types of harassment are a product of a larger belief about gaming’s supposed autonomy from cultural criticism. As Shaw notes, “Many of these attacks did not merely deny a woman’s right to be

16 present in a male-dominated virtual space but flat out rejected anyone’s right to critique games as cultural texts” (4).7 Although the harassment Sarkeesian faced was provoked by her feminist criticism, similar arguments were levelled at those attempting to critique games for their potential racist, homophobic, and transphobic content. Ultimately, any attempt to bring socially informed criticism against gaming was seen as a fundamental attack against what games “are”: a form of supposedly politically devoid entertainment that could only be appreciated for its formal and mechanical merits.

In response to these and other events, a strong current of queer games criticism argues that video games are a queer medium and that to protect games from queer criticism is to misunderstand what games are and how they function. Therefore, queer games studies embodies the radical spirit of queer theory by fundamentally dismantling the assumed hierarchies within gaming culture. Ruberg and Phillips expand their queer project into game studies by defining queer game studies as “a call to question, challenge, and ultimately move beyond the neoliberal rhetoric of representation and inclusion that continues to surround games and LGBTQ issues”

(“Not Gay as in Happy”). Rather than simply calling for more representations of LGBTQ2IA+ characters in video games, although these representations still hold value for queer gamers, queer game studies questions what inclusion in games does to more fundamentally challenge the dominant heterosexual structure of the medium. Thus, Ruberg and Phillips call for queer game criticism to consider how queerness manifests itself in games on a more structural level.

This call for moving beyond representation is even more clearly expressed in Adrienne

Shaw’s “Circles, Charmed and Magic: Queering Game Studies,” wherein she purports that utilizing queer theory is necessary to move beyond simply describing how games poorly

7 For a more detailed exploration of #GamerGate and its resonances, see Shaw and Chess’s “A Conspiracy of Fishes” and Katherine Cross’ “The Nightmare is Over.”

17 represent and hurt queer people into discovering the systems that support such hierarches. She suggests that “game studies empowered by queer theory can interrogate the processes by which particular forms of gaming are marginalized, rather than just describe their marginality” (66).

Like Ruberg and Phillips, Shaw seeks to identify and dismantle larger structures of power in games and in gaming culture rather than focusing on messages of inclusion and acceptance.

Following Shaw’s call to use queer theory in game studies to challenge the hegemony of gaming as it exists now, I will now examine how queer failure fundamentally challenges gaming’s presumed cisheteronormativity by proving the inherent queerness of the medium.

In “If Queer Children Were a Video Game,” Kathryn Bond Stockton questions the perceived failure of the gamer in larger social spheres by drawing parallels between how video games and queer people are critiqued by heteronormative society. Stockton claims that games have been associated with “lateralization [and]… jouissance” and that “before the rise of gaming, as we know it now, “homosexuality” was accused of both” (226). Stockton’s invocation of lateralization calls back her concept of “growing sideways” and jouissance refers to excess pleasure. Stockton constructs video games as an ally to queerness where, in playing games, the gamer experiences the jouissance and lateral growth that LGBTQ2IA+ people enact in their everyday lives by being queer. In Stockton’s view, when playing a video game, a person is enacting lateral growth because they are “wasting their time” in engaging in a leisure activity.

They are lingering in their growth because they are living unproductively but also because they are engaging in unacceptable jouissance. By over-indulging in the pleasure of gaming, rather than learning to temper these desires like a proper heterosexual adult, gamers of all sexualities enter the queer position of not growing up because they have not grown out of a non-normative pleasure. Indeed, the position of the “gamer” is queer.

In addition to these societal ways of conceptualizing game queerness, queer game studies also theorize how games themselves can be considered and constructed queerly through failure.

Jordan Youngblood’s “‘I Wouldn’t Even Know the Real Me Myself’: Queering Failure in Metal

Gear Solid 2” seeks to fulfill the call to queer games at a level beyond representation by offering failure as a (dis)organizing principle for game studies. He continues to draw out the useful comparison between Juul and Halberstam, addressing the limits of the “eventual success” model of failure in considering how games can be thought of queerly. Youngblood notes how Juul, in

The Art of Failure, assumes that in video games there is “an inevitable ‘after’ [to failure], when success returns” (215). Youngblood rejects this model, instead opting for Halberstam’s more disruptive queer project, noting that “in defining failure in games primarily as a temporary negative affective experience predominantly characterized by loss at both the narrative and ludic levels, we lose the larger potentiality of failure” (211). As I noted after summarizing video game criticism’s engagement with failure, understanding failure as only conditionally political limits the true queer possibilities of considering failure as inherently queer. Youngblood’s solution to this problem is to “attempt to deploy failure as a usefully incoherent means of finding coherence, a thematic tie that weaves together game play and narrative not to bring player improvement but to unsettle her worldview” (212). Therefore, Youngblood synthesizes queer theory and video game studies to see failure’s full and inherent radical potential in gaming. Failure is not a moment where the normative subject reinforces their want to succeed but instead a site for creating fractures in a game’s structure. Gameplay and narrative fail to be brought together in cohesive ways because continued failure does not allow for the progression of the game’s narrative in the intended way. The game starts to fail and break down due to the player’s refusal to play normatively.

Revisiting the queer potential of game studies, Halberstam calls for an understanding of queer failure at the level of a game’s code and construction. In “Queer Gaming: Gaming,

Hacking, and Going Turbo,” Halberstam shifts the language of queer theory into the language of hacking and glitches, where “queer theory is queer code, it breaks code, recodes, hacks codes, drags codes” (193). In this suitably playful reimagining of queer process, Halberstam describes how queer theory challenges the way games are built and what systems of play they present us with. Halberstam continues: “if hetero-normativity sets up a code for blending into one’s society

… then queer codes represent strategies to rewrite the notion of achievement altogether and to exploit the normative code in order to produce transformative possibilities, often through the act of failing” (194). While this statement translates outside of video games as well, Halberstam explores the possibilities of engaging with games by “hacking” into a game’s heteronormative code (mechanics and progressions) by failing. Games can be constructed to accommodate such hacking, but this metaphor illustrates how failure can structurally challenge straight hegemony by challenging it at its most base level: code.

Shira Chess understands the queerness of games at the level of narrative construction.

Rather than focusing on the content of individual game narratives, Chess argues in “The Queer

Case of Video Games: Orgasms, Heteronormativity, and Video Game Narrative” that video games are inherently queer in how they challenge heterosexually coded models for understanding narrative.8 By applying queer and feminist narrative theory to video games, Chess illuminates how video games fail to follow the Freytag model of narrative (where an inciting event builds through climbing action to a climax mimicking heterosexual and male dominated

8 The Narratology vs. Ludology debate in video game criticism is well summarized by Chess. The debate argues whether video games can be analyzed using existing tools of narrative criticism (a stance represented by Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck) or whether video games are action-based and thus have no narrative (represented by Markku Eskelinen’s “Toward computer game studies”).

20 sex) and thus fail as traditional narrative. However, instead of this model, video games support a structure that is “placed firmly in moments of delay – moments of narrative middle” (85).

Therefore, queer time as outlined by Freeman and Stockton becomes a part of how games are constructed. Chess continues that “this middle … revels in queer process: it allows for a space that is not defined by a singular, ultimate climax but a multitude of climaxes that are not intent on necessarily finding an end” (86). Through the failure to adhere to the heterosexual narrative norm, Chess allows us to understand the inherent multitude of pleasures available to us through gaming. Ultimately, a game is inherently queer not only because its structure mirrors queer sex, but because it challenges the manufactured wholeness and productivity of the inherently straight narrative form.

Finally, Bonnie Ruberg clearly asserts the queerness of video games in Video Games

Have Always Been Queer. In their book, Ruberg thoroughly summarizes the radical queer potential of game failure through three chapters dedicated to failure. In the first, “Playing to

Lose: Burnout and the Queer Art of Failing at Video Games,” Ruberg addresses the ways in which they find joy in purposely finding alternative or non-traditional objectives while gaming.

In failing, a player can find new roads of enjoyment that reject the game’s intended way to play.

In “No Fun: Queer Affect and the Disruptive Potential of Video Games that Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt,” they explore the embrace of negative queer affect and the need to question “fun” as an institution. They ask, “when we talk about fun, whose fun are we talking about?” (166).

Ruberg’s challenge to fun works in a disruptive way similar to how Ahmed challenges happiness. Feeling negative emotions when failing (without the comfort of eventual success) is necessary to challenge dominate gaming assumptions that games are “just for fun.” Finally, in

“Speed Runs, Slow Strolls, and the Politics of Walking: Queer Movements Through Time and

Space,” Ruberg discusses non-linear progression through time and space, exploring the queer possibilities that arise when one fails to progress through a game just as a queer person fails to progress through the benchmarks of heterosexual success. These understandings of failure culminate in Ruberg’s assertion that “in truth, failure in video games is far more complex – and far more queer – than the idea that players simply hate failing. To question [this] notion … one need look no further than the multitude of “fail” videos constantly accruing views on YouTube”

(145). Gamers enjoy failing, they even enjoy showing off their failures. As a whole, gamers experience pleasures and pains far removed from heterosexual understanding and Ruberg is well- justified in claiming that games have always been queer.

While these theorists all envision different ways that failure creates queerness in games, they all prove that video games are structurally queer. I will expand on this conversation by examining how video game literature supports these findings and extends these conversations about queering video games. Ultimately, because literature can imagine games and gaming communities outside of the budgetary, sociocultural, and technological limitations of actual game design, it offers the unique ability to speculate about the possible queer future of gaming. I argue that because literature is removed from the technological limits of game production, video game novels are able to imagine queer gaming spaces and futures which game developers and communities should draw inspiration from. Using the lens of video game criticism, queer theory, and queer game studies, the following chapters will examine examples of video game novels and how their games speak to the inherent queerness of the video game medium.

In Chapter One, I re-examine two key texts in the video game novel genre, Ender’s Game and Ready Player One, to prove that these purportedly heteronormative texts also have queer meanings. Both novels have been critiqued for their homophobic undertones and their

22 perpetuation of the male authority of the game space, but I draw upon Eve Kosoksy Sedgewick’s method of reparative reading and Bonnie Ruberg’s concept of queer infection in gaming to purposely read against the grain of these texts for queer agency. In reference to Ready Player

One, I focus on the novel’s sole queer character, Aech, to argue that her success in presenting as the white male gamer ideal online (while actually failing to meet this ideal as a Black lesbian in real life) fundamentally ruptures the hierarchies of Ready Player One’s gaming space and establishes a counter-narrative in the text questioning the authority of the white male narrative voice. While examining Ender’s Game, I discuss how failing to play video games in their intended way leads Ender to sympathize with and utilize more queer modes of thought which emphasizes the possibility of queer love over heteromasculine violence.

In Chapter Two, I use the popular e-sport League of Legends as a foil to Marie Lu’s

Warcross series, in order to analyze the queer ways that Lu remixes the e-sport. By discussing the standardization of traditional e-sports, I demonstrate how Lu challenges this institution through her creation of a gaming role that purposefully changes aspects of a game’s world during play. Thus, Lu creates queer space by allowing hacking in her book’s game—a kind of hacking that directly opposes the developer’s intentions. Further, I argue that this in-game hacking extends beyond the confines of the game and into the text’s failure to culminate in a heterosexual union and its engagement with queer politics.

Finally, Chapter Three examines Brittney’s Morris’s SLAY and intersectional representations of Black transgender gamers in video game spaces. Considering the novel’s project of creating an intersectional safe space for Black gamers, this chapter will examine the limits of failure as a lens for considering queer embodiments. Instead, the chapter focuses on the success of Black queer gamers despite the failure of the broader games industry to operate

23 outside the limits of a white cisheteronormative worldview. By comparing the novel’s game

SLAY to the popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) World of

Warcraft, I argue that SLAY represents Black queerness in ways that disrupt cisgender and straight white models of understanding and instead allows for the individuality of Black queerness through the game’s avatar creation system.

All three chapters will ultimately prove that reading for failure within a video game novel will expose queer potential in that text. By combining the fields of queer theory, video game criticism, and queer game studies, I will illustrate how video games can reveal the inherent queerness present in the otherwise overwhelmingly straight-centered genre of the video game novel. Indeed, video games have always been queer, and video game novels can contribute significantly to the conversation surrounding this provocation.

Chapter One

Let’s Play it Gay: A Reparative Queer Reading of Ender’s Game and Ready Player One

Video game literature is largely reflective of the video game culture from which it draws inspiration, which results in the centering of cisgender, straight, white, male voices in ways that incidents like #Gamergate make apparent.9 As of mid-2020, no video game novels feature queer or transgender main characters, the majority of the genre’s protagonists are white, and characters with disabilities are either invisible or treated as side characters.10 While I do not wish to erase the important work done by authors of colour to represent racialized voices in this genre (as will be explored in later chapters), the genre still suffers from the structural problem of fostering authority in mostly cisgender white able-bodied straight men.

This is perhaps best represented by two of the most popular video game novels, Orson

Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011). In addition to how widely read both novels are, they also have increased in popularity due to their adaptation into major Hollywood films. Yet, both have been rightfully critiqued based on their representation of queerness. Ender’s Game has been deemed so homophobic, due to Orson Scott

Card’s publicly expressed homophobic views, that many LGBTQ organizers boycotted the film adaptation’s release.11 While Ready Player One features a lesbian character named Helen,

Cline’s refusal to challenge the structural homophobia and racism surrounding her as a Black lesbian (which I will discuss later) contributes to the novel’s implicit marginalization of queer

9 See pages 15-16 of the introduction and footnote 7. 10 In addition to the texts included in this thesis, in my reading I have seen no video game novels that feature queer main characters, and Asher in Warcross is the genre’s only significant engagement with disability. However, Cory Doctorow’s polyphonic novel For the Win includes main characters of colour and Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang’s In Real Life also engages with racism in gaming. 11 See Card’s “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality”,” Homosexual ‘Marriage’ and Civilization”, and “What Right is Really at Stake” as well as Child’s “Activists call for Ender’s Game boycott over author’s anti-gay views.”

25 experience. These texts are clear examples of how video game novels can harmfully center white cisheterosexuality to the detriment of marginalized audiences.

However, I argue that there is still merit in examining Ready Player One and Ender’s

Game more closely. Particularly, I seek to queer these proclaimed “straight” texts exactly because of their performative heterosexuality. In queering the texts most aligned with a heterosexual project, I will prove that even the most straight of game texts has always been queer. Indeed, through the lens of queer game failure, I will explore how one will always fail the game of perpetuating heteromasculinity.

While examining Ready Player One, I investigate Cline’s restrictive use of first-person narration and narrative singularity and how this corresponds to the novel’s marginalization of women, queer people, and people of colour. I argue that Cline fails to create a convincing video game in Ready Player One because the OASIS is so hindered by the novel’s form. However, I also contend that the novel’s ludic aspects give agency to the marginalized characters. I examine

Helen Harris, also known as Aech, the novel’s one queer character, to illustrate how her gameplay overthrows the logic of the game’s meritocracy and queers Cline’s novel by undermining the integrity of its vision of white male centrality. In analyzing Ender’s Game, I argue that by gaming and failing repeatedly, Ender is taught to reject the heteromasculine military complex in favour of a more pacifistic queer mode of thought. Ultimately, playing games allows Ender to explore counterhegemonic modes of conflict resolution which lead him to sympathize and eventually become allies with his former enemies, a queer aligned alien species.

While neither novel features queer content in the sense of representing LGBTQ2IA+ experiences or relationships (besides Cline’s brief mention of Helen’s sexuality), I argue that these novels contribute to the queer political project of dismantling the logic of heteronormativity. In

26 comparing the two novels, I contend that the video games in these novels are queer tools that inherently challenge the heterosexual systems embedded in and surrounding them.

In revisiting purported heterosexual texts with the purpose of finding queer signification,

I adopt Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading.” In her essay on the topic,

“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This

Essay Is About You”, Sedgwick argues for the importance of reparative reading practices in a specifically queer context. She opposes what she deems to be the normalization of paranoid reading practices in theory, where to be paranoid means to assume a text is intending to harm you. She describes how, in paranoid practice, we have the conflicting goals of “seeking to minimize negative affect and … seeking to maximize positive affect” (136). The paranoid lens protects a queer reader from a text’s potential homophobia by pre-emptively assuming that a text will be homophobic. This is intended to reduce the negative affect that the reader will experience by preparing them for potentially harmful content. However, Sedgwick notes the flaws of this method of protection when she illustrates how paranoid reading practices actually further harm the theorist using them:

In most practices … there are small and subtle … negotiations between and among these

goals [of minimizing negative affect and maximizing positive affect], but the

mushrooming self-confirming strength of a monopolistic strategy of anticipating negative

affect can have… the effect of entirely blocking the potentially operative goal of seeking

positive affect. (136)

Paranoid reading practices can ultimately harm the reader by eliminating their capacity to find potentially helpful content in the texts they consume and by limiting their freedom to experience positive affect.

In contrast, Sedgwick outlines how reparative reading practices stand to benefit queer theorists. She first defines the reparative impulse as “additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (149).

Reparative reading practices still acknowledge the lack of nurturing content for queer audiences, but respond in a different, yet equally significant way. Reparative practices find what usefulness they can, even in heterosexual texts, in order to provide for a queer community that would otherwise be starved for positive content. While the homophobic problematics of a text should still be acknowledged and the individual needs of theorists who experience systematic and structural discrimination should always be considered, Sedgwick summarizes the advantages of reparative reading when she asserts that “what we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them”

(150-51). Reparative reading practices serve as a political necessity for queer theory as they allow theorists and audiences to increase the scope of texts which contribute usefully to their communities. This practice serves the double purpose of taking away some of the power of texts that would have originally harmed queer audiences and instead turns that power towards queer enrichment.

Taking away the power of straight or homophobic texts and drawing meaningful and helpful material from them is particularly central to engaging with video game objects. In chapter two of Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Bonnie Ruberg expands on the political significance of drawing queer sustenance from gaming. They discuss the ways in which reading games queerly “has the potential to spark a kind of gay panic – the fear that straight games will

28 be made gay and through them that game players themselves will be deemed ‘queer’ … queer thinking is a contagion that can infect a previously straight video game through the agent of analysis” (62). It is through this lens that reading ostensibly straight video game novels like

Ready Player One and Ender’s Game becomes an important political act. To make gaming a queer space, Ruberg contends that we can start by proving that the games themselves are queer.

This creates space for queer gamers to exist as they find queer sustenance (in addition to the sexual anxiety this produces in homophobic gamers). Indeed, the fear of a gay infection reveals how permeable the imagined boundaries of heterosexuality are.

In this chapter, I combine Sedgwick’s concept of the reparative and Ruberg’s impulse to queer straight game texts to disrupt the overwhelming heteronormativity of Ready Player One and Ender’s Game. This reparative reading practice purposefully, and perhaps spitefully, reads against the grain of these purported straight texts to illuminate how they serve queer audiences.

To carry on Ruberg’s metaphor, I will use queer reparative readings of these novels to break down the “immune system” of homophobia and queer marginalization in the video game novel genre.

1. Ready Player One and the Queer Secret of the OASIS

Set in the year 2044, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One sees protagonist Wade Watts participating in a video game contest to win ownership of the OASIS, the popular virtual reality

MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) that Wade’s society has used to escape economic collapse and environmental destruction. While the OASIS provides a haven from the realities of an apocalyptic world, the game still fosters a toxic environment for many: women’s authority is constantly questioned, players of colour and queer gamers feel they must hide their identity, and disabled players are never even discussed in the novel. Wade uses his

29 gaming prowess to win a contest, a digital scavenger hunt set out by the game’s late creator,

James Halliday, to keep the game out of corporate hands. The contest also stands to offer the winner a vast amount of wealth in addition to ownership of the OASIS, which makes the contest immensely popular. Wade’s strategy is to preserve the OASIS rather than address its systematic problems of discrimination. In addition to Wade’s diegetic refusal to address the structural problems of the OASIS, Cline’s extradiegetic refusal to stray from Wade’s narrative perspective or diverge from a heterosexually constructed narrative also marginalizes counterhegemonic voices in the novel. Using the character Aech as an analytical focal point, I argue that Cline’s heteronormative narrative becomes fractured when the novel engages with play through Aech’s skill and presence in the game. Thus, the queer narrative potential of video games provides some queer sustenance to the novel as it challenges Wade’s singular straight perspective and introduces queer multiplicity.

The novel is told from Wade’s first-person perspective, the perspective of a straight white cisgender male, which exacerbates the novel’s dismissal of queer, female, and racialized voices.

The novel only addresses discrimination briefly through its side characters. One of Wade’s competitors (and his love interest) is Art3mis, a skilled female player, although “a lot of

[players] … questioned whether she was really female” (35). When Art3mis is supposedly “too skilled” to be a female gamer, the mainstream cisgender male gamer community reconciles this skill by assuming that she is male. She represents a threat to the gaming hierarchy which privileges male players, and consequently her threat is neutralized by erasing her gender.

While the sexism directed at Art3mis is important to note, my concern in this chapter rests with Wade’s best friend, a player named Aech. Aech’s game avatar is a white male who presents as straight. Wade believes that the person behind Aech is also white, straight, and male.

However, Wade eventually learns that Aech is Helen Harris, a Black lesbian, when they meet in person for the first time. Helen admits that she presents herself as her avatar when playing the

OASIS because of her mother’s belief that “the [game] was the best thing that ever happened to both women and people of color” (320). Helen uses the ability to customize her avatar to gain access to the privileges afforded to white straight male gamers.12 The necessity of Helen’s actions is concerning because she must sacrifice her identity in order to escape harassment and be respected in the OASIS community. Ultimately, Helen reveals that the OASIS game space isn’t truly a “a magical place where anything [is] possible”, if “anything” includes being visibly

Black, female, or gay (18).

Ready Player One’s failure to address its perpetuation of systematic discrimination corresponds to its inherently heterosexual narrative arc and its failure to create a convincing video game within the novel. The novel fails to discuss difference because it is tied to Wade’s perspective to the point that it excludes all other voices. In an interview about the Ready Player

One film for The Guardian, Cline discusses the novel’s problematics, “acknowledges the book’s solipsistic focus, and puts it down to his inexperience as a novelist,” noting that “in retrospect, one of the ways I made it easier for myself to write the novel was by using a first-person narrative…I could show the whole world from [Wade’s] perspective, but this ended up limiting the other characters” (Stuart). Cline creates a space where characters like Aech have no room to speak because the narrative is inextricably bound to Wade’s concerns and prejudices. Thus, the novel’s narrative perspective becomes entangled with its white heteronormative content.

12 For a deeper exploration of how Blackness is usually erased from or heavily stereotyped in online games, see Tanner Higgin’s “Blackless Fantasy.” I shall explore this topic in more depth in Chapter Three in consideration with Higgin.

Further, Ready Player One’s adherence to a traditional linear narrative arc corresponds to its heterosexual storyline. As Shira Chess argues, the traditional literary narrative, where a novel builds to a singular “climax,” is inherently heterosexual. In this narrative trajectory, “there is always a naturalization of the heterosexual/reproductive conclusion to narrative, in order for it to appear ‘productive.’ To be considered a good story, a satisfying story, there is a presumption that narrative will end productively/reproductively” (87). The novel’s climax, in which Wade wins the contest, removes the obstacle of the contest which Art3mis had named as the reason they could not be together (371). Thus, after this climax, the narrative results in a denouement where

Wade and Samantha officially meet in person and become a couple. The cisgender male and female are united, resulting in a heterosexual narrative climax that also suggests a possible future

(re)productive relationship. The productivity aspect of this denouement is heightened by Wade’s realization that he “for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS” (372). To recall my discussion of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s “If Queer

Children Were a Video Game” on pages 19-20 of my introduction, Wade is learning how to engage more productively with society by “wasting” less time playing video games. Instead, his energy is spent creating a supposedly more “real” connection with a heterosexual partner.

While multiplayer online games usually highlight the importance of each character to the completion of a quest or mission, Ready Player One refuses to construct the narrative like an actual multiplayer video game by removing other players from positions of agency and, indeed, from the game entirely. Near the novel’s end, the company trying to win the contest activates an in-game item that kills all avatars within the vicinity of the item’s activation (including the user), leaving only Wade alive to compete in the contest, as he had acquired an extra life (344). This plot decision on the part of Cline purposefully takes agency away from Aech, Art3mis, and

32 others as they are forced to watch and then assist Wade via voice chat rather than have a chance at the contest themselves or even be present in the game during this key moment. Cline fundamentally fails to create a multiplayer online game as he fails to meaningfully engage with multiple players. While the novel could have adopted a more polyphonic structure and followed the perspective of multiple characters as they race towards the contest’s end, Cline instead removes any barriers to Wade’s solo success.

Despite Cline’s erasure of counterhegemonic voices and his removal of other players from the OASIS, I argue that gameplay, in particular Aech’s gameplay, still works to challenge the novel’s narrative voice and hierarchies of power. Aech brings back the “multi” in

“multiplayer,” and this is when the novel is most queer. Indeed, Aech resists the restrictive linear construction of Ready Player One by questioning the legitimacy of Wade/Cline’s narration and the hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality under which the OASIS supposedly operates.

I argue that Aech achieves this disruption by revealing the hidden ideology of the game’s meritocracy. A meritocracy is a community that is supposedly constructed around earning respect with skill. Thus, players must demonstrate their skill before they earn the right to be respected and accepted into the gaming community. However, the reality of this concept is often that, even when marginalized players perform equal to or better than their male, white, and/or straight counterparts, their identities are denied (as with Art3mis) or they are otherwise forced to assimilate into the dominant gaming culture. In her essay “Racism, Sexism, and Gaming’s Cruel

Optimism,” Lisa Nakamura notes this flawed logic and stresses how it does not address the root cause of discrimination in gaming. She describes how it is thought that “the best strategy for creating social justice—the freedom not to be harassed while playing games—is for stigmatized players to create habitable spaces for themselves by displays of superior skill, by proving their

33 worth by dominating other players” (1). However, marginalized players are still harassed regardless of skill, and after their identities are erased and they simply become “players.” For example, this is reflected in the commonly expressed gamer mentality that a female gamer’s gender doesn’t matter because they play “just as well as any of the guys.” Male gamers can simply ignore the identities of marginalized players because they assimilate into the flow of play.

The meritocracy of Ready Player One manifests itself most strongly in the implicit win condition of Halliday’s contest. In her critique of the novel, Megan Amber Condis notes that to win the contest, players are expected to assimilate to Halliday’s interests and ideology. Condis describes how players “must demonstrate their devotion to the old-school video game culture that inspired Halliday … in hopes that these experiences will shape their perspectives on gamer culture into something that more or less resembles [Halliday’s]” (6). Ultimately, Halliday constructs a contest in which he replicates his “canon” of what counts as “good” media in his potential replacements. As the vast majority of this content is made by white creators, the contest creates a race for marginalized players to quickly assimilate themselves to white straight male culture.13 Ultimately, as Condis suggests, the gaming environment depicted in Ready Player One is one that demands its players’ adherence to a normative way of play and way of being in the

OASIS. Criticisms of the novel that identify the meritocracy as a way to force assimilation on marginalized players are valid; however, I argue there is room for queer sustenance to be found in the novel when this system is proven to be arbitrarily constructed and exploitable.

Multiplayer online video games enable queer forms of narrative multiplicity that challenge the male orgasmic trajectory of most novels. By challenging the logic of the meritocracy, Aech creates a counternarrative within the novel that establishes an unintended

13 The novel does engage with a large number of Japanese properties but again marginalizes the voices of its actual Japanese characters, Daito and Shoto, who draw on appropriated stereotypes of samurai and Japanese culture.

34 multiplicity. In “Narrative and Conceptual Expertise in Massively Multiplayer Online Role

Playing Games,” Javier Alejandro Corredor and Leonardo Rojas Benavides describe the story of online games as “emerg[ing] from the concatenation of events created by several characters/players … In this context, the skill to understand change in time and to predict and act according to other players’ intentions, plans and actions represents a valuable asset” (44).

Multiplayer online games often require players to adapt their play based on other players, which decentralizes power from individual players. Stories are created by how each person decides to act on their own but also by how they interact with others. Thus, online games challenge how we traditionally view narrative voice by creating narratives collaboratively with several players acting in equally important roles. Rather than a story with a main character and subsequent supporting characters, as in Ready Player One, actual online games challenge us to see each player simultaneously as a “main character” and as a potential narrative focus.

Helen represents a disruptive presence in the novel because she creates a counternarrative that undermines the novel’s outward claims of accepting “diversity”. While Ready Player One tries to tell the story of Wade, a self-described “nice guy” who accepts all forms of difference and saves the OASIS from an evil corporation, Helen implicitly acquires narrative power by telling the story of how Wade perpetuates the OASIS’s racist, sexist, and homophobic hierarchies (372). Helen challenges the unstated white straight male benefactor of the meritocracy by proving that she is equally, if not more, skilled than her white male counterparts and that the role of the white straight male gamer is a constructed role that she can adopt. Indeed, she proves that queerness and Blackness are not marginal to the OASIS at all, but rather a central part of how the game’s mainstream culture defines itself. When Aech is first introduced in the novel, she is introduced as an already established and successful member of the OASIS

35 community. Wade describes how she is able to afford hosting her chatroom because “Aech [is] one of the highest-ranked combatants in the OASIS … He [is] even more famous than Art3mis”

(38). In addition to Aech’s financial success, she also has established her chatroom as an area of gaming prestige. Wade outlines how “the Basement had become a highly exclusive hangout for elite gunters. Aech granted access only to people he deemed worthy, so being invited to hang out in the Basement was a big honor, especially for a third-level nobody like me” (38). While this can be viewed as Aech contributing to the meritocracy of the OASIS by creating a space where one must meet a certain standard to enter, Aech being among the top gamers in the OASIS community is inherently disruptive.

The fact that Aech must hide her identity to enter elite gaming spaces—but can infiltrate and create those same spaces based on her skill—proves that elite gaming is implicitly meant for straight white men. It does not matter that her play is on the same level as the other elite players because her queerness, gender, and Blackness would be immediately questioned if known.

However, in Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Ruberg outlines why thinking of queerness as marginal to gaming is misguided as “queer experiences can already be found operating within games–and specifically … they can be found through analytical practices” (63). Queerness has always existed in online games, but revealing this fact instead of actively repressing queerness, like current gaming culture does, is what can lead to the queer infection of games like the

OASIS. Aech dismantles the logic of the meritocracy by illustrating that gaming is not truly about skill but instead policed to keep gaming prowess in the white masculine domain, just as

Nakamura outlines. Ultimately, she infects the OASIS with the knowledge that she and other queer people have always been there and that the cisheteromasculine meritocracy has failed to keep them out.

Aech’s undercutting of the meritocracy also undermines the novel’s explicit messaging about equality and acceptance in gaming communities. While Ready Player One attempts to argue that the facets of Aech’s marginalized identity do not matter, her challenge to who counts as a “gamer” proves that her identity as Black, female, and queer cannot fully be erased despite the text’s efforts. This results in a second “queer-text” in the novel where the reader understands the untold but implicit story of Aech’s challenge to the OASIS and subsequent silencing. After

Wade “overcomes” his initial shock at Helen’s identity, he claims that as they kept talking together that “we already did know each other … We’d connected on a purely mental level. I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend. None of that had changed or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation” (321).

While Wade claims that nothing has changed in his relationship with Aech/Helen now that he knows who she is, he undermines this statement by continued displays of discomfort.

Aech’s presence and success in the game creates dissonance for Wade when he discovers

Helen’s true identity. This is most apparent in the following conversation between Wade and

Helen, where Wade begins by musing:

“That the famous Aech, renowned gunter and the most feared and ruthless arena

combatant in the entire O.A.S.I.S., was, in reality, a …”

“A fat black chick?”

“I was going to say ‘young African American woman.’” (319)

While Wade’s statements could be read as him trying to reword Aech’s negative comments about herself, I argue that this conversation is evident of his discomfort with forms of Blackness outside of white respectability. Ultimately, he refuses to accept her as she is, by acknowledging that there is nothing wrong with being a “fat black chick”, and instead rephrases her identity in

37 more polite terms. Condis further demonstrates how Wade’s musing does not amount to him questioning his biases. Condis argues: “no matter which words Wade uses to describe [Helen’s] race and gender, he still sees them as incompatible with his image of what a hardcore gamer is.

He ‘never imagined’ that a gamer as skilled as Aech could be black and female (and, as she later reveals, queer)” (14). While I agree with Condis that Wade’s refusal to use Helen’s phrasing for her identity is indicative of his persistent sexist, racist, and homophobic assumptions, I also argue that Wade’s continued discomfort is exactly what proves that Helen’s presence in the

OASIS is radical. Helen disproves the idea that Black queer women cannot be elite gamers through her demonstrated ability and therefore challenges Wade’s self-concept as an open- minded and tolerant player. Helen challenges Wade to accept her as a “fat black chick” and he fails because her identity operates outside the bounds of his understanding.

However, there is reparative content to be found in Wade’s restrictive definitions of who should and shouldn’t be an elite gamer. Even though Wade may understand femininity, queerness, and Blackness as marginal in gaming, Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet describes how, in defining heterosexuality, heteronormative society needs queerness to define itself in opposition to. Sedgwick purports that “the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition— have the potential for peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally” (3).

Ultimately, these constructed binaries of the closet reveal that in defining straightness one necessarily defines queerness and vice versa. Therefore, queer identities become “closeted” only when straight institutions, like Wade and the gaming culture he represents, create environments where marginalizing these identities is necessary for establishing power. As Ruberg argues,

Aech’s presence as a skilled Black lesbian player is not new. However, what Sedgwick reveals is

38 that Aech is actually a central rather than a marginal presence in the novel because without people like her, straightness in gaming couldn’t exist. Further, by being the best combatant in the

OASIS, Aech reveals how fragile the definition of heteronormative gaming authority is.

While Wade purports to be comfortable with Helen’s gender, he still insists on using he/him pronouns when referring to Aech in the game. Yet, I argue this is where the novel’s counternarrative becomes most apparent. When Wade describes Aech’s choice of weapon for the battle against the corporate Sixer army, Wade notes that “Aech had selected an RX-78 Gundam mech from the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series, one of his long-time favorites. (Even though I now knew Aech was actually a female in real life, her avatar was still male, so I decided to continue to refer to him as such)” (330). Interestingly, Cline writes Wade’s thoughts about

Helen’s gender in parentheses. The use of parentheses in this passage is equivalent to a grammatical closeting, where Wade’s acknowledgement of Helen’s gender must be contained and kept separate from the text’s plot. Indeed, Condis notes how Wade’s choice to use he/him pronouns for Aech continues to erase her as a Black lesbian in the game space: Wade

“essentially stuffs her body back into the virtual closet for the sake of his own comfort” (15).

Cline pauses in his description of Aech’s gundam choice to make these comments, interrupting the narrative’s flow and making these remarks more prominent. In fact, the parenthetical note is its own sentence rather than being connected to the previous sentence, creating an even further divide between these two thoughts. All of these formal elements result in the splitting of Wade’s narrative voice and a challenge to his authority as a narrator. As Sedgwick describes, the closet is both a place of suppression and also a central locus of definition in heteronormative society. The authority of straight white male players depends on the existence of queer players and players of colour to define their supposed dominance. Thus, Wade defines Aech as male in the game

39 because he refuses to acknowledge that a Black queer woman is equal to him in gaming prowess, although she is, and he must reconcile his dissonant thoughts. This directly disproves Wade’s claim that Helen’s identity does not matter to him because he refuses to use her proper pronouns, establishing Wade as an unreliable narrator. This unreliability opens the counter-narrative where the audience reads in Wade’s discomfort a second underlying narrative of continued prejudice, which corresponds to how Wade’s own story and thoughts become divided when talking about

Aech. It is possible for the reader to see that Wade is misgendering Helen; they might replace

“her” for “him,” inserting their own voice into the narrative to correct Wade. Ultimately, Wade’s narrow perspective creates narrative fracture, where Aech’s gameplay and existence in the

OASIS injects an underlying narrative to the novel that challenges its perpetuation of white cisgender straight masculinity.

In Ready Player One, Cline’s restrictive use of narrative perspective is linked to his novel’s marginalization of female, queer, and racialized voices. However, the gaming aspects of the novel work to queer Cline’s heterosexual narrative. Particularly, I argue Aech’s play challenges the intersecting sexism, racism, and homophobia in the novel diagetically, in addition to the extradiegetic marginalization occurring in Cline’s writing process. Ultimately, it is through gaming that Aech creates a queer countercurrent within the text that reveals and challenges the novel’s heterosexual singularity and provides a queer reparative angle to the text.

2. Ender’s Game, Failure, and Queer Pacifism

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game deals with a different system of entanglements between masculinity, heteronormativity, and gaming by tapping into cultural anxieties surrounding games as military training tools.14 Ender’s Game tells the story of Ender Wiggin, a

14 See Carly Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans for more on the intertwining of masculinity, video games, and military power.

40 young boy genius who is recruited to attend a series of space battle schools because the military believes he is the only one capable of defeating an alien race known as “the buggers.” The Battle

School is centered around games, including a physical game where the children engage in mock battles in a zero-gravity chamber as well as a variety of video games. Eventually, Ender is upgraded to conducting digital simulated battles against the buggers. Ender keeps being advanced through progressively more intense training until he is given a “final” training test, where he learns that his simulated battles have been real and he has unknowingly destroyed the bugger race. After the war, Ender finds that the buggers have replicated a video game environment from a game he used to play during his “Free Play” time on an isolated planet as a means of directing him towards their queen’s pupa. He then decides to help the buggers rebuild their species.

Scholars of Ender’s Game often interpret video games as part of the hyperheteromasculine military complex used to manipulate Ender and foster the detachment which allows him to commit genocide.15 However, I argue that video games in the novel also accomplish the exact opposite, teaching him to think in more queer and more radically peaceful ways. When the games in the novel are oriented towards victory, they serve the militaristic aim of cultivating battle strategies. When these strategies are used against the queer-coded buggers

(“bugger” is a well-known homophobic slur), video games become inextricable from violent heteromasculinity. However, the Free Play video game that links to Ender’s mind allows him to operate outside such a system by failing repeatedly. Failure in the mind game teaches Ender how to inhabit a pacifistic mindset which contributes to his eventual queer allyship with the buggers.

Rather than speculate if Ender or other characters in the novel are queer, I argue that the novel

15 See Lykke Guanio-Uluru (discussed later in this chapter) as well as Layfield’s “Gaming the System: Militarization Narratives in the Hunger Games trilogy and Ender’s Game”

41 embodies a queer politics which embraces failure to allow for the eventual emergence of the queer bugger voice.16 Just as in Ready Player One, video games become the undoing of the heteronormative systems they are purported to perpetuate.

Before I illustrate how game failure teaches Ender to embody a more pacifistic mind set,

I will first explain why violence in the novel is anti-gay and therefore why pacifism is queer. The homophobic violence in Ender’s Game military culture is most evident in the interactions between the boys at Ender’s battle school. Early in the novel, a boy named Bernard bullies one of Ender’s classmates for how his butt wiggles when he walks. Bernard represents a more traditional military figure as he uses his strength to control their social group. Ender combats this when he warns his classmates to “COVER YOUR BUTT. BERNARD IS WATCHING” (37).

When his classmates begin to laugh at him, Bernard retaliates with violence because “the one thing he couldn’t stand was having the other boys laughing at him. He had to make clear who was boss. So Ender got knocked down in the shower that morning” (37). Bernard is defending himself against the argument that he’s fixated on other male bodies and therefore the implication that he’s gay. This potential is seen as delegitimizing for him as an authority figure and therefore he seeks to hurt Ender in order to restore his violent masculine dominance. However, a clearer example of how a potential loving bond between the boys is repressed by military norms is when

Ender’s friend Alai kisses his cheek and says “Salaam” (50). While this scene is not explicitly queer, in “Kill the Bugger: Ender’s Game and the Question of Heteronormativity,” James

Campbell proves how the type of masculine violence trained at the school marginalizes any form of love, including queer love. With Alai’s kiss, Campbell writes,

16 See Michaud and Watkins’s “How Queer is Ender?” James Campbell in “Kill the Bugger” also addresses the queer undertones of the novel.

there is another sense of the forbidden here: loving friendship between boys, relationships

built on something other than competition and demonstrations of power, cannot be

supported by the Battle School. A same-sex kiss, whether as a sign of friendship, a sign

of sexual attraction, or a sign of peace … cannot be tolerated. (495)

To build relationships outside of competition and power is inherently disruptive and queer in

Ender’s Game because it allows for the possibility of love, including queer love. Therefore, as

Ender adopts more pacifistic conflict resolutions skills through his gaming, he is directly challenging the homophobic violence of the military and, by eventually siding with the buggers, he is creating space for a world where love can exist.

To illustrate how the Free Play game operates differently than the other games in the novel, I will first address how games do operate harmfully and heteronormatively in Ender’s

Game. Explicitly, the novel states that video games can serve as a means of cultivating violent behaviours. The students at Ender’s battle school believe that “the teachers monitored the games and spotted potential commanders” in the Battle School’s Game Room (61). In addition to the physical battle game the school is centered around, the teachers treat video games as military aptitude tests and training tools. As Tim Blackmore describes in “Ender’s Beginning: Battling the Military in Orson Scott Card’s ‘Ender’s Game,’” “those who believe in endless rehearsal refuse to draw the line between simulation and reality for the child warriors” (127). Video games at the Battle School replace normal methods of military training because the adults running the school know that there is no difference between them when Ender can fight a war using the same set of controls he would use to play a game. Thus the children are prompted to treat video games like battles because eventually they could be (and they are). Lykke Guanio-Uluru notes in “War,

Games and the Ethics of Fiction” that “the ethical cost to Ender of the ‘games’ he plays is

43 emphasized… Ender is tricked into committing genocide, eventually demolishing an entire planet in the belief that he is engaged in just one more battle simulation.” The adults use video games as a means of manipulating Ender into killing the buggers because video games create a disconnect between his actions and their consequences in addition to disguising that he is fighting a real war. When there is no difference between war and video games, video games are directly a method of inflicting violence.

The treatment of games as tools of the military is centered around the concept of obtaining victory no matter the price. This is something that Dink Meeker, one of Ender’s peers, notes when he confides his belief to Ender that “these other armies, they aren’t the enemy. It’s the teachers, they’re the enemy … They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win win win. It amounts to nothing” (77). As Dink suggests, the teachers are the children’s enemy because manipulating them to hate each other serves their militaristic agenda.

The games in the Battle School are structured around winning even though winning seems to offer no reward as the children continue to be worked past their limits despite their success.

Indeed, the text uses the “Battle Room as a metaphor for life. Winning does not mean peace; it simply means one is allowed to play again” (Blackmore 132). Therefore, the children are taught to win battles but not to finish wars, instead perpetuating an endless cycle of violence leaving no room for love of any form.

Given the military’s emphasis on winning, Ender’s repeated failures in the Free Play game serve as important acts of defiance. Failure allows Ender to discover more pacifistic methods of conflict resolution which fundamentally challenge how games are played and how they function within the heteropatriarchal framework of his school. Indeed, not only does the game eventually serve as the language the queer buggers use to communicate with him, the Free

Play game is queer because it actively works against the military’s dominant ideology. When

Ender first starts playing the mind game, he engages in what Bonnie Ruberg would describe as

‘failing toward’ a game, where the player “fail[s] in the way that a game wants players to fail”

(146). Ender describes himself as having “lots of deaths, but that was OK, games were like that, you died a lot until you got the hang of it” (45). The game wants Ender to die so that he will learn to overcome his enemies and eventually win. In this initial engagement with the game,

Ender follows the model of failure set out by Jesper Juul in The Art of Failure, when Juul describes “the often paradoxical guides for how to reach peak achievements: in order to win, do not play to win but to learn” (116). Ender originally believes himself to be in a system where failure will naturally dissipate.

However, Ender begins to move into the territory of failing against the game, “failing in the way that the game does not want” when he doesn’t stop dying (Ruberg 146). Two adults overseeing Ender note that he is stuck on a level in the game where Ender’s character converses with a giant and must choose to drink out of one of the cups laid before him (which are all poisoned). Due to his many in-game deaths, one of the adults asks the other, “is the boy suicidal?

You never mentioned it” (40). They discuss how another boy they were monitoring committed suicide after similar behaviour in the game. He was unable to handle his repeated in-game deaths. Ender’s failures constitute disruptive behaviour in the military complex because, as a solider, he is expected to succeed when faced with deadly circumstances. The fact that Ender dies repeatedly means that he is failing in his training. While Ender’s eventual resolution to the

Giant’s Drink is violent when he kills the giant to escape the level, his failures eventually prompt him to consider more peaceful solutions.

The Free Play game takes a significant turn in a segment called the “End of the World”, where, for the first time, Ender refuses the intended violent objectives of the game and comments on its beautiful design. At the beginning of the level, the text describes how Ender

stood on a small ledge, high on a cliff overlooking a terrain of bright and deep green

forest with dashes of autumn color and patches here and there of cleared land, with ox-

drawn plows and small villages, a castle on a rise in the distance, and clouds riding

currents of air below him. Above him, the sky was the ceiling of a vast cavern, with

crystals dangling in bright stalactites.

The door closed behind him; Ender studied the scene intently. With the beauty of it, he

cared less for survival than usual. He cared little, at the moment, what the game of this

place might be, He had found it, and seeing it was its own reward. (53)

This passage operates at both a grammatical and ludic level to illustrate how Ender is entering a new relationship with the game. Instead of progressing towards beating the newly presented level, the text lingers on its description of the End of the World environment through an extended list of visual details. The first paragraph contains only one verb which refers to Ender, when he stands to observe the scene, and this is ultimately a stationary and passive position. This writing contrasts with the rest of Ender’s discovery of the End of the World, where Card uses more active verbs to describe what Ender is doing. Rather than Ender “standing” or “studying”,

Ender then “jump[s] from the ledge” and “plummet[s] downward toward a roiling river” (53).

The text’s interaction with the game creates a moment of queer lingering, where the text pauses its progression to enjoy creating images rather than delivering plot information, progressing sideways rather than onward as Stockton would suggest.

In the second paragraph of this passage, Ender’s admiration of the game environment is what marks the shift in his gameplay. Instead of being objective-focused as he previously has been, as when he kills the giant, Ender is considering the beauty of the game design as a

“reward.” The previous paragraph’s focus on images rather than verbs echoes how Ender is valuing aesthetics over action and failing to move through the game’s stages as intended. The vibrant and image-heavy way with which Card describes the End of the World demonstrates how video games can still be engaged with outside of the frame of violent action. In fact, none of the adjectives or images in this passage suggest danger at all, such as the “bright stalactites”; instead, they are used to suggest the splendor of the scene. For this moment, the Free Play game exists as a fully realized world which Ender can explore, rather than an interactive military training tool.

Although Ender does return to the game’s objectives, this moment illustrates that he can play in ways outside of the developer’s intentions and feel fulfilled in a game that has previously denied him any enjoyment. After Ender returns to the game’s challenges, he tires of being constantly forced into violent solutions. Therefore, he develops pacifistic tendencies which directly contrast with the violent world the military has created for him to play in. Ender gets stuck in the tower portion of the End of the World, where he repeatedly kills a snake and then sees his violent and abusive brother Peter in a mirror. Ender only “succeeds” and breaks free of seeing Peter by showing compassion. In this peaceful attempt at beating the level, “Ender didn’t grind [the snake] underfoot. This time he caught it in his hands, knelt before it, and gently, so gently, brought the snake’s gaping mouth to his lips” (108). As Melissa Gross describes in “Prisoners of

Childhood: Child Abuse and the Development of Heroes and Monster’s in Ender’s Game,” “This

[action] is in direct contrast to Ender’s history of destroying his enemy completely. The response from the game is to grant Ender’s most enduring desire …Valentine” (125). While Ender fails in

47 conforming to the violent expectations of his military school, failing at the Free Play game by choosing not to follow the developer’s violent path, he succeeds in reconnecting with his merciful and compassionate side, which is represented by the snake turning into his sister,

Valentine.

Ender desires not only to reconnect with his sister, but also to resolve conflict peacefully.

As one of the adults who develops the Free Play game describes, “the mind game is a relationship between the child and the computer. Together they create stories” (86-87). As Ender deviates from the game’s original purpose, the game begins to defy its developer’s intent because of its interactions with Ender. Together they deny the violence of Peter and the military and choose compassion instead. The game is constructed to be malleable and both the game and

Ender enter queer methods of play as they challenge the institution which the game was designed to serve.

After Ender resolves the End of the World narrative of the game, he stops playing it.

Paradoxically, it is only through losing that Ender feels he has “won.” Ender’s objective in playing the game thus becomes entirely different than that intended by his military superiors.

Gross, quoting page 135 of the novel, describes how Colonel Graff “is nonplussed when Ender says [he has stopped playing] because he won. Graff asserts, ‘You never win everything in that game. There’s always more’ … but Ender feels he has won the prize, and for him, the game is over” (125). Ender’s failure to play the game “properly,” which is to always continue playing and perpetuating the system of violence, disrupts the military’s control over him. The military must justify its existence through constantly being in conflict. In fact, after the war against the buggers is over, Ender is immediately recruited by several military powers for conflicts on Earth.

However, in the Free Play game, Ender not only ends a conflict without violence, he ends the

48 conflict entirely. Ender’s methods of conflict resolution are queer because they threaten to make the military’s perpetual violence obsolete, creating potential space for more loving, and potentially queer, relationships.

To say that the arc of Ender’s Game is entirely homophobic is to misunderstand Ender’s allyship with the buggers. Interpreting the buggers as a stand-in for queer populations is problematic because of the inherent dehumanization in this process. However, this does allow the reader to work against Card’s otherwise homophobic sentiments. The narrative arc of

Ender’s Game is that Ender eventually aligns himself with the buggers rather than the military.

Beyond simply being called “buggers,” and thus being a stand-in for gay men, the buggers are queer figures in how their existence challenges the power of the military complex. Indeed, rather than just being potential LGBTQ2IA+ figures in the text, the buggers question the systems of power in the text by refuting the military’s justification for the war that “if the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you” (178). Rather than investigate why the buggers have never attacked after their initial invasion, the military invests extravagant effort into killing the buggers rather than learning to understand them. Their immediate assumption is that the buggers want to destroy them because they cannot think outside of their violent perspective. In contrast, the buggers operate queerly by actively choosing to not defend themselves and appealing to Ender rather than fighting back in the war. They refuse to perpetuate the cycle of violence and instead communicate with Ender to form a more loving relationship.

Considering the inherent challenge that the buggers pose, Ender’s Game offers a queer reading through its counterhegemonic politics. In “Kill the Bugger,” Campbell conducts a reparative reading of the text to emphasize what he sees as a more nuanced representation of homosexuality in Ender’s Game and its sequels than Orson Scott Card’s other work and public

49 addresses would suggest. His argument is summarized most succinctly in his reading of a passage from Xenocide, the third book in the Ender’s Game series. In this scene, Ender and

Valentine watch the bugger queen try to repopulate her species through sex. Campbell notes

Ender’s unease in the situation, where Ender says: “I love her and fear her. Because I’m not sure whether I should help her or try to destroy her” (175). Ender struggles with the homophobia that he learned as a child and his own learning and compassion, which is facilitated in part through his time playing the Free Play game. Campbell concludes that, “In the novels, Ender does help the queen and assists in the restoration of the buggers as a species … Ender and Valentine do overcome the prejudices of their shared childhood” (504). Ender learns to combat the homophobia he learned in his upbringing and I argue that this connection is facilitated through gaming and the language of failure.

Ender’s decision to pass on the bugger’s knowledge and story as “Speaker for the Dead” is directly tied to his video game failures and the counterhegemonic conflict resolution he learns from those experiences. After Ender’s final test, during which he unknowingly kills the buggers, he finds a recreation of the Free Play game on an otherwise empty planet, which leads him to finding the egg of the future bugger queen. After Ender realizes that the buggers have planted this recreation, he thinks that “they built this place for me, and the Giant’s corpse and the playground and the ledge at the End of the World, so I would find this place by evidence of my eyes” (224). The buggers use the Free Play environment as a shared language to communicate with Ender. The Free Play game represents the space where Ender was most able to resist the manipulation of the military complex. Thus, in using this space as their signal to Ender, the buggers communicate that they understand that Ender did not want to kill them. When the buggers entered Ender’s mind they “found [his] fear of them, and found also that [he] had no

50 knowledge [he] was killing them …they must have dragged these images from [his] own mind, finding him and learning his darkest dreams across the lightyears” (222). Just like the buggers when they first invaded Earth, Ender fails to fully understand what he was doing (even though this is mostly because of how he was manipulated). He fails to recreate the peaceful solution that he enacted in the mind game. Thus, far from being solely a source of violence, the Free Play game is actually a source of bonding between Ender and the buggers as they acknowledge their shared failures and work towards a more peaceful and queer future. Thus, video games contribute to a queer reparative reading of Ender’s Game, where games can act as a place to resist homophobic violence. Like Ready Player One, Ender’s Game is a supposedly heterosexual text that offers queer potential through its interactions with video games.

Ultimately, Ready Player One and Ender’s Game illustrate how players outside of the white heterosexual mainstream of gaming infect the systems around them with queer meaning.

However, rather than creating queerness within these games, these texts prove that queerness has existed within gaming all along. Aech illuminates the reality of Black queer female gamers that have always existed in gaming spaces and the failure of white cisheterosexual men to realize that their supposedly “apolitical spaces” of heteromasculinity have always included and been defined in terms of queer players. Ender’s Game similarly proves that video games have always been queer by illustrating how game failure can actually teach players unintended lessons. Rather than succeeding at the game of heteromasculine violence, Ender repeatedly fails until he realizes that he no longer wishes to win. This potential to reject a game by failing is present within all games.

While both texts illustrate different forms of failure that question the straight authority of video games, both games prove that queerness has always been a part of gaming spaces, it has just been purposefully repressed to perpetuate a system of white straight cismale dominance. These

51 texts can be reparative in Sedgwick’s view because they reveal that Ruberg’s queer infection of games is already in motion.

Queering texts that are constructed as heterosexual documents is particularly important in video games spaces where, unless a text is explicitly stated to be queer, the assumed “neutral” state is straight. To recall the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on reparative reading and Bonnie

Ruberg’s concept of queer analysis “infecting” games, reading Ready Player One and Ender’s

Game as queer texts is important work in establishing video games as a queering agent. Finding queer sustenance in these straight texts illustrates how video games are an inherently queer medium even despite a text’s explicit heterosexual content. In Ready Player One, video games become a way to queer the inherently heterosexual form of Cline’s novel, whereas in Ender’s

Game, failing at the mind game teaches Ender to enter queer counterhegemonic modes of thought. In both texts, video games are the method by which the text becomes queer. If video games’ presence in such straight texts can provide queer sustenance when there appears to be none, then video games are a truly a powerfully queer medium.

Chapter Two

The Queer E-Sport: Marie Lu’s Warcross, League of Legends, and the Queer Potential of

Hacking

Online multiplayer video gaming is perhaps one of the most normative gaming spaces that a player can enter. As discussed in Chapter One, online gaming is the centre of the meritocracy, where gamer culture purports that marginalized players must prove their worth through skill to avoid harassment. In actuality, and as seen in Ready Player One, marginalized players become assimilated into the normative flow of play and are thus stripped of their racial, sexual, and gendered identities to fit into the assumed white cisheteromasculinity of western gaming spaces. This normalization is implicit even in the mechanics of the game and how one is expected to play. The standardization of play is particularly prevalent in competitive online gaming or “e-sports,” where meritocracy is exacerbated by competitive play and monetary prizes. E-sports continue to rise in popularity, with the Newzoo Project estimating that the global e-sports market will exceed $1.6 billion by 2021 (Pei). One of the most popular e-sports, League of Legends, is a prime example of how players are expected to play in accordance with the

“meta” or “what’s believed to be the most optimal way to play within a game’s established rules”

(Macabasco). For example, the meta dictates what characters and techniques work best in the game. From my own playing of the game, refusal to meet the meta is met with intense in-game harassment. Therefore, e-sports foster an environment where players must adhere to certain constraints on time and forms of teamwork in order to reduce the risk associated with non- normative play.

With the rise of professional video games, the e-sports institution has begun perpetuating larger problems in the games industry. While previous chapters have referenced the events of

#Gamergate, the sexism and queerphobia of the games industry extends far beyond this one incident. Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters outlines how video games originated from a place of straight white male authority, and how the industry perpetuates these hierarchies.

Anthropy describes how “In the 1960s and ‘70s, universities like MIT and Southern Illinois

University contained computers that were available for student use. Most of these [first] games existed on the school network and were played and contributed to by only those people on the network” (23). Ultimately, early game design was accessible only to those in these university environments, disproportionately straight white men. These men became the knowledge holders of games who then shared their knowledge in spaces marginalized people did not have access to because of various barriers (e.g. policing of online forums according to the image of the “true gamer,” inaccessibility of university spaces, inability to afford gaming apparatuses). Thus, it remains harder for queer, transgender, and POC creators to break into the industry. E-sports reflect these heteromasculine foundations as game play started in and was practiced within these university circles and other restrictive game spaces. Even today’s e-sports industry still has a widely identified “diversity issue” where the vast majority of e-sport gamers are straight men and people of other identities feel that they are actively unwelcome due to repeated incidents of harassment.17

However, a countercurrent to the normalizing and queerphobic force present in e-sports is

Marie Lu’s Warcross series (2017-2018). Warcross tells the story of Emika Chen, cyber bounty hunter, whose job it is to track down criminals operating in the online virtual reality world of

Warcross. While Warcross exists partially as an alternative virtual world, gamers mostly focus on the e-sport (also named Warcross) contained within that world. As Emika risks being evicted

17 See Jason Krell’s “Diversity, inclusion remain a problem in e-sports industry” for a deeper exploration of persisting discrimination in the e-sports industry.

54 from her apartment, she hacks into the annual Warcross championship’s opening game to steal a valuable item. After this, she is recruited by the creator of Warcross, Hideo Tanaka, to track down a hacker. The hacker, Zero, threatens to take control of Warcross and assassinate Hideo.

Emika’s job includes infiltrating the Warcross championship as a player to track down Zero as he attempts to sabotage the event. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Zero is attempting to stop Hideo because Hideo had implemented a plan to use the hardware that players need to access Warcross to control their brains and thereby eliminate crime. This chapter will also briefly engage with Warcross’s sequel Wildcard, wherein Emika works to stop Hideo’s anti-crime algorithm. However, as this sequel largely turns away from the Warcross game, this chapter mostly focuses on the first novel. Ultimately, the ethics of control and the ambiguity of agency are key debates throughout the series.

I argue that Lu queers the e-sport through her creation of the “Architect” position, a player whose job is to manipulate the game’s world to support their team. Emika plays as an

Architect and it is largely through her that the reader realizes that the Architect is analogous to an in-game hacker: they have the power to actively dismantle the game environment and create additions within the game-space in opposition to the Warcross developers. Thus, Warcross challenges the constraints of the e-sports meta that normally controls players because of Lu’s decision to create a position that refutes the possibility of a fixed and unchangeable game environment. As the meta relies on the game being the same each time, and therefore optimizable, changing the game’s setting and refuting the possibility of an immutable meta has queer potential. In “Circles, Charmed and Magic: Queering Game Studies,” Adrienne Shaw proves how games without explicit LGBTQ2IA+ content can still be queer. According to Shaw, a game can be queer by disrupting how games are normally conceived: “sometimes [queer

55 games] might be games about queerness, but they could also simply be games that question what counts as a game in the first place” (87). While only some of the characters in Warcross are queer, I argue that its game is still queer because it challenges how games usually control their players through collective understandings of game optimization. While this queer rebellion has its limits and the Architect is still limited by the tools that the game provides to them, I contend that the hacking function of the Architect challenges the heteronormative structures of online games more generally, where those who are unable to or refuse to meet the current meta of a game are harassed with homophobic slurs and queer players and characters are practically non- existent.

However, the queerest moment of the novel occurs because of a failure: when Emika’s victory against Zero turns into the failure to stop the implementation of Hideo’s algorithm. This leads to the disruption of the novel’s heteronormatively linear progression by derailing Emika and Hideo’s romantic relationship and denying the novel a heterosexual closure. Emika realizes that she has been unwittingly serving Hideo’s secret project and, by successfully stopping Zero from hacking into the NeuroLink, she has failed to free herself and the public from technological control. I contend that the position Emika decides to take at the end of Warcross is an inherently queer position. She refuses to align herself with either Zero or Hideo and instead tries to find a way to maintain her own agency outside of both of these factions, extending the work she does as an Architect to larger sociocultural systems.

This chapter builds upon the argument of Chapter One because it considers how players can actively create new ways of playing and existing within gaming by failing to adhere to standard play, rather than arguing that queerness is a hidden aspect or passive potential within all games. In Ready Player One and Ender’s Game, queerness either exists within the gaming closet

56 or can be explored through repeated ludic failures, whereas Warcross creates an entirely new gaming role to hack traditional understandings of video games. While even the straightest of game texts is queer, some texts actively create queer space within games. In this chapter, I will compare Warcross and real-life e-sport Riot Games’ League of Legends, to argue that Lu’s game advocates for queerer modes of being in e-sports. Further, it is through e-sports that Emika ultimately realizes the ethical implications of heteropatriarchal modes of progress and the failure of this institution to provide agency for queer people and queer play.

To understand how Warcross queers the e-sport by interrogating a game’s control over its players, we must first understand how e-sports condition and control players into adopting standardized ways to play. While an e-sport can be simply defined as “video games that are played competitively” or as “tournament play,” there is a specific type of game that dominates the professional sphere (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 222). Out of the top ten e-sports of 2019 (sorted by player earnings), only one game is not some form of battle royale, battle arena, or shooter game: the outlier, Hearthstone, is a spin-off card game of another popular game (“Top Games of

2019”). What all of these game genres have in common is that they have no plot; they are simply games that result in winnable rounds. Like a physical sport, the objective of the game is not to play through a written narrative but to defeat an opposing team or player. Thus, e-sports do not include competitions to see who can best complete the story of a Legend of Zelda game. I purport that e-sports have two implicit conditions. The first is that they offer a relatively consistent play experience, where the rules and parameters of the game are predictable. Secondly, this predictability generates a normalizing force within e-sports because players are not only able to but are expected to optimize their play according to the meta. Players then must either embody these certain ways to play or be excluded from participation or harassed.

1. League of Legends and the Heteronormative Standardization of E-Sports

I will now explore League of Legends, one of the most popular and well-established e- sports, as a representative example of how e-sports marginalize queer play and queer players.18

League has three regular game modes with three corresponding maps but the one that is consistently used in competitive play is Summoner’s Rift. In this game mode, players work in teams of five and each player can pick which character they would like to play out of League’s roster. The teams work together to advance further and further into their enemy’s territory until they can eventually destroy their enemy’s energy source, known as the nexus, to win the game.

There are established positions in League matches with particular characters who work well in each position. As Seth Stevenson notes, “League of Legends is quite bounded in its time/space scope. Matches are generally done within 20 to 35 minutes. The main battle environment—the simple, square-shaped grid—is the same every time … You know the territory.” League is an e- sport with a predictable play experience and professional players spend years learning how matches unfold, which characters fit which position, and the expectations of each role. With such a long history of the game, new professional players enter an environment where the acceptable ways to play on a team have long since been established.

In his book outlining how players become professional e-sport gamers, T.L. Taylor describes how “pro gamers” are trained to adhere to a certain way of performing. Taylor reminds us that a professional gamer is not a natural identity and that

Pro gamers do not simply appear out of thin air but are created not only through their

individualized efforts but through a broader social process. The possibilities and

realization for professionalization include everything from being socialized into highly

18 According to esportearnings.com, League of Legends has been in the top ten e-sports for player earnings since 2011.

instrumental play by their peers to institutional influences, economics, relationships with

technology, and larger cultural factors around things like gender and play. (86)

As e-sport gamers are being paid and must interact with their industry, they are shaped by their peers, their team, the game’s league, and sponsors into embodying a “professional” standard.

Taylor proves how this standard is something that is actively created by these institutions, where outside forces shape a player’s actions rather than allowing them to choose how they present themselves. In League of Legends, this has often included queer exclusion. As of the writing of this chapter, League only has two confirmed queer characters out of a roster of 148 champions, illustrating how little the game and its developers seek to entice queer players.19 Extremely few professional League players are openly queer and as recently as February 2020, professional

Turkish League player Dumbledoge cited the homophobia he experienced from his own teammates as the reason he needed to leave his team SuperMassive. When Dumbledoge approached Riot with the issue, they responded that they could not intervene (Richman).

The most telling example of how queerness is viewed in the League community is Riot

Games’ own attempts to police homophobic behaviour in their game. In July 2015, the then Lead

Game Designer of Social Systems, Jeffrey Lin, claimed that Riot was able to greatly reduce incidents of in-game homophobia, sexism, and racism through a tribunal system which allowed players to report other players for discriminatory behaviour and then to vote on these cases. In

“Doing Something About the ‘Impossible Problem’ of Abuse in Online Games,” Lin purports that the “vast majority of negative behavior … did not originate from the persistently negative online citizens; in fact, 87 percent of online toxicity came from the neutral and positive citizens just having a bad day here or there.” Lin further reported that in voting on reported cases, “The

19 See Nicole Carpenter’s “New League of Legends champion Neeko is gay, says Riot writer”.

59 vast majority of online citizens were against hate speech of all kinds; in fact, in North America, homophobic slurs were the most rejected phrases in the English language.” Lin presents seemingly contradictory statements, where the vast majority of League users think using homophobic slurs is a punishable offense while supposedly “positive” players are the ones using this homophobic language. Why then are positive people using homophobic language which they supposedly do not approve of? I argue that players purposely queer non-normative or “poor” play to reconcile the game space as a cismasculine white space. Failure in the game or the failure to conform to other gamers’ standards is made equivalent to being queer so that the imagined authority of straight cismale gamers is not questioned. To be a professional gamer, then, a player must eliminate the queerness in their play and in their presentation to enter the heteronormative industry of e-sports.

Let us examine how queerness becomes entangled with non-standard play. In “Circles,

Charmed and Magic,” Shaw warns against types of play being positioned as normative when she conceptualizes how “certain kinds of play [are] marked as ‘good’ or ‘bad’” through the concept of the magic circle (drawing upon Gayle Rubin’s Charmed Circle of Sex and Johan Huizinga’s

Magic Circle of Play) (80).20 Players in the inner circle of play conform to a certain code of conduct. For example, they have the best equipment, invest ample time into the game, and are knowledgeable about the games they play (83). While the methods of alienation inherent in the creation of the inner circle may appear to be divorced from sexuality, Shaw distinguishes between bodies “expected to play” and “not expected to play” in gaming spheres (83).

Ultimately, players who fail to conform to the code of conduct of the inner circle are therefore

20 Gayle Rubin discusses how certain sexual practices are marginalized in Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality and Johan Huizinga discusses what constitutes a space of play and how players create them in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.

60 aligned with queer bodies through being marginalized to the outer circle of play. Edmond Y.

Chang expands upon this exclusion of bodies in his concept of the technonormative matrix, what he calls “the technologically enhanced and informationally infected version of Judith Butler’s heteronormative matrix, ‘the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produce and regulate the intelligibility of [sex, gender, or sexuality]’” (228).21 Chang draws upon Butler’s observations that gender, sex, and sexuality are constructed and enforced by systems of power and expands these findings to gaming, where video game players are subject to “the tyranny of the binary, of the Boolean, of the matrix” (229). Video games are limited by their technology because they are composed of binary code. Games are inherently restricting because their components encourage dualistic thinking. Players immersed in gaming culture learn to think in similarly reductive ways. Therefore, players are either “good players” who play according to the professional standard and are thus “straight” or they are “bad” players who fail to meet this standard and are marginalized and queered due to their non-compliance. Truly, queerness is aligned with failure in e-sports.

In addition to these external factors, the game itself also manipulates players into performing how it intends. Chang succinctly summarizes video games’ suppression of player choice in his article “A Game Chooses, A Player Obeys: Bioshock, Posthumanism, and the

Limits of Queerness.” Chang asserts that games inherently cannot give their players agency because “video games seduce their players with fantasies of power and control, the chance to play as superhuman heroes battling wrongdoing, injustice, and oppression. Yet the one power that gaming can never fully offer its players is choice” (230). Online games offer the illusion of power, where one can “master” a game’s system so well that they reach professional levels of

21 See Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”

61 play. However, as one masters a game, it is actually the game that is mastering the player as they are forced into certain ways of playing. As Chang elaborates, “some – even most – of the choices within a game have already been decided, mapped onto decision trees … and command structures. The player is always caught between limited gamic action and algorithmic control”

(230). Players are offered choices in online games, such as what character to choose for a particular round or what abilities to use against an opponent, but these choices are limited. Thus, games inherently manipulate their players because they generate a paradox of control: the better one can play a game, the more they are choosing to follow its pre-built logic.

League of Legends players are pressured to adhere to strict timelines in a game. In

“Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gaming,” Matt Knutson describes how in e-sports, “play’s tendency toward optimization at higher and higher levels of competition crescendos in th[e] context of high-stakes performance … players become professionalized, observing social and temporal standards within their industry.” In order to compete professionally, gamers must be able to optimize their play by learning how to best take advantage of League’s many timed components. As Chang states, players are not given the choice as to what speed they want to play at. Some timings in the game are mandatory, such that players experience ability “cooldowns” where they are unable to use a skill after it has been utilized until it has “refreshed.” Other timing mechanics of League do not prohibit the player from doing anything, but more subtly compel them to act in certain ways in order to optimize the benefits they receive throughout the game.

This is most prominent in the position known as the “jungler.” While all the positions in

League have established ways to play according to the gaming community, the jungler is the one most bound by time. As one game guide describes, “junglers are difficult to define … they

62 ransack small camps in the jungle, inhabited by neutral creatures” (“Jungler: Champions’ roles in team”). The jungle on the League map is the territory between the three major lanes connecting the two team’s bases where the majority of the fighting happens. Defeating the creatures in each of the camps in the jungle provide the jungler with different “buffs,” boosts to their and their team members’ stats. After being defeated, these neutral creatures will disappear and reappear after a set time. Thus, the jungler is a crucial support member of the team, who must keep several countdowns and timelines in mind as they play. The jungler’s body is heavily controlled by the game as they are directed where to go and when to go there in order to optimize the buffs they can earn for themselves and their team.

This control over the body and time in the game creates heteronormative play, which is policed through the fear of harassment. For example, in a player-created guide to jungling, the author asks the potential player if they are “ready to get flamed ‘n’ blamed?” before reminding them that “/mute all will be your best friend in the jungle. In my experience, when something goes wrong your team will find a way to blame anyone else save themselves, and a lot of the time that just happens to be the jungler, unfortunately” (Schmi). The guide is describing the feature in League that allows users to mute all messages from both enemy and team players. As the jungler is so crucial a support, when players do things that are unexpected or considered to be poorly executed, they are “flamed.” The process of “flaming” is harassing another player, which can take the form of using derogatory (and often homophobic) language. While harassment towards junglers is also due to players deflecting their own faults (as this guide describes), this is an example of how poor/queer play becomes aligned with removing queer bodies from a legitimate position in the game space. Ultimately, players must adhere to the technonorm or face the consequences.

In addition to controlling in-game bodies, mastering a game like League of Legends also manipulates how one’s physical body behaves. T.L. Taylor describes how “successful players … understand that mastering their own internal and bodily reactions is a core first lesson … in making the shift from amateur to professional gamer” (89). As an example, Taylor discusses

David Sudnow’s book, Pilgrim in the Microworld: Eye, Mind, and the Essence of Video Game

Skill, where Sudnow:

makes visible the work of play, recounting how he marked his video screen with tape to

help him train timing and positionality, how he would daydream strategy and practice in

his imagination, how he had to train his gaze and reflexes, ultimately how his interaction

and skill with the game was embodied in hands, eyes, ears. (Taylor 91)

Thus, professional gamers must hone aspects of their physical bodies in order to keep up with their gaming skill and facilitate the kind of precise split-second moves that a game such as

League requires. The game’s control of the player extends beyond their digital presence into how their physical bodies interact with the game.

E-sports like League of Legends leave no room for queer failure as queerness and non- normative play are both relegated to the outer portion of Shaw’s magic circle of play. However, as the inner circle of play is implicitly where the game and the institution of e-sports have the most control over players, queer failure becomes an important way through which marginalized players regain control. I argue that Lu’s Warcross exemplifies this renewed agency because its game resists standardized play as the Architect can change aspects of the game as it unfolds.

Additionally, while Emika sees great success in the Warcross championships, it is ultimately her failure to stop Hideo from carrying out his plans that places her in a powerful position of queer critique.

2. Warcross, Queer Hacking, and Failure

The game Warcross is constructed in a way that would be practically impossible to replicate in today’s video game development environment. In an interview with NPR, Lu discusses the inspirations for Warcross, stating that “her plot was inspired by real-life video games, such as League of Legends” where “fifty thousand people will pack into the Staples

Center to watch the world championships” (Del Barco). However, Lu also reveals that she

“approached the writing process like a game studio with an infinite budget” (Harrington).

Warcross takes inspiration from e-sports in their wide appeal and the culture that surrounds them. Yet, Lu’s freedom from the normal constraints of game development allows her to create a game that affords more possibilities for players. The fusion between the video game and the novel allows for Warcross’s queer deviations from actual video games.

In contrast to the conventions of e-sports, Warcross has a built-in player position with the power to work against the developer’s and the game’s intentions. However, Warcross has its own controlling mechanics that players must counter. While Warcross is constructed differently from other e-sports, it still suffers from some of the same problems. To begin, I will outline how

Warcross is described in the novel and analyze how the game’s construction departs from mainstream e-sports. When the game is first introduced, Emika says that “Warcross [is] pretty simple: two teams [battle] each other, one trying to take the other team’s Artifact (a shiny gem) without losing their own. What made it spectacular [is] the virtual worlds the battles [are] set in”

(31). The arenas that the Warcross games take place in vary to an unusual degree for an e-sport.

In fact, the game levels used in the annual tournament appear to be tournament exclusive. To have a game’s worlds be the focus of an e-sport is unexpected considering that games like

League of Legends emphasize the uniformity of their play experience.

In fact, the Warcross championships seem to thrive upon introducing new elements to the game. In addition to the tournament exclusive arenas, “power-ups in the championship tournaments are different from the ones in regular games … Every year, the Warcross

Committee will vote in a dozen new power-ups exclusive only to the championships, and then retire them at the end of the game season” (154). Usually tournament play rewards those who have most mastered the elements of a game, rather than emphasizing adaptability to new scenarios. T. L. Taylor notes how developing professional players will “devote hours upon hours to mastering [a game], endlessly fascinated by the intricacies of the system, its characters, its weapons, its properties. Figuring out strategies and tactics become core play activities” (88). The

“metagame” or the activities surrounding the game, such as strategizing or discussing the game in online forums, become ways that players gain agency. Occasionally, players can even influence the game’s meta. Further, gamers can assert control in executing their plans as they want them to be executed (even if those plans are prompted by how the gamer has been taught to play). Adding in new elements largely undoes player preparation because they can only guess what these new elements will be. While Warcross does not control players through fully established gameplay, the elements of chance in Warcross tournaments surprise players and still leave them at the mercy of the game.

In opposition to these randomized elements, the Architect position works against the game’s control by hacking the intentions of the game and its developers. Even if random elements are introduced into the game, the Architect can also change aspects of the game by altering the game’s presented terrain. Emika describes an Architect’s job as “manipulat[ing] the world of the level in the favour of [their] team. If there’s an obstacle, like a bridge, [they] would collapse it to let [their team] through … An Architect is a designer of the level, dedicated to

66 changing the world on the spot in favor of [their] team” (124). The Architect is the only position in Warcross whose job is mostly divorced from obtaining the Artifact. Indeed, they face off more with the level of the game than with other players as they decide how to manipulate the design in their favour. Rather than playing just against the opposing team, they are also playing against the game’s designers. While hacking usually has the connotation of gaining unauthorized access to a technological system, Jack Halberstam gives us a working definition of what it means to “hack” queerly. In “Queer Gaming: Gaming, Hacking, and Going Turbo,” Halberstam describes how

“queer subjects constantly recode and, within limits, rebuild the worlds they enter. Since the world as we know it was not designed for queer subjects, then queer subjects have to hack straight narratives and insert their own algorithms for time, space, life, desire” (187). The

Architect does essentially this, rebuilding the game worlds they enter and making room for their own queer game play. Warcross worlds are not designed for play outside of the developer’s intentions, but with the Architect hacking into that world, queer play can enter into the game.

Indeed, Emika establishes herself as the perfect candidate for the queer Architect role because she is selected to join the league after hacking into the season opener game. Thus, she enters the league only after having disabled how it usually functions. In order to obtain an expensive tournament exclusive item, Emika uses a hack which allows her to steal the item from a player from her position in the audience and accidentally glitches herself into the game in the process (45-46). This prompts Hideo to recruit her for her hacking ability and her bounty hunting skill to hunt Zero. Beyond this instance of hacking serving as driving force of the plot, I argue that Emika’s hacking embodies Halberstam’s vision of queer hacking. From the first time the reader sees Emika interact with Warcross, she establishes that she is engaging with the game in ways that question its structures and hierarches. She challenges the separation between the

67 audience and the players in addition to challenging the game’s designers by proving that they are not entirely in control of their game. When Emika is describing how she has been selected to enter the league’s draft, she comments that her nomination “makes no sense. I’m a good

Warcross player, but I’ve never had the time or money to get enough experience or levels to hit the world leaderboards. In fact, I’ll be the only wild card in this year’s draft who isn’t internationally ranked” (69). Emika acts as an exception to the usual rules of entry into professional Warcross, ultimately questioning what is truly required to be skilled at the game.

Rather than having to dedicate numerous hours to become familiar with normative professional play or paying the money to acquire “proper” equipment or high-tier game features, Emika hacks her way into Shaw’s inner circle of play while still embodying the characteristics of a “body not expected to play.” As a woman of colour, who has not gone through the normalizing aspects of the meritocracy, Emika truly hacks into the world of Warcross and begins to recode it, as

Halberstam outlines, shifting the game’s standard of play by forcing other players to respond to her and refuting the usual barriers to entry common to e-sports.

Recalling Bonnie Ruberg’s concept of infecting straight games from Chapter One (see pages 27-28), I argue that the way the text initially describes Emika’s hacking into Warcross is analogous to a computer virus the game must delete. When the game notices that she has glitched herself into Warcross, Emika narrates that

a flash of red light engulfs the scene, and the omniscient voice echoes all around us.

“Time-out,” it booms. “System glitch.”

Then, my screen goes dark. I’m kicked out of the game and back into my starting room,

looking out at a virtual view of Tokyo. The doors in the room are gone now. The Sudden

Death power-up is still flowing in my inventory.

But when I reach for it, it vanishes. They’ve deleted it from my directory. (45-46)

The text emphasizes that the punishment that Emika receives is executed by the game itself, where the system’s reaction is equivalent to an immune response. In particular, the omniscient voice that declares Emika to be a “system glitch” is seemingly programmed into the game rather than that of an announcer. Prior to this point in the game, the text refers to any commentary that the audience can hear as coming from an “analyst” or “announcer,” linking the voice to a human source. But this omniscient voice gives words to the game as it malfunctions due to Emika’s hacking. Further, the way Emika’s presence is referred to as a “system glitch” highlights how the glitch she creates challenges the game’s construction holistically because she has affected the whole system. Rather than just engaging in an isolated instance of hacking, Emika exposes and exploits a significant coding issue, which allows her to gain power over the system’s developers as she engages with an in-game item outside of its intended context. Finally, she is flushed from the opening ceremony into a digital quarantine, where the doors of her normal starting room have been taken away, and she is left unable to access other aspects of the game while they remove the spoils of her hacking. The game attempts to restore the health of its systems by removing

Emika, the virus. Indeed, the reader recognizes the severity of Emika’s breach through the sudden shift from the image of the game flashing red to Emika’s abrupt transferral to her cordoned-off loading zone. The text establishes through the construction of this early scene that

Emika does have the power to interfere with the Warcross world and she proceeds to fulfill this queer hacking potential throughout the novel.

I will now examine how Lu explores the queer potential of the Architect in Warcross, mostly through Emika’s play. The language used in e-sports usually serves to alienate less experienced players, creating a power dynamic that further delineates who “belongs” in the inner

69 and outer circle of play. If one cannot understand the highly specialized terms used in competitive play, the player is immediately barred from adhering to the professional standard.

However, Emika bypasses this purposely constructed barrier even though her teammates use this alienating terminology. After the first match is announced, Emika’s teammate on the Phoenix

Riders, Hammie, begins discussing how their opponents, the Demon Brigade, “eight-dive in formation by the cliffs” and Emika has “no idea what they’re talking about. But a chorus of agreement answers Hammie, and more high-level worlds are brought up in rapid succession.

More chatter about nicknamed moves that I’ve never heard of” (147). Emika discusses how

Warcross has tiers of worlds where being a higher level allows a player access to higher level worlds. As Emika has hacked her account to stay at level 24, she is barred from understanding much of her team’s strategizing. While the Phoenix Riders are a more diverse team, where Asher is disabled, Roshan is Brown and queer, and Hammie is Latinx, their use of gaming language reflects current practices in e-sports which have made it difficult for new, and often marginalized, players to enter the game. As this knowledge has traditionally been held by white men in e-sports and Lu has not made clear how Warcross has created a welcoming environment for new players, this terminology can still be used as a way to maintain the integrity of forms of knowledge popularized by white male cisgender bodies. Indeed, the Phoenix Riders have been assimilated to this system rather than challenge it.

However, in her play as an Architect, Emika’s lack of knowledge of this “insider” terminology does not appear to matter. In fact, her ability to operate outside the network of established professional gamer knowledge works to her advantage. In her first match of the tournament, Emika’s team wins due to her risky decision to control an in-game dragon. The match takes place in a speed-based level where the players fly on hoverboards around a circular

70 track. If the player falls, they are sent back to the beginning of the track. As Emika races, her

“eyes flicker to the glacier’s ice below [them]. Along the cliffs, a white dragon is stirring to life, its movements cracking the ice that encases it” (221-22). The awakening of the dragon signals a new obstacle to be introduced to the race, where players will have to dodge its attacks in order to stay on their boards. Usually elements like this (which test a player’s ability to dodge and multitask) cannot be interacted with beyond triggering a fail state when the player is hit.

However, Emika lassoes the dragon and begins to control it, effectively hacking into the intentions of the developers and repurposing them for her own use (222-23). She refuses to allow the game to control her body by forcing her to dodge the dragon and instead controls the game’s elements. Ultimately, Emika surpasses the need for highly specialized and alienating maneuvers and terms by creating an alternative playstyle which creates room for her to exist in the structure of e-sports.

Emika’s queer style of play challenges the usual hierarchy of team play in Warcross.

Asher, Emika’s team captain, tries to constantly remind her that she is supposed to be following his orders. In her second match of the tournament, Asher asks Emika if she “can … follow my lead for once?” (277). After Emika insists she has a better move planned, “Asher makes a sound as if to argue, but then he stops, as if he’d remembered [her] successful moves from [their] last game. ‘Your only solo move’ … ‘Hear me’?” (277). While this interaction may be reminiscent of the meritocracy of Ready Player One, where Emika has proven her worth and thus earned the right to disobey orders, it differs because she is pushing against the standard of play rather than being assimilated into it. While the text does not specifically address issues of racism in the e- sports industry, instead opting for the representation of diverse players without systematic change, Emika, as a woman of colour, is given space to change how her team plays. Rather than

71 players demonstrating their ability to listen to their captain’s commands, in addition to the game’s prompts, “hacking” the game as Emika does allows her to expand definitions of play and how players can inhabit the game space.

Significantly, the other bounty hunter/hacker we encounter in the series, Tremaine, is also an Architect and one of the explicitly queer characters of the series. Tremaine is recognized as particularly unpredictable by his gaming peers. Another one of Emika’s teammates, Roshan, describes him as

an Architect who has trained in every position. He’s the best of the Demons at switching

roles, and he’s actually a very good Thief and Fighter. So sometimes, in games, his

teammate will toss him their own power-ups or weapons, so that he can use them even

though he’s technically the Architect. When you fight him, remember that he can wear

many faces, and that he’s fluid enough to pull an uncharacteristic move on you. (149)

What makes Tremaine such a talented Architect is his failure to remain tethered to that role’s provided definition. While Tremaine’s playstyle is a combination of those provided by the game, he combines those pre-fabricated options into an entirely new style of playing. Just like Emika,

Tremaine refuses to have his playstyle dictated to him and resists the control of the game and of the e-sport institution. Both Architects hack Warcross in the way Halberstam suggests in order to create space for themselves and work outside the “straight” modes of playing presented to them.

The ways in which Warcross further queers the e-sport are made particularly clear by how the game is taken up in the “Dark World,” the criminal underbelly of Warcross, and how it relates to Emika’s hacking and role as a bounty hunter. In the Dark World, users compete in and bet on “Darkcross” matches, where the play is associated with gang activity and an assassination lottery. These games adhere to the connotatively illegal definitions of hacking, where players use

72 hacks to create glitches that manipulate the game in their favour. Emika describes watching a

Darkcross game where “two opposing players reach each other and both swing their arms back to attack. As they do, one of them suddenly glitches out of sight. He glitches back in behind the other player, and before the second player can react, the first one kicks him off the building’s roof” (185). This maneuver is presented in the text as a dirty tactic and Emika notes that “in a real game, a move like that would have been banned immediately. But here, with no official

Henka Games employees overseeing it, anything goes” (185-86). These players are hacking by gaining unauthorized access to the game that Henka Games closely monitors. They are cheating because they are purposely bending the game to their advantage, working against how the game is intended to be played. However, while the text suggests that this type of play is not to be encouraged, I argue that it is not far removed from the queer hacking which allows Emika to interfere meaningfully in Warcross. Ultimately, I argue that the Darkworld illuminates why

Emika’s presence is so disruptive in Warcross.

While cheating breaks trust between players, assuming that they all enter the game with the belief that they will follow the same set of rules, it is also a way of challenging institutions like gaming leagues. It is strange that the text criticizes cheating so broadly by associating it almost exclusively with criminals and assassins, when Emika only defeats Zero by cheating.

Emika steals several items from the Dark World black market, in order to make sure she can win the final match. Throughout the text, she is constantly balancing the acceptable role of the

Architect and her illicit role as a hacker and bounty hunter. However, even given Emika’s use of illegal items, I argue that the use of hacking and glitches in Warcross is a natural extension of what the Architect position already allows and is inherent to realizing Halberstam’s queer hacking. In Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games, Mia Consalvo reminds us that “just

73 as players exercise agency, they aren’t doing so in a vacuum. Along the way, various industry elements work to constrain certain readings or activities, promoting certain ways of seeing gameplay and ways of playing that are valued over others” (2). Cheating only exists because games and the games industry define what is allowed in a game. Consalvo’s understanding of cheating works with Shaw’s magic circle of play, where those who cheat are immediately ousted to the outer circle of play. Challenging how some ways of playing are deemed more valuable than others is what the Architect inherently does in Warcross. Cheating can perform this same function, creating new motivations for playing. While the types of cheating done in the Dark

World are dangerous and non-consensual as they are tied to dangers such as assassination,

Warcross points to the possibility of productive cheating, purposefully breaking the game and its rules in order to imagine new ways of play that are valuable. In fact, without “cheating” Emika would be unable to function as such a queer presence in the text because she would have been unable to enter the league and save it from destruction without using forbidden hacking. The difference between Emika’s cheating and the Darkworld, besides violent criminal activity, is that

Emika uses her hacking and glitches to challenge Warcross and its norms rather existing in a separate underworld which poses no threat to the mainstream structure of the game.

The queerness of Warcross and the Architect’s play is most realized at the novel’s end.

The book ultimately fails to fulfill its promises of a heterosexual ending with Emika and Hideo solidifying their romantic relationship and instead ends on a much more ambiguous and queer note.22 In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman describes how

“naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation: binding is what turns mere existence into a form of mastery in a process I’ll refer to a chrononormativity,

22 By the end of Wildcard, Emika and Hideo become a couple so the heterosexual conclusion of the series is only delayed. However, the questions that arise at the end of Warcross that align with this delay are still politically queer.

74 or the use of time to organize individual human bodies towards maximum productivity” (3). In

Chapter One I discussed how Ready Player One follows an orgasmic narrative trajectory as described by Shira Chess (see page 31 of this thesis). Ultimately, Emika does not become a

(re)productive subject by entering a relationship with Hideo, as do Wade and Art3mis. Rather than giving the novel a singular chrononormative conclusion, Emika refuses to compromise her morals. Instead of submitting to Hideo’s control and supporting his algorithm, Emika continues to embrace her hacking in order to maintain space for queerness in their society. During the

Warcross championship’s final match, Emika’s believed victory over Zero is actually a failure.

Before the match, she learns that Zero has rigged the Artifacts of the final game to hack into the

NeuroLink devices users need to access Warcross once the game is over. However, it is revealed after her win that Zero was taking control of Warcross because he was trying to stop Hideo from activating his secret anti-crime algorithm.23 Hideo’s algorithm uses the NeuroLink contact lenses to gain access to the brains of every Warcross user (which the novel estimates to be approximately 98% of the population) to change their brain chemistry when it detects that they are considering criminal activity. How Emika’s failure to stop Hideo occurs at the same time as her greatest victory in the text demonstrates that traditional success is not adequate to enact queer change. Emika’s win in the Warcross tournament aligns with straight ways of progressing, where her efforts culminate in a final victory. However, her simultaneous loss immediately challenges what traditional modes of victory actually accomplish and advocates for the importance of hacking such narratives. Like Ender in Ender’s Game, Emika’s success is actually a colossal failure that leads her to seek out an alternative to the system she is presented with.

23 This plot becomes complicated in Wildcard, when Zero takes control of the algorithm and the reader learns that Zero is actually Hideo’s lost brother, Sasuke.

Emika’s belief that she is in the right in defeating Zero is immediately challenged after her win. The moment after Emika grabs the Artifact, “something strange happens. A jolt of electricity sparks through [her]. Like a static shock. [She] jump[s]. A unified gasp ripples through the audience, too, as if everyone had felt it at the exact same time. Numbers and data flicker over each of the players, in and out, then gone” (334). Emika and the entire crowd receive a physical sign of the disruption that has occurred. Most interestingly, the implementation of the algorithm is signalled by code flickering over the players. This process makes visible how technology has the power to manipulate its users at a physical level. The control that Edmond

Chang asserts is inherent to all games and technology becomes perceivable for a brief moment as it crescendos to a dystopic level. Warcross users become even more susceptible to the binary of technology as their free will is reduced to a switch that the algorithm can turn off or on.

Nevertheless, the anti-crime algorithm is an extension of processes that technology already affords. After Hideo has told Emika how he has control over the populace through the

NeuroLink, she contemplates how control has supposedly shifted from the technology user to the technology. Emika ponders how “users are supposed to be able to control the NeuroLink with their minds. But that can also be used the other way – type in a command and use that to tell the brain what to do. Type in enough commands, and the brain can be permanently controlled”

(339). Emika’s observation assumes that technologies like the NeuroLink did not have control over their users in the first place. Online games like League of Legends and Warcross illustrate how technologies can condition people to act in certain ways even as the player is the one entering input into the gaming system. The system can decide what is “cheating,” not allowed, or not “normal” and players are manipulated into avoiding these activities. Games always give commands to their players. For example, in League, players are commanded to destroy the nexus

76 or to kill the jungle creatures at certain times. As professional players are receiving these commands every day as they play, their brains do become permanently controlled, just to a smaller degree.

Emika’s identification of the political heteronormalizing of the algorithm prompts her to leave Hideo, denying the chrononormative trajectory that the novel was previously taking.

Rather than the novel “climaxing” and resulting in a straight union like in Chess’s model, and in

Ready Player One, it is the climax which leads to their break-up. Emika argues with Hideo that because the algorithm is based upon the justice system, the corruption in the law will lead to dangerous censorship and silencing. Her viewpoint as a woman of colour is particularly potent in this critique. Emika’s only incident on her criminal record is from hacking and exposing the personal information of all the students and teachers who had shared a naked photo of her female classmate during high school. She specifically cites the discrimination she experienced as a woman of colour as her reason for standing up for her peer, reasoning that:

sometimes people kick you to the ground at recess because they think the shape of your

eyes is funny. They lunge at you because they see a vulnerable body. Or a different skin

color. Or a difficult name. Or a girl … sometimes, you find yourself standing in exactly

the right position, wielding exactly the right weapon to hit back… I hit with nothing but

the language whispered between circuits and wires, the language that can bring people to

their knees. (73-74)

Emika sympathizes with her classmate because she realizes how power is enacted on marginalized bodies. While Emika is discussing gender and race, Shaw’s circles of play illustrates how queer bodies, which intersect with considerations of gender and race, have power enacted on them in gaming spheres through the designation of “bodies not expected to play” and

77 the harassment, exclusion, and erasure they subsequently experience. Emika uses hacking as her method of fighting back, actively asserting her presence in online spaces as a woman of colour and using her abilities to deny those who attempt to push her to the margins both in and outside of the game. Therefore, when Hideo argues that his algorithm will bring peace, Emika reminds him how the justice system can fail. She was sent to juvenile prison for fighting back in her classmate’s honour, even though the justice system was unable to help the girl. She asks him,

“What about protestors? What about fighting for what’s right or making mistakes or even just respecting people who disagree with you? Is it going to stop people from passing laws that are unjust? What laws is it going to enforce, exactly?” (343-44). If we continue to see queerness as not only a sexuality but as a mode of political critique that challenges the systems of power inherent in cisheteropatriarchal society, Hideo’s plan endangers the existence of queer politics.

Ultimately, Emika cannot abide Hideo’s control of the populace, which aligns with her refusing a heterosexual timeline. In Time Binds, Freeman notes how “properly temporalized bodies [are linked] to narratives of movement and change. These are teleological schemes of events or strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childrearing, and death and its attendant rituals” (4). In breaking up with Hideo,

Emika refuses to be properly temporalized. She is not transitioning from a hacker and bounty hunter into more legitimate employment or into a relationship. Instead she is solidifying the necessity of remaining a hacker and working outside the cisheteropatriarchy by vowing to stop

Hideo. Emika remains in a politically queer position rather than being neutralized by the text’s plot.

Rather than condemning technology as inherently controlling, the text demonstrates how using technology in queer ways can be an effective method of resistance. Warcross as a video

78 game is integral to Warcross’s queer conclusion. Only through the game does Emika learn the truth about Hideo, but more than this, the game provides a guide for how Emika will continue to resist the normalizing forces of technology. At the very end of the novel, Emika joins forces with

Tremaine (353). The two Architects, who are already skilled in resisting the manipulations of

Warcross, are best prepared to expand their queer styles of being beyond the game and into political action. Both of them fundamentally challenge Hideo’s new hierarchical structure as they have already hacked their way into the e-sport institution. Warcross serves as a blueprint for the resistance ahead as Emika and Tremaine plan to hack and cheat their way into destroying

Hideo’s algorithm.

The purpose of my project is to prove that video game novels, just like video games themselves, have always been queer. Warcross contributes to this assertion in complicated and contradictory ways. Hideo’s algorithm illustrates the ways that technology controls its users and how video games like Warcross and League of Legends are implicated in this process. The games in Ender’s Game and Ready Player One hold similar potential to manipulate their users either through the meritocracy or through the military industrial complex. In Ready Player One,

Aech escapes this control by demonstrating her skill in a game that wishes to silence her. Ender escapes manipulation through failing at his game repeatedly and eventually denying the military industrial complex. However, in Warcross, Emika actually shifts the way that the game she engages with is played. Warcross reminds us that even as video games have always been queer, sometimes it is the players themselves who must do this queering. Warcross offers the space for marginalized players to hack into games rather than become assimilated into their culture.

Ultimately, embracing failure is an important technique to challenge what types of play are

79 valued and who gets to be considered a “gamer.” Failing to adhere to what games ask of us is how we stop the game from telling us how to play and how to exist digitally and physically.

Chapter Three

The Limits of Queer Failure: Brittney Morris’s SLAY and Black Transgender Gaming

In previous chapters, following Bonnie Ruberg’s Video Games Have Always Been Queer,

I examined how video games and video game novels have always been implicitly queer.

Through Aech from Ready Player One and Warcross’ Emika, I also briefly examined what it means to occupy a racialized identity in gaming spaces. Aech’s identity as a queer Black woman in the OASIS is erased because she feels unsafe to present as a visibly Black and queer woman and thus plays as a straight white male avatar. However, Aech’s game skill creates an underlying counternarrative to Cline’s story of white male authority. In contrast, Emika can play as a visibly

Asian woman in the Warcross League, but the text makes no reference to the racism that players experience in real-life e-sports or whether these problems persist in Warcross. In both works, these women of colour have been made to integrate themselves into an online community where whiteness has historically been the assumed authority. The continued history of forced whiteness in online gaming spaces, outside of the competitive realm, is exemplified most by the MMORPG

(Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, one of the most popular and longest running MMORPGs, serves as a representative example of this assumed white authority: the game only gave players the option to create characters with Black and Asian facial features through an expansion in 2019, fifteen years after the game’s initial release (Purchese).24

In contrast, Brittney Morris’s SLAY (2019) examines what it would mean to create an online gaming space specifically and only for Black players. In the novel, a Black female teen game developer named Kiera Johnson creates SLAY, an MMORPG exclusively for Black

24 According to Altar of Gaming, World of Warcraft is still the most populated MMORPG in 2020 and has around seven million users (see Babalon, Mother of Abominations).

81 players, as a direct response to the racism she experienced when online gaming. The game’s mission is to offer a place for Black gamers to celebrate their Blackness. New players need to be invited to join the game by pre-existing SLAY users and thus it continues to be shared among only Black players. However, after a teenager is killed over a dispute in the game, SLAY comes under media fire for promoting violence and is accused of being racist for excluding non-Black players. While the rhetoric of “including other races” is used by the media, it is made clear that those who are offended at being excluded are white. The novel ultimately explores the necessity of creating Black spaces within gaming and how SLAY provides something sorely lacking in other games, namely a place to represent oneself outside of white frameworks and to feel the joy of belonging to a supportive Black gaming community.

The focus of my project thus far has been to examine how queer failure in video game novels proves that these novels (and the games they contain) have always been queer. However, to use the language of queer failure in the case of SLAY would be to mistakenly place a generalized method of resistance onto a community that is specifically focused on Black success.

Kiera defines SLAY as “a fabulous mecca of Black excellence in which Nubian kings and queens across the diaspora can congregate, build each other up, and SLAY” (Morris 157). Thus, in this chapter, by focusing on the specific needs of Black queerness, I hope to nuance the ways we view queerness in gaming spaces and demonstrate how SLAY might indicate the limits of queer failure as critical lens. Indeed, SLAY both illuminates the failure of the gaming industry to create safe spaces for Black transgender gamers and demonstrates why queer failure, namely failing to pass as cisgender online, can have detrimental consequences. Thus, this chapter examines how SLAY offers a vision of Black queer gaming which succeeds in offering players a place to explore their identity rather than prompting them to fail. Rather than engaging in failure,

82 these characters succeed in creating transgender gaming identities that cannot be consumed by intersecting white and cisgender frameworks. In this way, SLAY begins to create habitable spaces for Black transgender players where other games have failed.

To address the ways in which SLAY represents Black transgender identity and queerness as disruptive mechanisms, I will first offer context for how these facets of identity are usually handled by MMORPGs with the representative example of World of Warcraft (or WoW). WoW’s history of anti-Black racism and homophobia exemplifies the kind of online environment SLAY is responding to. Then I will discuss the novel’s queer characters, who are both transgender, and how they exist and play within SLAY. In particular, I argue that the SLAY character creator offers these two characters, PrestoBox and Q.Diamond, a unique opportunity to create their in- game bodies outside of white cisheteronormative logic. SLAY is a queer game because it offers its transgender players the unique ability to import their own designs into the game and control how other players experience them. The game takes away exclusive creative power from the developers and disperses it amongst its players. In an interview regarding her game WE ARE

HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley discusses how her game, a playable archive of Black transgender experiences, has a pathway for cisgender players.

The game asks the player at the beginning if they are Black and transgender, transgender, or cisgender and, based on the player’s position, the game prompts them to see different parts of the archive. Brathwaite-Shirley says that the cisgender pathway was deeply thought out:

It was really important that I put a lot of thought into what we allow the cis pathway to

get, because we don’t want it to feed into the idea of cis people consuming trans bodies.

We’re actually saying, ‘No you’re not ready to consume us. You can’t consume us. I’m

not accepting that. (Guobadia)

Brathwaite-Shirley educates her cisgender audience with her game while simultaneously refusing to allow her narrative to be subsumed under white cisgender modes of understanding. She asserts agency over what cisgender audiences are allowed to see and denies the attempts of these audiences to take knowledge from this archive and interpret it outside the intentions of lived trans experience. I argue that the character creation that PrestoBox and Q.Diamond conduct in

SLAY performs a similar function. Both characters use the expanded possibilities of online space to create in-game bodies that defy the bounds of how bodies usually behave. For example,

PrestoBox’s body appears to defy the limitations of matter and size (by expanding and contracting), whereas Q.Diamond’s body includes different animal features. Ultimately, these presentations give power to the players, as the cisgender audience around them is unable to consume or force understanding upon them when the players successfully control how they are seen.

1. World of Warcraft and White Cisheteronormativity

To contrast how SLAY depicts Black transgender identity, I will first use WoW as an example of how marginalized identities are engaged with in popular online gaming spaces and how Black, queer, and transgender players usually experience online play. To begin, I will define what an MMORPG is and explain why, in this particular game environment, issues of representation and identity are so important and contested. In a Massively Multiplayer Online

Role-Playing Game, a large number of players access a large shared digital world. What most differentiates an MMORPG from the e-sports discussed in the last chapter is that RPGs involve role-playing elements where the player adopts a different persona when playing. Thus, a player constructs an online life through which they can form relationships with other players. Many of these games fall under the fantasy genre and players create lives by interacting with the game’s

84 world building. However, as Edward Castronova explains, “In the case of synthetic worlds …

[the] membrane [between the digital and physical worlds] is actually quite porous. Indeed it cannot be sealed completely; people are crossing it all the time in both directions, carrying their behavioural assumptions and attitudes with them” (147).25 Castronova’s idea of crossing-over between the two worlds is significant as players can experience the online world as equally meaningful to the physical, as the experiences they have feel real, they can interact with real people, and they can form real relationships. However, while entering a space of play might suggest that the player temporarily abandons the rules and social constructs of the physical world, Castronova illustrates how an MMORPG will reflect the social prejudices of the society that creates it.

WoW is a representative example of a larger problem with racism in online games and how developers interact with their games and their communities. Engagements with race in online games, which are often influenced by traditional Eurocentric fantasy tropes historically steeped in racism, is complicated as in-game races, such as elves, orcs, and goblins are fused with racial significance from the physical world.26 Thus, to engage with Blackness in WoW, I borrow Tanner Higgin’s definition of Blackness in “A Blackless Fantasy: The Disappearance of

Race in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.” In-game races “interface allegorically with racial identity formations in the physical world,” Higgin writes, using

Blackness “to refer to the ontological condition of being labeled and understood as black—in the manifold forms that this is realized in the physical and game worlds” (5). Players can be

25 Castronova’s book takes an extended look at how online games affect real world economies as players spend actual currency on in-game objects. In-game marketplaces come with a form of racialized labour known as “gold- farming” which is outside of the purview of this chapter. Gold-farming consists of largely Asian workers operating in terrible sweatshop conditions gathering items for sale, leading to another prominent form of in-game racism. See Nakamura’s “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game.” 26 See Higgin, p. 11, for more on the roots of historically white high fantasy.

85 understood as Black through aspects such as self-identification, avatar skin colour, guild affiliation, and voice chat. However, not only do players who exhibit their Blackness experience harassment no matter their avatar, one’s avatar choice can also be aligned with a racialized position. The idea of being labelled and understood as Black in WoW becomes particularly important when “for example, the Trolls have pronounced and unquestionable Jamaican accents and the Tauren are a mystical and tribal culture with Native American architecture and dress”

(Higgin 9). Choosing a Troll or a Tauren avatar then creates a further vulnerable scenario for players of colour as the game appropriates aspects of Jamaican and Indigenous culture to create racial stereotypes; WoW “races fit into simple binaries … such as civilized/savage, peaceful/warlike, and honorable/opportunistic” (Weiss and Tettegah 38). Ultimately, WoW perpetuates the use of racial stereotypes associating Blackness and other non-white identities with savagery where, as a result, players of colour are further othered by playing these non- human and stereotyped avatars if they want to be understood as non-white in the game.

While WoW allows human characters to customize their skin tone, it nonetheless constructs Blackness as non-human. When creating a character in the game, users are prompted by WoW to pick a side in a conflict between two fantasy factions, the Alliance and the Horde.

Depending on which side the player chooses, they will be able to create characters of different races. While both sides feature non-human races, only Alliance players can create human avatars. Lisa Nakamura outlines how race becomes encoded into game worlds through her concept of cybertyping: “the process by which computer/human interfaces, the dynamics and economics of access, and the means by which users are able to express themselves online interacts with the ‘cultural layer’ or ideologies regarding race that they bring with them into cyberspace” (Cybertypes 3). Thus, a game’s mechanics and construction (which are reflective of

86 the developer’s implicit racism) will interact with the user’s racial ideologies in ways that can perpetuate marginalization rather than provide an escape. In the Alliance and Horde conflict, players of opposite factions are encouraged to attack each other in player vs. player combat if the opposite faction enters their base. Further, they are unable to share the spoils of defeating enemies by collaborating in neutral zones like they are able to with other members of their faction. Therefore, players must compete against each other for resources. The game mechanically pits humans against the Black-coded members of the Horde (in addition to the other racial cybertypes the Horde employs). Further, in “A Blackless Fantasy,” Higgin makes reference to a comment on a 2006 post on Terra Nova, a blog about virtual worlds, which explains that “it is completely unambiguous that, even though you can pick a number of skin tones in WoW for your human character, the culture of humanity is clearly European. There is no existence of non-European humanity in Warcraft lore whatsoever” (qtd. in Higgin 9). While there can be Black-presenting humans in WoW, they are forcibly assimilated to white European culture. The game’s mechanics prompt the player to consider humanity (which is coded as exclusively white) as needing to be hostile towards the Black-coded trolls, making racial conflict and anti-Black racism an implicit part of WoW’s gameplay.

Further, WoW’s development company, Blizzard, admits to treating players of colour as a lesser priority compared to white players. WoW added the option for Black and Asian facial features to the WoW character creator in the Shadowlands expansion released in 2019. In an interview with Eurogamer magazine, Michael Bybee, senior producer at Blizzard, justified the lateness of including these racially diverse options by claiming that “one of the things that’s just a reality of making video games is we have to figure out exactly where we spend our resources

… we have time that we can spend on characters and art, and we have to make decisions about

87 that” (Purchese). Bybee’s comments reveal how the needs of Black players are overlooked by gaming companies like Blizzard in the name of efficiency. Ultimately, Blizzard decided that creating a place where people of colour could experience the same sort of wish fulfillment as their white players was not worth the labour. Their eventual reconsideration of their priorities is also suspect, as increased diversity in games “is also a trend motivated by interests of capital in maintaining a consumable product. To this end, the meaning of design decisions such as those of racial customization must also be looked at as driven by the market and dependent on political economy” (Higgin 16). Blizzard realized that their game was no longer meeting their players’ standards of inclusivity, so they attempted to rectify the problem. However, these problems of representation are not so easily solved as the game still treats “blackness … as an exterior painting of the body equivalent to an aesthetic choice. It does not, for the most part, exist outside of that activity” (Higgin 18). While Black and Asian players would be able to produce avatars that looked more like them, which is still significant, these options would not disrupt how humanity is exclusively associated with European whiteness in WoW because Blizzard is not willing to make larger structural changes to the game.

Beyond the racism of WoW’s character creator is the racism that players of colour experience from other players. SLAY directly references this racism through Kiera’s experiences with a fictional game called Legacy of Planets, which is described as a popular fantasy-themed

MMORPG and is therefore reminiscent of WoW. Kiera describes how the racism that she experiences in Legacy is actually more explicit than what she experiences in the physical world.

She recalls, for example: “after I had finally customized my character, who had to be a dwarf if I wanted to make her skin tone as dark as mine is in real life, I went to the first character I saw on the map – I can’t even remember his username – and he took one look at my character and

88 whipped out [the n] word” (96). The process of being recognized as Black in Legacy exposes players of colour to the often-unfiltered prejudice of other players. Kiera says that this is the only time that she has ever been called the n-word and explains why players feel more empowered to be racist online versus in real life: “who doesn’t want to have a world at their fingertips–where

… your actions have no consequences … whenever I played Legacy, I’d hear all the things that people wish they could say to people in real life” (96-97). The online environment not only reflects the behavioural assumptions and attitudes of the physical world as Castronova and

Nakamura suggest, but it also has the power to intensify the harmful prejudices of the physical world due to player anonymity.

This harassment is exactly what leads Aech from Ready Player One to disguise her race and sexuality in order to avoid the consequences of being perceived as Black while playing in the

OASIS. Aech’s mother gives Aech the idea of using the OASIS as a tool to access whiteness.

While I argue that Aech’s presence in the game creates a counternarrative to Cline’s novel, the text’s primary arc disregards Aech’s need to protect herself. Rather than challenging the perpetuation of normalized whiteness, Ready Player One and MMORPGs like WoW illustrate how “the White dominance of gamespace has been recast as a racially progressive movement that ejects race in favor of a default, universal whiteness and has been ceded, in part, by a theoretical tendency to embrace passing and anonymity in cyberspace” (Higgin 7-8). Thus,

MMORPGs are traditionally structured to encourage Black players and other players of colour to sacrifice their identities to protect themselves from the intensified harassment of the game space.

However, they rebrand this toxicity as progressive, suggesting that everyone is treated the same and can have power online while glossing over the fact that everyone must be understood as white for this structure to function.

Additionally, Blizzard has a long history of structurally removing queerness from WoW, which persists despite past controversies. In “Confronting Heteronormativity in Online Games:

A Critical Discourse Analysis of LGBTQ Sexuality in World of Warcraft,” Alexis Pulous outlines the failed attempt of World of Warcraft player Sara Andrews to create a queer guild in

2006. Andrews used the general chat channel to recruit members to her guild and she was informed by Blizzard that this was a breach of the game’s terms of service (Pulous 78). The clause of WoW’s terms of service that was invoked at the time stated that “insultingly refer[ing] to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players” was banned (qtd. in

Pulous 78). Despite the fact that Andrews used no offensive language in the chat and was instead creating a safe space for queer players, the company insisted that, by not allowing her to discuss her identity, they were protecting her from possible homophobic harassment. While Andrews’ case does not discuss transgender identity specifically, it does point to the pressure for transgender and otherwise queer players to pass online.

The company continued to monitor its community in a similarly homophobic fashion as recently as 2019. A WoW guild called the GAY BOYS had its name changed to Guild ZPXPX in

October of 2019. When the guild members asked Blizzard for clarification the “representative confirmed that they’d been punished because advertising the fact that they are gay invited slurs”

(Doctorow). Instead they suggested that the guild pick “a name that [they] can identify with without also using words that would illicit [sic] a reaction from other players” (qtd. in

Doctorow). The implicit belief in both of these cases is that simply talking about being queer invites harassment from other players. Further, the company’s policy is to remove the queerness in question rather than making structural changes to WoW’s moderation to protect queer players

90 from the harassment they claim is inevitable. The result is a default straight world where queerness is silenced so that straight players can pretend it was never there in the first place.

However, despite WoW’s homophobic history, transgender players have used the game space to explore their gender identity outside of the developer’s cisheteronormative control. In

“How World of Warcraft helped me come out as transgender,” Laura Kate Dale describes how

WoW was one of the first places she felt safe to explore her gender identity.27 Despite being unsure of her identity as a transgender woman at the time, Dale opted to play as a female avatar when creating her character for WoW, reminiscing that “maybe it was because I didn’t know anyone else playing the game before I started … whatever the reason, in that one area of my life

I was willing to try out expressing myself as female.” Being able to explore one’s gender identity with relative privacy is a key affordance games like WoW provide. While online social interactions can be as real and important as those in the physical world, players who feel unsafe can choose to log off. Dale elaborates: WoW “taught me things about myself in an environment where, for a long time, I felt safe. And I could walk away from thoughts of transition any time I needed to.” Dale was eventually outed as trans in WoW and needed to leave after her online friends made her feel unsafe. However, she still cites the game as an important resource for learning how to explore one’s identity without real-world consequences. The game world is a unique space that is simultaneously real and temporary, where transgender players have the opportunity to experience what being treated as their gender identity feels like before potentially coming out in the physical world.

27 See Justin Kirkham’s “My Transgender Sister, Gwen, Found Solace in World of Warcraft” and Owl’s “Don’t underestimate video games, without them I wouldn’t be here” for similar personal narratives of WoW serving as a place to explore gender identity for white transgender players.

However, while game spaces like WoW can sometimes provide safety for white transgender players to explore their gender identity, as long as they are able to pass as cisgender, being both Black and transgender in an MMORPG is a unique position which cannot be subsumed under these narratives of white transgender discovery.28 As Salvador Vidal-Ortiz describes in his entry on whiteness in the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies

Quarterly, “both …transgender issues and whiteness studies help to indicate the need for thinking of race and gender/sexuality as axes of power” (265). Therefore, WoW’s enforced whiteness does not allow Black transgender identity to thrive; the game asserts power over both the player’s Blackness and gender by pressuring them to play avatars that present as both white and cisgender. Further, trans-inclusive spaces can often run the risk of silencing trans people of colour as “trans discussions … voice an intent of diversity and inclusion or demands for the end of oppression based on racism and discrimination, while they simultaneously use language in everyday interaction that construes such spaces as predominantly white” (Vidal-Ortiz 265). Even if, for example, a guild welcomes transgender players, transgender players of colour will find themselves having to silence the racial aspect of their intersectional identity in order to appease the white members of the guild who assert the invisibility of their race as universal. These environments fail Black transgender gamers who deserve the same sort of avenue for exploration that white transgender players identify in WoW. Ultimately, these conditions prove that spaces such as SLAY, which center Blackness and can center transgender experiences, need to exist.

28 In all three of the articles mentioned exploring WoW as a space for transgender players, none consider race, suggesting that the writers were white.

2. Brittney Morris’s SLAY and Queering Character Creation for Black Transgender

Gamers

When discussing SLAY, it is important to consider the racist, homophobic, and transphobic context that SLAY responds to by offering its Black transgender characters a space to explore gender presentation through digital bodies. SLAY expands upon the tradition of using

MMORPGs like WoW as a place to explore gender by responding to the failure of these games to provide space for the intersectional identities of Black transgender people. In her introduction to

The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas summarizes how people of colour have been barred from fantasy as a genre. She writes: “when people of colour seek passageways into the fantastic, we have often discovered that the doors are barred. Even the very act of dreaming of worlds-that-never-were can be challenging when the known world does not provide many liberating spaces” (2).29 Finding space to explore one’s gender identity through the fantastic has been of extreme importance to many white players. Barring Black transgender people from these fantastic worlds through the dominant whiteness of MMORPGs is a failure of the game industry that needs rectifying. Indeed, Kiera creates SLAY to provide liberating spaces for Black and

Black queer players. Kiera works in the space where other games have failed to queer the

MMORPG by finally providing a passageway into a fantastic world for people like PrestoBox and Q.Diamond, who need a space like SLAY to be themselves. Therefore, SLAY pushes the critical conversation about queering games past the rebellion tactic of queer failure into considering what models of queer success could look like.

29 See TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us” to consider how Blackness has been disproportionately linked with the dystopian genre in video games. While part of the umbrella of speculative fiction, dystopian video games link Blackness to martyrdom and suffering.

In the second chapter of Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Ruberg describes why failing to pass while gaming can be detrimental to marginalized players and thus why it is necessary for SLAY to question queer failure as a universal method of resistance. They analyze

Octodad: Dadliest Catch, a game where the player is a large octopus attempting to pass as a human man. Ruberg claims that failure in this game can have severe consequences: the goal is

“to pass for human and thereby continue the everyday objectives of living. The enemy gaze

[Octodad] must avoid is the gaze of the very society that surrounds him, a kind of cultural, systemic, and ever-active vigilance against the perceived dangers of difference” (107). However,

Octodad serves as a parody of passing, as the player is forced to grapple with the game’s ridiculous octopus physics. Octodad will never have to face the real consequences of harassment and discrimination that Black players do in online games, and his attempts at conforming to human activity while flailing like an octopus are largely humorous. Yet, Ruberg’s analysis of the game points to how the stakes of passing online can go beyond the ludic and into the personal. In online games such as WoW and the OASIS, queer players of colour like Aech cannot afford to fail at passing like the people playing Octodad can. Indeed, queer failure would be actively harmful in these situations. Such players learn that they must avoid the gaze of society, which permeates the boundary between game and reality, in order to continue the everyday objectives of living in an online game. This is why it is significant that SLAY creates an environment where

Black transgender characters can create avatars which allow them to exist safely in SLAY by simultaneously exiting the confines of traditional understandings of gender and avoiding the potentially violent cisgender gaze of other players.

To frame how SLAY’s transgender characters of colour challenge the restrictions of games like WoW, I want to highlight how the players in SLAY have the ability to import their

94 own creations into the game and thus have increased agency over their in-game presentations.

When reminiscing on how she arrived at Q.Diamond’s character design, Jaylen, the player behind Q.Diamond, admits: “I’ve tried replicating [Kiera’s] algae-green dress so many times, but

I can never get the design right. Mine always ended up looking like tacky prom dresses. So eventually I gave up and gave myself a huge black robe instead, kind of like PrestoBox” (118).

This passage can read problematically as Jaylen tries and fails to adhere to Kiera’s cisgender femininity and instead opts for a more gender-neutral garment that conceals her body. I will discuss why this actually places the power of Q.Diamond’s presentation in Jaylen’s hands later.

However, this passage also indicates that SLAY gives Jaylen the power to incorporate her own designs. Usually in MMORPGs like WoW, players are limited to the clothing that the game provides. Clothes and armour have certain stats associated with them, and therefore clothing is pre-inscribed with ludic meaning. SLAY items are not associated with in-game bonuses as

SLAY is a card game where players use virtual reality technology to duel one another with the abilities the cards provide them. Thus, the game affords players the ability to modify their appearances and create clothing because these items do not have to be recognized by the game as holding certain powers. This has particular significance for transgender players who get to decide how they wish to present themselves, rather than being constrained by a game’s failure to go beyond binary and restrictive constructions of gender.

The idea that a player can customize their own experience challenges the central authority of the game’s developers. To return to Edmond Y. Chang’s exploration of choice in games, as discussed in my previous chapter (see pages 60-61), players must be critical of what limitations traditional games are putting on their expression through the choices provided to them. Chang challenges Dale Carrico’s figuration of the queer possibilities of technology in

“Technology is Making Queers of Us All,” where Carrico posits that society can “unite technological development with human self-creation in the hope of unleashing varieties of desires queers themselves have rarely (but sometimes) dreamt of” (Carrico). While Carrico imagines a future where technologically enhanced bodies can assist in queer presentations,

Chang points out that this type of freedom is not available from games. Chang draws a connection between the flawed promises of using technology to transcend the body and games when he notes that “like the transhumanist fantasy of technological transcendence, video games offer a similar promise of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the liberal humanist virtues of choice, free will, and success” (231). However, games like Bioshock force bodily augmentation upon the player by requiring it in order to progress in the game (233-234).

Thus, when the game creators hold power over players, particularly by limiting what gender presentations are available to them or by forcing gamic elements onto their bodies, the fantasy of queer embodiment in a game is not fulfillable. Players are only able to rebel against the restrictions of a game when they are able to create new choices for themselves and refuse the current model of forced consent.

SLAY decenters much of the power from co-developers Kiera and her friend Claire by allowing user input through player designs and character customization. I wish to nuance

Carrico’s vision of queer technology and Chang’s criticism by noting how games can enhance the possibilities of a physical body if players have power over these possibilities and consent to them. In “Queer Theory, the Body, and Video Games,” Derek A. Burrill advocates for the inclusion of the physical body in game studies, where its current exclusion risks “the potential erasure or disembodiment of the real body and its signifying and representative power in virtual space” where “bodies of difference face deletion” (29). This view illuminates how certain bodies

96 are erased from digital space. For example, Asher in Warcross uses a wheelchair in real life, but his disability is erased or at least not conceptualized in the Warcross game. In SLAY the Black physical body is emphasized because of the erasure of Blackness from most online game spaces.

The fact that Kiera can create an avatar that looks like her physical body is extremely empowering. However, I wish to nuance Burrill’s warning by considering it in conjunction with

Chang and Carrico, and alongside a transgender perspective. In “Virtual Avatars: Trans

Experiences of Ideal Selves Through Gaming,” Kai Baldwin notes that character “customization allows players to construct a virtual body completely independent from the limitations imposed by physical existence … Avatar creation can relieve dysphoria and empower transgender individuals to experiment with the embodiment of their ideal physical selves” (1). Thus, while the physicality of the game body should be acknowledged as a potential counterpoint to the universalizing of white, able-bodied, cisgender bodies, games can also provide an important means of escaping the restrictions of the physical world by allowing transgender gamers a place to find a presentation that makes them feel comfortable.

Transgender SLAY players are not required to fail in order to gain agency because they are given creative agency from the beginning. Thus, SLAY realizes the potential of queer avatar creation because its avatar creation system works outside the confines of physical limitations, while simultaneously counteracting the default state of white cisgender bodies that pervades most games. Indeed, SLAY’s players have the power to direct how people look at them rather than being consumed by cisgender players. For example, the description of PrestoBox highlights how they create a specific scene when they are viewed, using magic-like elements suggested by the “Presto” of their username. While PrestoBox is not explicitly confirmed to be non-binary,

Morris consistently uses they/them pronouns for them and their avatar’s description has no

97 gendered aspects. When they are first mentioned in the novel, Kiera describes how PrestoBox appears as

a black disk [that] emerges and slides across the floor. It’s like a shadow, but with

nothing creating it. It slides right up the steps, headed straight for me. Just as I think it’s

going to stop, it slides underneath me. I glance over my shoulder as it emerges from

under my sparkly green train and stops beside me. The cheering hasn’t stopped, and it

hums louder as a mountain of black lumps rises slowly from the disk, which is shrinking.

The lumps slowly take shape into shoulders and a head. Then a face forms – one with a

Guy Fawkes mask and a black Zorro hat–they look a bit like No Face from Spirited

Away. The body is just a nondescript black cloak, concealing whatever tricks lie

underneath. (29)

The fact that this scene is described from Kiera’s point of view, rather than PrestoBox’s perspective, allows the passage to directly mimic how her gaze is being manipulated and thus influences how the reader perceives PrestoBox. Thus, PrestoBox’s presence even shapes how the text’s narrative is presented. The scene follows the trajectory of Kiera’s gaze; much of the description is directional as PrestoBox’s shadow form moves across the arena and then their body begins to emerge. The audience is not allowed to voyeuristically examine PrestoBox’s avatar during their performance because they are not in a form that is recognizable as gendered and the audience is preoccupied by the ongoing movement. Even when Kiera and the reader are given the opportunity to look at PrestoBox’s fully formed avatar, their gaze is barred from penetrating past what PrestoBox wants them to see. The text says that “a face forms” during the transformation process, yet the reader is given no suggestion of what this face looks like because of the mask and hat which conceal it. Similarly, the text says that PrestoBox has formed a

“body,” but describes the elements hiding underneath their cloak as potential “tricks,” questioning the idea that PrestoBox has an understandable tangible form. Ultimately, the game affords PrestoBox presentations they could not otherwise access, allowing them to create a body with a fluid form whose purpose is to elude definition. This is how SLAY succeeds where most games fail: it allows Black transgender people to represent themselves rather than conform to a preconstructed presentation.

Ultimately, the text makes clear that PrestoBox is empowered by directing their audience’s gaze and thus avoiding inspection by a cisgender gaze rather than being subject to surveillance. In Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, Patricia Hill Collins critiques discourses surrounding visibility as beneficial for Black women where they “remain visible yet silenced; their bodies become written by other texts, yet they remain powerless to speak for themselves” (38). I must note the difference between the surveillance of Black transgender bodies and Black cisgender female bodies: transgender bodies experience exponentially higher rates of violence and simultaneously receive significantly less visibility but more scrutiny than cisgender female bodies. Along these lines, I wish to consider Collins’ work in conjunction with Brathwaite-Shirley’s warnings against transgender consumption. PrestoBox avoids containment and consumption by remaining both visible and an enigma. Rather than trying to conform their presentation to pass as cisgender, undergoing ludic passing like Octodad is forced to, PrestoBox’s body bypasses this process by operating outside of cisgender modes of understanding. Any attempts to define their gender presentation are met with bodily elements which operate outside of the gender binary and even the laws of matter. In their analysis of

Octodad, Ruberg suggests that “what it feels like to play as Octodad–like a sea creature trying to move on land–is often what it feels like to be queer: a misfit subject with an unruly body

99 navigating a world that is not designed for you” (103). Ruberg outlines how, in games and in real life, trying to pass as cisgender requires one to conform their body to a set of rules and standards which do not make sense because they are created by cisgender society. In such a model, transgender subjects are designed to fail. This is where queer failure can become a harmful practice, where by failing, transgender people are further exposed to this harmful system.

However, PrestoBox succeeds in exiting this model by being given the power to intervene creatively in SLAY. PrestoBox succeeds in reworking the rules of ludic society because they are given the ability to influence how bodies work in the game through elements like magic and the ability to change what form their body takes.

In contrast to PrestoBox, Q. Diamond is confirmed to be a transgender woman by the novel. The novel’s handling of transgender issues with respect to Q.Diamond and Jaylen can be concerning at times. Kiera consistently refers to Q.Diamond using they/them pronouns, despite a chapter narrated from Jaylen’s perspective—using she/her pronouns—in which Jaylen tells the reader that she identifies as a woman. While this may be because Jaylen does not come out to other players until she feels comfortable, and Jaylen and Kiera only interact directly once, it is nonetheless concerning that Jaylen does not feel comfortable sharing her pronouns with SLAY’s developer. Further, in Jaylen’s chapter, the reader learns that she is in a home environment where she feels unsafe to come out to her family, and these issues are never resolved. Jaylen is an example of the potential material consequences of queer failure and being outed because SLAY appears to be the only space where she feels safe to be herself. Indeed, in Ruberg’s reading of

Octodad, they note that the potential violence players must avoid in the game, “echoes the very real dangers that threaten transgender subjects–particularly trans women of colour and/or trans people who do not pass–who can find themselves all too easily under physical attack from those

100 who respond with hate and outrage to their “secret” (101). However, the book does suggest ways in which video games can become more welcoming spaces for Black transgender players. While

Jaylen may not be out to all of SLAY in order to protect herself, SLAY does provide her with the means to protect herself and assert her presence in the game.

In similar ways to the text’s handling of PrestoBox, Q.Diamond’s character design in

SLAY highlights her artistic choices rather than looking voyeuristically at a description of a transgender body. When Kiera first meets Q.Diamond, she emphasizes the variety of all the elements that constitute Q.Diamond’s in-game body:

[Q.Diamond’s] face is covered up with a jet-black mask. They have two long, dark elf

ears and bright red deer antlers, and their hair is long, pin-straight, and paper-white. Their

eyes are sky blue, they have the muzzle of a dog, their arms are purple tentacles, and they

stand upright, balancing on a hot-pink-and-green mermaid tail. (115, emphasis in

original)

Again, Q.Diamond’s body avoids containment because it challenges normative physical form.

The different animal aspects to her body are not used to dehumanize Q.Diamond, but instead allow her to be viewed for her choices rather than for adherence to gender norms or reductive transgender narratives. This character creation is again outside the norm for an MMORPG, where players must adhere to the developer’s created races and designs. Thus, Jaylen’s engagement with SLAY deeply queers normal power dynamics between developer and player as even Kiera is surprised at how Q.Diamond appears. Further, the text makes Q.Diamond’s queerness explicit only when she chooses to reveal it. When Kiera sees Q.Diamond remove her mask, she realizes that her “face is painted in vertical rainbow stripes, a design I released for

Pride Month last year” (116). Jaylen confirms herself as queer by removing her mask, an

101 assertion of queer identity that puts the power of the reveal in her hands. Rather than being outed by her physical appearance, and facing the potential consequences, Jaylen’s elusive character presentation and mask allow her the power to come out when she is ready and is in a safe position to do so.

In her chapter, Jaylen reveals that SLAY is an important space to her because it is the only place where she is able to present as herself. After dueling Kiera, Jaylen reflects that “I don’t think [Kiera will] ever understand what she’s done for me. To have a place like this where

I can be who I am is indescribable. It feels like waking up for the very first time” (123). In “How

World of Warcraft helped me come out as transgender,” Dale expresses similar sentiments, where being able to present as female online serves as a crucial means of supporting herself.

Dale became attached to WoW because she states that “I found a place where I had friends that treated me as female … A world where I felt happy with who I was. I didn’t want to leave. I didn't want to go back to the real world where I felt I needed to be masculine to remain safe.”

Considering how real and potentially liberating online experiences in MMORPGs can be for players, SLAY serves a real place where Jaylen receives validation as a woman.

But SLAY is unique as an MMORPG because it offers Jaylen and other transgender players a means of acquiring power over the visual containment and surveillance that their bodies experience in the physical world. Jaylen must present as masculine in her home environment to protect herself and she uses SLAY as a place to create a body which combats surveillance, not through invisibility, but a hypervisibility that refutes any traditional classification or study. At home, Jaylen is contained in a masculine-presenting body and in other

MMORPGs she would be contained in a cisgender-presenting female body forced to adhere to white culture. Queer failure cannot serve as an exit to these harmful environments because it

102 would actually invite more harm to her. However, because she is given free reign over her in- game form and utilizes this freedom to question normative bodily logics, SLAY allows Jaylen the opportunity to begin exploring her identity safely. She is visible, yet her presentation is impossible to know fully and thus contain.

Finally, not only does SLAY give PrestoBox and Q.Diamond unique opportunities to question how creative power works within online games, it also frames transgender voices as central to its mission and purpose. In direct contrast to how Blizzard moderators silence queer voices in WoW, Kiera, as the developer of SLAY, fights for Q.Diamond and her right to a safe space. At the novel’s end, Kiera battles an infiltrator of SLAY for ownership of the game. In this in-game fight, Kiera sees Q.Diamond watching her and right when Kiera is struggling against her opponent, she “spot[s] those red deer antlers and that rainbow face with the piercing blue eyes.

Q.Diamond is watching me, unmoving. Just staring. A chat bubble appears above their head in white. ‘Finish him,’ it says” (269). Right when SLAY’s identity and purpose is most at risk, the novel centers Q.Diamond’s voice. Transgender identity and transgender voices have traditionally been decentered by gaming companies like Blizzard through their failure to create character bodies outside of cisgender frameworks, but SLAY defends Q.Diamond’s right to SLAY as a safe space to present herself as she wants and explore her gender presentation. It is people like

Q.Diamond that Kiera is actively fighting for.

SLAY is a unique game text in comparison to the other games and books considered in this thesis. Rather than engaging in failure to rebel against the dominant heteronormative gaming culture, SLAY exposes the failure of this institution. SLAY succeeds where countless other games have failed to create a safe community for Black queerness to thrive. While Aech in

Ready Player One exposes the problem of white homophobia in online games, SLAY takes this

103 exposure to another level by actively creating a solution. Ultimately, SLAY reminds us of the importance of not universally applying theories, such as queer failure, due to the potentially silencing effect which academic study can have on actual communities. Instead, the text suggests supporting the stated missions of marginalized communities and standing in solidarity with people of colour. SLAY takes the conversation about queering video games beyond using failure as a universal tactic and challenges its readers to actively imagine what creating a game which succeeds at providing queer sustenance to its players would look like. SLAY accomplishes this by not only providing a necessary answer to the racism implicit in the MMORPG, but also providing a vision for how games can give more power to transgender and queer players by offering them control in the game space. Indeed, SLAY as a queer text advocates for game developers to have an ethical and mutual relationship with their queer players and responds to the current environment of online gaming by demanding that developers pay attention to and do better for Black and Black queer players.

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Conclusion

The Queer Video Game Literary Avant-Garde

Video games are not the bastion of white cisheteronormative authority that they are imagined to be. As queer game scholars have proven repeatedly, even if a game does not feature queer characters or storylines, games are queer because players have the opportunity to fail at them. Games are uniquely interactive: gamers can challenge how they encounter a text by failing to engage with it as it was intended. Rather than following a linear timeline of success, which often graphs onto the heterosexual timeline of a male orgasm, games give us experiences that are repetitive, fractured, and unique to each person as players fail and try the same segments over and over again in varying ways. Further, the way that developers fail to provide gamers with queer sustenance prompts them to work outside of these systems to create queer spaces of their own.

This thesis has expanded upon Bonnie Ruberg’s claim that video games have always been queer, with the statement that video game novels have always been queer as well. In

Chapter One, I proved that even the most seemingly heterosexual video game novels are queer because any attempt to force queerness out of gaming spaces will fail. In Ready Player One, pretending that all gaming knowledge and authority belongs to straight white men fails because of the demonstrated skill of queer gamers of colour like Aech. Ender in Ender’s Game discovers the unsustainability of the heteromasculine military complex and its games, and escapes them through more loving gameplay and queer alignments. In Chapter Two, I proved through

Warcross that in the highly regimented world of e-sports, failing to meet the standard of the sport actually creates room for queerness within competitive gaming. Finally, Chapter Three examines why failure cannot be universally applied as a queer lens: communities of colour can create

105 online space for intersectional queer embodiments that center success and excellence. Indeed, the success of these communities reveals the failure of the broader gaming industry to facilitate such welcoming spaces. What examining all of these texts together ultimately illustrates is that queerness exists in all video games and video game novels. Failure, whether internal or external to the game, will have the potential to challenge the straight power structures of video games and video game production. Thus, video game novels can contribute significantly to considerations of queering games. Not only do these texts further confirm the queerness in video games that queer games scholars have already identified, but also extend this conversation by imagining new ways to construct and challenge game environments. Novels like Warcross and SLAY operate outside of the budget and development constrictions of real games, and imagine how new gaming worlds can amplify the queer failure of its players or work outside of the failure of current game development and culture. While recreating these game worlds exactly is not possible, they still point to methods of resistance that can be adopted to resist ludic heteronormative manipulation.

This project is intended to be a preliminary conversation between queer games studies, young adult literature about video games, and queer theory. The analysis focuses largely on what novels have to contribute to the field of queer game studies. However, in this conclusion, I will briefly outline an area of inquiry outside the purview of my thesis. I will briefly demonstrate why a potential video game literary avantgarde can intervene in literature and literary form. My hope is to ultimately illustrate that video games can contribute meaningfully to queering the novel.

Before discussing how video games in literature can have queer effects, I will first outline what effects queer games are having on the gaming industry and how this might transfer into the literary world. Video games have a distinct and prominent body of queer work occurring largely

106 in the “indie” sphere. Indie games are generally created by singular creators or small groups who operate outside of the funding and production models of the mainstream games industry. These games are often crowd-funded and somewhat collaborative and conversational due to their community focus. In their book The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers

Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games, Bonnie Ruberg describes this body of work as the

“queer games avant-garde,” a “renaissance … in large part driven by radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work from a wide-reaching and constantly evolving network of

LGBTQ game makers” (Introduction).These games are not simply queer because they sometimes represent queer people and experiences, but because they directly challenge the hierarchies, preoccupations, and acceptable compositions found in mainstream game-making. Further,

Ruberg explains: “the work emerging from the queer games avant-garde … speaks to pressing social issues by drawing from the personal in order to intervene on the level of culture.” As these games are often made by individual creators, they explore how personal experiences speak to the larger queer project of challenging default straightness, therefore refuting the belief that games are an apolitical space.

If a queer games avant-garde can have such an effect on video games, what could a queer video game literary avant-garde have on literature? Warcross and SLAY incorporate very personal stories of racial discrimination—those of Emika and Kiera—to formulate alternative gaming spaces where structural problems are addressed. What could personal stories of queer experience inspire in terms of creating queer gaming worlds and disruptive narrative forms to express these experiences? How could queer failure, in content and form, help explore potential new ways of expressing queer experience, and how can video games help introduce this failure to literature?

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To begin, a queer video game literary avant-garde must address the gross underrepresentation of queer experiences in video game novels. While surface level representations of queer experience are not what ultimately make media “queer,” and this should not be treated as the movement’s only goal, in a genre where queerness is barely discussed, the issue of representation does become more important. As noted in the introduction, as of the summer of 2020 there are no main characters within the video game novel genre who identify as queer. In the video game novel genre as it currently stands, queer voices are repeatedly marginalized as side characters and this is a failure that must be rectified. Further, many of the books within the video game novel genre are young adult fiction, a genre which already lacks in queer, POC, and disability representation. The We Need Diverse Books movement seeks to address such disparity in representation by actively promoting children’s and young adult literature produced by marginalized authors.30 Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic, as discussed in Chapter Three, echoes this need for more diversity in media in order to rectify what she terms an “imagination gap,” observing that when “youth grow up without seeing diverse images in the mirror, windows, and doors of children’s and young adult literature, they are confined to single stories about the world around them and, ultimately, the development of their imaginations is affected” (6). In a genre where queer and especially queer POC experiences are never central concerns, centering queer voices in a genuine non-tokenistic way is a major intervention in the genre that would challenge its white cisheteronormative priorities.

Further, the queer video game literary avant-garde could offer new ways of conceiving narrative form through more ludic and game-like constructions. The visual novel, for example, is a particularly popular game format for the queer games avant-garde given its accessibility to

30 See Flood’s “‘We Need Diverse Books’ calls for more representative writing for children.”

108 marginalized creators working outside the mainstream games industry. In particular, visual novels illuminate the potential power of branching storylines and reader choice.31 In “Are Visual

Novels Video Games? Well, What Exactly Is a Video Game?”, Emma Roth identifies the complex narrative construction of a typical visual novel, noting that “some visual novels have multiple endings, while others only have one. The ones with multiple endings can have dozens— the decisions you make affect which ending you receive. Both multi-ending and single-ending visual novels usually have the possibility of a game over.” The idea of creating a book with more than one ending or where a character develops in a different way depending on where the reader decides to take the story provides readers agency that cannot be experienced given the linear structure of a traditional novel. The choose-your-own-adventure novel realizes some of this potential because the novel’s gamic format and interactive elements challenge how a reader progresses through the book. Readers are asked to skip pages, return to earlier sections, and re- read multiple times in order to experience the “whole story.” However, the reader does have the ability to access every page of the book, whereas some visual novel endings can be hard to achieve.

What would it mean to write a book with an ending that a reader could not access? The possibility of failing at reading a book is a particularly fascinating route for queering the linear trajectory typical to the novel. In a novel, what would it mean for the protagonist to die repeatedly and never make true progress? While this is a common occurrence in games, this is a queer narrative possibility rarely considered in literature. What is the literary equivalent to failing a level and never returning to a game? How can novels inspired by games explore storylines that repeat constantly or that are never are completed? These questions are all potential queer

31 See Hart’s “Why visual novels are a haven for LGBT+ stories.”

109 possibilities to be considered in a queer video game literary avant-garde that might question what is understood as traditional narrative form.

My thesis demonstrates the benefits of the interconnections between literature, queer theory, and video games. However, my work is only the beginning of a potentially rich conversation, which speaks to the multi-disciplinarity of queer game studies. As my introduction makes clear, queer theory, video game criticism, and queer game studies all consider failure to be an integral aspect of their practice and research. Expanding on the failure of heteronormative systems in gaming and literature as well as the failure of queer subjects within these texts and communities can create space for further queer exploration. Ultimately, the conversations surrounding queer game-making are complicated, multiple, and far from unified. I advocate for the incorporation of literature into this conversation not as a way to provide a new focus, but to create further productive disruption.

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Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010.

Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. University of Minnesota Press,

2018.

Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists,

Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art

Form. Seven Stories Press, 2012.

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