“Just Because It’s Gay?”: Transgressive Design in Qeer Coming of Age Visual Novels Anastasia Salter Bridget Blodget Anne Sullivan University of Central Florida University of Baltimore Georgia Institute of Technology Orlando, FL, USA Baltimore, MD, USA Atlanta, GA, USA
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION While queer narratives have recently gained greater prominence In the awards season of 2017, PC Gamer announced a surprising and atention [35][51][48] both in games and game studies, they award: Best Visual Novel for Butterfly Soup, a tiny, free game still represent a tiny portion of the playable romances available. made by an individual designer [45]. While PC Gamer has, Even fewer among these represent the potential of what Edmond through the years, awarded narrative games for excellence in a Chang [12] has referred to as “queergaming,” or games which range of categories dating back to “Best Adventure Game” in the refuse to conform in their narrative, mechanics, and modes of 90s, the category of visual novel has never previously been play to a cisgender, white, heteronormative gaze. We argue that included. meaningful queergaming is impossible within the current norms PC Gamer has earned industry respect over the last decades and genres of so-called AAA, or mainstream. It thus requires as a reliable outlet for capturing unbiased mainstream gaming space and platforms dedicated to transgressive game design, viewpoints. A survey of games honored in recent award years building on Aarseth’s [1] framework of transgressive play. To reveals only a few narrative-centric titles at all.