Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of San Francisco State University in Partial Fulfillment of a B the Requirements for the Degree

#EVERYONEGAMES: EXPLORING QUEER GAMER IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY

thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University in partial fulfillment of A b the requirements for the Degree

; w HMSX Master of Arts • R 'B 4- in

Sexuality Studies

Spencer Taylor Berdiago Ruelos

San Francisco, California

May 2017 Copyright by Spencer Taylor Berdiago Ruelos 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read #EveryoneGames: Exploring Queer Gamer Identity and Community by Spencer Taylor Berdiago Ruelos, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies

Martha Kenney, PKD. Assistant Professor, Department of Women and Gender Studies #EVERYONEGAMES: EXPLORING QUEER GAMER IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY

Spencer Taylor Berdiago Ruelos San Francisco, California 2017

The cultural perceptions of the mainstream gaming community reinscribe dominant ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. This has historically left women gamers, gamers of color, and queer gamers at the margins of gaming culture. I center sexuality as an analytic framework, first, to account for the stories and experiences of

LGBT gamers and, second, to understand queer gamer identity and community.

Through ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviewing, I argue that queer gamers employ multiple worldmaking practices through their connections with games and with one another. These queer gamer worldmaking practices make possible narratives that acknowledge queer gamers’ existence and actively create spaces that foreground diversity in video games and in game communities.

I sentation of the content of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis and the research behind it would not be possible without the mentorship and unrelenting support from my thesis committee, Professors Darius Bost and

Martha Kenney. Darius and Martha have pushed my thinking in new and unexpected ways and exposed me to new frameworks for understanding the world; I am forever indebted to them for their time, energy, critique, and encouragement. I am also thankful for the guidance from Professor Jessica Fields. Jessica’s commitment to graduate student success and academic rigor has helped me flourish as a sexuality studies scholar. I am also ever thankful for the support, community, and love from my peers in 2017 Sexuality Studies graduating cohort. We did it, y’all! We have come so far, shared so much pleasure and pain, and become so close over the last two years. Each one of you has captured a bit of my heart, and I am so lucky to have had you as colleagues and as part of my scholarly community. Lastly, I also am especially grateful for the queer gamers who made this research possible. GLaDOS’s words have never rung truer: “This is a triumph!” To all the folks who attend and make

GaymerX possible, I am indebted to your spirit, your love, and your passion. I have found a community in our queer geekiness. Thank you all so much!

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures...... vii

Introduction: Playful Queer Beginnings...... 1

Chapter 1: Gamers and Their Games: Digital Connections through Stories, Characters, and Worlds...... 30

Chapter 2: Putting the Gay in “Gaymer”: Queer Gamer, Identity, and Coalition ....68

Chapter 3: Playing with Queer Gamer Desire: The Space of GaymerX and the Uses of the Erotic...... 91

Conclusion: Memoirs of a Gaymer...... 139

References...... 157

VI LIST OF FIGURES

Figures Page

1. Photograph of Top Gamers in the World...... 4 2. Tron (1982) Movie Poster...... 5 3. Tropes Versus Women Screenshot...... 7 4. Original GaymerX Flier...... 21 5. Table of Interviewee Demographics...... 23 6. journey Opening Sequence Screenshot...... 51 7. r/gaymers Subreddit Screenshot...... 73 8. Screenshot from Original GaymerX Kickstarter Page...... 76 9. Google Trends Screenshot...... 78 10. Gamers at GX Playing Dance Dance devolution...... 102 11. Group Photo from GX4 Cosplay Pageant...... 113 12. Confliction Resolution Page from GX4 Program...... 124 13. 8-Bit Candle Still...... 140 14. Charizard Pokemon Card...... 142 15. Classic Pac-Man Still...... 143 16. GaymerConnect Screenshot...... 147 17. Screenshot from Author’s TEDxHumboldtBay Talk...... 148 18. Photograph of Author and Friends’ Pokemon Cosplay...... 153 19. Photograph of Author’s Pokemon Tattoo...... 156

vii 1

Introduction: Playful Queer Beginnings

August 4, 2013.1 sit in a large, yet crowded panel room in the Kabuki Hotel in San

¥ randsco with hundreds of other queer and allied gamers. It is the closing ceremonies of the first

GaymerX convention, and Ellen McClain, the voice actor of the villain from the first Portal game,

GLaDOS, begins to sing: ‘This was a triumph!” Immediately, almost all of the audience members, myself included, begin to sing along. ‘Vm making a note here: huge success! It's hard to overstate my satisfaction We do what we must because we can for the good of us, except the ones who are dead!” I look around to see the room filled with smiles and laughter. I am filled withjoy to have been in this space over the weekend. I notice, however, two gamers in my periphery are crying and embracing each other. Seeing what I imagine are their tears of joy of being in the space, but also tears of sadness because the event is ending, I struggle to hold back my own tears. The event was coming to a close, and this was our last collective act as participants in this queer gaming convention. Ifelt a sense of belonging and community, and I had made so many new friends that week. I personally was sad to see GaymerX end, but I was also overjoyed to have been a participant. Resiliently, our singing continued and closed out the convention.

Collectively singing “Still Alive,” the end credits song to Portal, was our last hurrah in this queer gamer space of GaymerX (or GX for short). My fieldnotes from this first convention paint an emotional and heartfelt picture of the queer gaming community—one characterized by a shared sense of identity, belonging, and geek 2

knowledge. Reflecting on this moment inspired some of the central questions of my

research on the queer gamer community. What does it mean to be a queer gamer? How do

these gamers understand sexuality in relation to their gamer identities? How do queer gamers participate in mrldmaking and worlding experiences? What follows is my attempt to grapple

and play with answers to these questions. As I will argue in this thesis, centering

sexuality as an organizing category of analysis—as it relates to identity, community,

and desire—expands our understandings of what it means to be a gamer.

I begin this introduction by situating my arguments within the literature on

game studies that addresses issues of identity and representation in video games. I

then describe my methodological approaches to studying queer gamers, primarily

through ethnographic fieldwork and through qualitative interviewing. I conclude this introductory chapter by laying out the theoretical engagements of #Epe?yoneGames

and providing a roadmap for the arguments I make in this thesis.

Gamer Identity and the Politics of Identification

Within the literature in game studies, the construction of the category of

“gamer” is an important domain of inquiry, guided by questions of who, how, and why do people identify as gamers. In Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the

Video Game Arcade, cultural historian Carly Kocurek (2016) traces the emergence of video gamer as a category of identity “through public discourses and public practices that accompanied the rise of video gaming’s early commercial success in the coin-op 3

industry [the arcade]” (xvi). As Kocurek illustrates, several American moral panics occurred in the history of the video game arcade from the 1970s to the 1990s; the general American public feared that young teenage boys would throw away their time and money and play hooky from school, and that violent video games would incite real-world violence. Several cities and states sought to regulate the coin-op and arcade industry through age restrictions, ultimately leading to the U.S. Supreme

Court ruling in 1982 that age-based restrictions in arcades violated youth’s right to free speech and freedom of assembly (Kocurek 2016). That same year, Ufe magazine posted a photograph of the top video gamers in the world in the

Kocurek writes:

The persistence and variety of the attacks on the video game arcade make a clear case for why arcade owners, route operators, and others invested in the coin-op video game industry felt a need to defend the industry and so actively campaigned to create a more positive impression of arcades and gamers. [...] The gamers were not delinquents; they were bright young men. The arcades were not for teenage troublemakers; they were for families. [...] The effort to help craft this alternate vision of video gaming is evident in the work of Day to draw attention to arcade games and shape the image of gamers. (62) 4

Figure 1. Photograph of the top gamers in the world gathered at Twin Galaxies Arcade in Ottuma, Iowa. Taken by Enrico Ferorelli, it appeared in L ife magazine’s 1982 "Year in Pictures" issue.

However, while providing an alternative narrative to the public’s perception of gamers, this image produces dominant narratives about who gamers are. Positioning young competitive gamers against both arcade games and cheerleaders, the image

“suggests that, at its perceived best, arcade gaming provided an arena for young white men with quarters to burn to prove their metde. The salience of this interpretation of gaming has resulted in a persistent cultural trope of the gamer as a young savvy man” (39). While gamers were a bit mischievous, as fundamentally talented and exceptional young men, according to Day’s logics, they would come to represent the new technical aficionados who would usher in the new digital age. 5

Figure 2: Tron (1982) movie poster, which reads "A world inside the computer where man has never been. Never before now."

Kocurek refers to this amalgamation of idealized gamer youth, masculinity, and digital competency as “the technomasculine” (xvii). Along a similar line of analysis, Derek Burrill (2008) discusses how this “digital boyhood” both produces and is produced by the “digital imaginary” of games, granting boys—or those positioned as adolescent—the ability to escape work to access “the digital jungle gyms of virtual reality, videogames, the Internet, and cyberspace” (3). Both Burrill and Kocurek examine how these narratives of technomasculinity get reproduced through other domains of popular culture, such as popular game-related films like

Wargames (1983) and Tron (1982). In both films, boyish gamer protagonists save the day with their geek masculinity and their bending of the rules. Popularly received by the mainstream public, both films illustrate white male gamers as the techno-cultural 6

vanguard of the digital age (Kocurek 2016; Burrill 2008). Because of their obsession and addiction to video games, both protagonists use their technical skills to save the world from impending techno-apocalypses and to explore and lay claim to digital landscapes (see Figure 2).

These images of the video gamer of the 70s and 80s have had a lasting effect on historical understandings of who count as gamers. According to Kocurek, “the representation of gaming, and of video gamers, is bound to certain ideals of white middle-class male identity through the exclusion of diverse narratives of gaming and through the exclusion of gamers who do not fit assumed notions of race and gender’"

(51). One of the most recent consequences of this exclusion is #GamerGate. In

2014, indie game developer Zoe Quinn received backlash for her game Depression

Quest,\ an interactive fiction game that grapples with the material and everyday subjective realities of living with depression. Quinn was falsely accused of cheating on her boyfriend with a games journalist in order to receive a positive review of her game. In response to this, (mosdy) straight white male gamers began to attack and harass Quinn both for her game and for allegedly cheating on her boyfriend. While the hashtag was supposedly used to convince game writers to adopt the same ethical standards as “real journalists” (Hathaway 2014), in reality these straight white male gamers used the hashtag to attack and threaten feminist gamers and game critics for pointing out misogyny and sexism in games (Parkin 2014; Losh 2014). Media critic and self-identified gamer Anita Sarkessian released a series of YouTube videos titled 7

Tropes vs. Women in Games, unpacking the negative stereotypes and tropes of the representation of female game characters. Coinciding with the harassment of Zoe

Quinn in 2014, Sarkessian released the second video of Tropes, which too was met with critique and hatred from the #GamerGate community. Sarkessian also received many death threats and even cancelled a talk at Utah State University after receiving a bomb threat from a GamerGater (Alberty 2014).

Figure 3. A Screenshot from Tropes Versus Women in Video Games: Vol. 1. Anita Sarkessian pictured to the right of Ms. Pac Man. These gamer boys were worried that criticism would lead to censorship of the games they loved most, and therefore retaliated against these women with threats of sexual abuse and death. While positioned as a campaign about ethics in games journalism and against political correctness by some GamerGaters, #GamerGate was really about who is and is not allowed to be a gamer and what constitutes a real game

GamerGaters have seemed particularly enraged by having game journalists opine that they are a vanishing breed in articles like “Gamers Are Over,” 8

“The End of Gamers,” and “We Might Be Witnessing the Death of an Identity.” GamerGaters also defend “real games” over imitations and phony products, and much of the wrath of the group is consequendy directed at independent and alternative game producers. (Losh 2014)

For these GamerGaters, women and feminists—or anyone else perceived to be critical of games—were not included in their conception of “real gamers.” These women threatened the status quo of these GamerGaters’ traditional games, and because of that were subjected to violent misogyny. Games like Depression Quest were not seen as real games. The violence and hatred directed toward these feminist gamers and game developers functions ideologically and materially to demarcate feminists (and women) from “real gamers.”

As Shaw (2011) argues, “how people identify as gamers is a different question from who counts as a gamer” (29, original emphasis). Drawing on Stuart Hall’s notion of identification, Shaw argues, “identification allows for the self-definition of the individual, rather than on static definitions of identity applied from the outside.. .allowing] us to parse how one might be externally placed into a category from how one actually describes one’s own identity” (29-30). However, in her interviews with gamers across multiple categories of identity, Shaw concludes that

“although race, sexuality, age, and platform [game console or computer] shaped people’s relationship with gaming, these did not determine whether they identified as gamers.” (34). Instead, her informants discuss how negative stereotypes of gamers, normative expectations of skill and investment, and gaming as peripheral to 9

mainstream media culture deter people from identifying as gamers. For example, one of the dominant stereotypes of gamers is that they are obese men who have never grown up and continue to live with their parents. Gamers are also assumed to be obsessed with games, dedicating hundreds of hours a week to playing video games.

While race, gender, and (as I later argue) sexuality play a role in who counts as a gamer, for Shaw, stigma and the amount of time playing games are the most significant factors determining who identifies as a gamer.

Together, Kocurek’s and Shaw’s work provide a glimpse of the barriers between those counted as gamers and those who identify as gamers. Bringing these conversations about the politics of identification together, my work on queer gamers asks how sexuality and queerness operate as categories that may exclude a person from being counted as a gamer. My work critically takes up these questions of gamer identity, examining how queer gamers position themselves in regards to the dominant constructions of gamers, and how they seek to carve out a space that can account both for their queemess and their gamer identity. The queer gamers I interview also have more inclusive understandings of what it means to be a gamer, creating a more expansive understanding for who belongs in the category.

Representation and Diversity in Video Games

While the literature in game studies has included scholarly conversations about both the politics of identification and the role of community for gamers, most 10

of the conversations have focused on the politics of representation. Anthropy (2012) reminds us that “games, as with all works of art, contain the values of the people who make them” (28). Put another way, games are cultural artifacts that are

“inherently political; they are created worlds that can’t help but express the values of their creators. Sometimes, those values are reflected in the demographics of the games: in how they represent, or fail to represent, women and minorities, or in the virtual foes they ask players to kill with their virtual guns” (Parkin 2014). As artifacts with cultural and symbolic weight, understanding representation within game worlds is a dominant conversation in the game studies literature.

In terms of representations of sexuality in video games, most conversations have focused on the depictions of LGBT romance. One of the earliest essays on sexuality in video games is Mia Consalvo’s (2003) “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale

Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games.” Consalvo centers sexuality as her analytic framework for understanding both representation and design in games. She examines two popular and influential games of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Final

Fantasy IX (FF9) and The Sims in order to examine the ways that sexuality is deployed in mainstream games.

One component of FF9 is the romance between Zidane and Princess Garnet, including their flirtation, banter, and increasing intimacies. The player is allowed to initiate some of these moments as choices for action are sometimes given—for example, will Zidane respond to a question from Garnet in a sarcastic or a caring manner? Will he admit to other characters his feelings for Garnet? Through the choices offered within the game, the player is drawn into the storyline and potential romance, but the romance 11

proceeds regardless of any active efforts the player-character may make, and assumes a pre-set heterosexual format. (Consalvo 2003, 177)

Consalvo reads the romance in FF9 as idealizing heterosexuality, “shown as natural and preferable, with marriage being the logical conclusion to romance, and the theme of love can conquer alT dutifully upheld” (176). Whereas FF9 reinforces dominant narratives of heteronormativity, The Sims provides a different perspective on sexuality, even allowing same-sex attraction and romance to exist. Although same-sex pairings are allowed in the game, Consalvo points out that these pairings are not described in the player manual and they are not something a player is forced to confront; players must electively seek them out. “Hot Dates” thus becomes a seminal essay in the history of game studies, calling on scholars to “explorfe] more systematically how these varying sexualities [in games] are expressed” (191), and encouraging scholars to take sexuality in game representation and game design more seriously.

Several contemporary queer game scholars take up Consalvo’s call to examine the representations of sexuality in romance in games. Chang (2015) examines the ways in which both Frvntierville and World ofWarcraft once allowed for queer sexual subjectivities to be explored—though sometimes only by accident.

However, this queer content was short lived. Same-sex romance options were removed from the game design through a process Chang refers to as

“straightwashing.” For example, in 2007, World ofWarcraft made it possible to collect 12

love tokens from non-player characters (NPCs) for a Valentine’s Day themed quest.

In 2010, when the quest was brought back, any queer possibility had been scrubbed from the game: “The queer possibility and room to generate alternative narratives is erased, and forced back into the digital closet” (25). Chang ultimately argues that mainstream games “must move beyond stereotypical representations, token content, and simplistic choices about queer identities and desires” (16). Chang calls upon game developers and players alike to take up diversity in games:

Games and game worlds, like the real world, cannot remain natural, neutral, or empty. They are full of reality and can oppress as much as they allow for expression, can limit and control even as they provide a limited kind of agency, and can displace or disguise problematic discourse and identification excused or even celebrated as “fun.” (28)

As we can see above, Chang also sees the political and cultural power of representation in games. He finds it frustrating that many mainstream games, like

Frontierville and World ofWarcraft, fail to envision the possibilities of diversity in gender and sexuality.

Greer (2013) addresses norms in game romance and love, focusing on how some forms of queer inclusivity can reproduce normative ideas about sexuality.

Greer analyzes the possibilities for and limitations of queer plurality in the Fable series. In the Fables series, players are presented with dialogue and character creation options that allow players to choose a “homosexual” or “bisexual” character. Greer argues that by presenting queerness and heterosexuality as equally viable options in the game, the Fable series loses any radical potential; queerness mirror straightness— 13

depoliticizing it and removing it from its political history as a “deviant” and

“perverse.” Greer also critiques the Dragon Age series, arguing that the first installment of the series privileges the two heterosexual companions, Alistair and

Morrigan, by making their romantic arcs central to the story’s plot. Zevran and

Leliana, the two "bisexual’ companions, have romantic arcs with no direct consequence on the story. In Dragon Age 2, all of the romance options are “bisexual,” creating a “sexuality blind” approach to romance in games. Similarly, while it offers the opportunity for queer romance options, it “affirms a separation of the cultural politics of design choices from those of the wider world. .. .such positioning also articulates a preference for models of inclusivity that preserve and privilege the status quo” (Greer 2013, 16). Therefore, even the inclusion of queer plurality in game love and romance can dangerously reproduce heteronormativity.

Several scholars have focused on how game mechanics are used to tell love stories and romance arcs. Khandaker-Kokoris (2015) argues that romance mechanics in games are routine, boring, and scripted, failing to address the inherent randomness and specificity that exists with real-world love. Khandaker-Kokoris writes: “In order to pursue a romance with non-player characters the process effectively becomes

‘press the correct sequence of buttons in order to get them to sleep with you’; it becomes superficial rather than a complex reflection on relationships for which they have hoped” (86). Because games are cultural artifacts that reflect the social values and cultural logics of both the culture and the developers (Anthropy 2012; Parkin 14

2014), this system of romance “seems to suggest, whether intentionally or not, that saying the right combination of things in order to be ‘nice’ leads to desirable sexual outcome” (Khandaker-Kokoris 2015, 86).

Kelly (2015) describes the romance options in Dragon Age 2 as a courting process that reifies masculinist notions of dating strategies that assume men should

“do X, Y, and Z, and the girl is yours” (57). What if, instead, games were to move away from binary and limited dialogue trees and simplistic gift giving, and relied on random possibilities of who is romanceable? What if, in one playthrough of a game, you’re able to woo one character, but in subsequent playthroughs, the same choices don’t end in a romantic relationship? This potential game design feature is very much possible and programmable, yet it is not one that developers have employed. Often in these games, women are seen as a prize for making the right decisions and pushing the right buttons. While realistic romance and love options are impossible to achieve in game settings, Khandaker-Kokoris calls upon developers to think of new and creative ways to grapple with love and sexuality that challenge the status quo and simplistic notions of affection and romance.

In order to address the representational disparities between queer and straight content in games, McDonald (2015) attempts to provide empirical data for how to make video game romance options better. She ultimately creates a list, derived from her survey data, of ways that game developers could create more satisfying romance options for players: 15

• Integrate the romance into the game mechanics, and have consequence that follow from the romance • Make the romance content deep enough to be interesting, and well written enough to not be too cliched or predictable. • Present a variety of gender and sexuality options for romance in a respectful manner that represents relationships in a healthy way. • Make sure that the romance somehow continues after consummation; the characters should grow and change in some way as a result of having had the romance. • Provide some sort of closure and/or emotional payoff; for example, the world should react to the romance, or the story should end differendy because of the romance. (McDonald 2015, 57)

McDonald’s insights point towards more inclusive and nuanced ways to grapple with the representation of romance in games. Many of the queer gamers I spoke with expressed their own queer gamer desire for diversity in games.

To understand the lack of diverse representation of sex and gender in games,

Adrienne Shaw (2009) interviewed both gamers and game developers to understand

“how members of the industry understand the place of and problems surrounding the representation of different sexual and gender identities within video games”

(232). One barrier to diverse representation in games is the cultural perception of gamers as heterosexual men who are homophobic. To industry professionals, as well as society at large, “hardcore gamers of the white adolescent male variety are constructed as homophobic [where] the use of the words’ fag’ or ‘gay’ in online gaming spaces are often noted as proof’ (Shaw 2009, 237; see also Gray 2014).

Because of these perceptions, which are based in some realities, the content in games

“is shaped by what the video game industry expects its audience to want and feel 16

comfortable with” (Shaw 2009, 239). Additionally, Shaw points out that video game developers fear backlash from the (dominant) gaming community for including

LGBT content; they worry that LGBT representations in their games will brand their games as “gay.” Companies fear that being branded as “gay” is too much of a fiscal risk. The institutionalization of these fears often leads to self-censorship through industry norms against showing sex or mentioning queerness (Shaw 2009, 241). The queer gamers I interviewed and observed actively work to dismande the assumption that LGBT/queer content does not belong in games. The assertion of their identity as gamers behooves the game industry to recognize their existence and to create more diverse media representations in their games.

Most of the scholarly discussions of representation in games are framed in a way that privileges identification as the primary mode of relationality between gamers and their games. Because of this, market-based logics essentialize the experience of marginalized people (Shaw 2009, 239), and developers create stories of marginalized characters assuming that those marginalized folks will identify with those characters.

This is a primary reason why the game industry fears including LGBT/queer content: if developers include queer characters, then the straight audiences won’t be able to identify with those characters and subsequendy won’t buy those games.

In Gaming at the Edge, Shaw (2015) argues that while representation through identification is important in particular situations to some gamers, it is not the primary mode of connection that gamers experience. “Players/audiences, owing to 17

the complexity of their identities, are able to have strong connections to people unlike them all the time” (Shaw 2015, 5). For Shaw’s interviewees, “gender, sexuality, and race are inflected in but do not predetermine play preferences. Similarly, identifiers can provide one form of connection between players and characters, but that does not mean that those identifiers encompass the many other ways (e.g. emotional, experiential) people identify with fictional characters” (216-217). But if identification through categories of race, gender, and sexuality isn’t the primary mode of engagement, what are the different types of ways that gamers connect with games?

This is a question I take up in my own research, and I explore more thoroughly in the next chapter. However, because many of Shaw’s interviewees didn’t believe that having their identities represented always mattered, Shaw argues, “diversity in video games should be promoted as valuable unto itself’ (218). She continues:

Marginalized audiences are often called upon to demand representation, but media producers are not pressed to see diversity as an integral part of their products rather than a feature included only if the case for such inclusion can be made. In other words, we need to stop letting media producers off the hook, including game developers and game corporations. It is not the job of marginalized audiences to hold their hands. If media producers want to create culturally relevant and important media texts, they need to take the initiative, learn about cultural difference, and design texts that reflect it. (Shaw 2015, 218)

Particularly, if queer gamers can connect with many types of characters across differences, then so can those normative gamers who are white cisgender heterosexual men. 18

The games studies literature on representation in games makes it clear that diversity matters. One way that diversity matters to queer and other marginalized gamers is that representation functions “as external acknowledgements of one’s existence” (Shaw 2015, 192). Representation of marginalized groups in mainstream games hails them into category of gamer, harkening back to a discussion of who counts as a gamer. Additionally, when identification does manifest for marginalized gamers, seeing characters like themselves in games validates their own identities, allowing games to cultivate a sense of belonging in the players. Another way diversity matters is that it “indicate[s] what might be possible” (Shaw 2015, 156). In many ways, games provide a form of escapism for gamers grappling with the discursive and material realities of the physical world. But as Shaw reminds us, “media validatefs] our sense of what is and what might be” (156), and therefore, “the goal in increasing representation in games is not expanding customization options but rather making more games that reflect more modes of being in the world” (143). Games encourage us to be fanciful and magical in imagining new possibilities of living in this world. Games as a medium also have the potential to cultivate empathy among players for characters who aren’t like them. As Anthropy (2012) points out, “Games are a kind of theater in which the audience is an actor and takes on a role—and experiences the circumstances and consequences of that role. It’s hard to imagine a more affective way to characterize someone than to allow a player to experience life as that person” (20). 19

My research on queer gamers continues some of these questions of representation and diversity in games. Many of the gamers I talked to discuss the importance of representation and diversity in games. In recounting their stories in chapter one, I take seriously Shaw’s assertion that identification is not the only—or even primary—mode through which gamers connect with games. In several ways, my research seeks to understand the different ways that queer gamers engage with diverse stories and connect to games through other means of storytelling and worlding. As I discuss later, the queer gamers I’ve encountered also urge the industry to produce more diverse games with queer content, illustrated both through individual interviews and through the original goals of the GaymerX convention.

As the literature illustrates, normative constructions of who gamers are and what content is allowed in games permeates the industry. “[H]eterosexuality remains the unmarked normative category and for all other identities to be represented their existence must be defended” (Shaw 2009, 244). These normative constructions continue to reproduce straight white male gamers as the imagined consumers of games, which in turn reproduces the same boring stories and narratives that cater to straight white men. It is within this sociocultural landscape of video games that my research on queer gamers emerges. Through examining (1) how queer gamer identity emerges out of these normative discourses of who counts as gamers and (2) how these queer gamers connect to both the games they play and the queer gamer communities they inhabit. I take seriously the worldmaking practices these queer 20

gamers employ. As I show throughout my thesis, queer gamers articulate their experiences, stories, desires, and senses of belonging in order to make gaming culture more accepting of more types of people.

Methodological and Theoretical Engagements of #EveryoneGames

What does it mean to be a queer gamer? How do these gamers understand sexuality in relation to their gamer identities? How do queer gamers participate in worldmaking and worlding experiences? These are my guiding questions in exploring queer gamer identity and community. Drawing on my undergraduate training in cultural anthropology, I employ ethnography as my method for studying queer gamers. I conducted an ethnography of “a culture of gaming” (Boellstorff 2006), specifically the culture of queer gaming. Ethnography is a method of social scientists, such as anthropologists and sociologists, to study culture and communities. The primary methodological approach to conducting ethnographic fieldwork is known as participant observation—where ethnographers immerse themselves in the worlds of the folks they’re studying in order to understand their social interactions and organizing cultural logics. By immersing themselves in these words, ethnographers become a part of the social landscapes they study, intimately learning everyday minutiae and connecting their lives to those of their informants. Many ethnographers employ other qualitative and quantitative methods throughout their fieldwork, but participant observation is the dominant method. 21

Gft*MERK IS THE FIRST GAMING CONVENTION FOCUSED OM IGE:TC? GEEK CULTURE

San Francisco, California August 3-4, 2013

Figure 4. Original flier from the first GaymerX.

My fieldwork for this thesis project comprises two separate research projects.

The first project was conducted between October 2012 and April 2013 as an undergraduate project examining the virtual spaces of queer gamers. I spent seven months participating in forum discussions on a website known as

GaymerConnect.com, the initial companion forum site for the GaymerX convention. In those seven months, I ran weekly discussion groups in a forum thread titled “Gaymer Research;” conducted five digital interviews; analyzed survey data of 20 informants; and participated, observed, and recorded field notes of 22

interactions I saw in the broader GaymerConnect forums. Since this research was conducted at the undergraduate level, my methodological rigor and attention to detail hadn’t fully developed; nonetheless, this initial research, which I draw on in my second chapter, paved the way for my current work.

The second research project that informs this research is my MA thesis research conducted between March 2016 and January 2017 through both qualitative interviewing and ethnographic fieldwork. In those ten months I interviewed seven queer gamers about their experiences playing video games and attending past

GaymerX conventions. Figure 5 provides some of the demographic and methodological information guiding my interviews with these queer gamers. Using purposive sampling, I strategically selected these seven queer gamers to capture a diverse array of identity categories. I take a more phenomenological approach to understanding these queer gamers experiences in relation to their identity categories, rather than making any broad claims about their experiences as essential and inherent to their social identities. In addition to these seven interviews, I also conducted ethnographic fieldwork through participant observation at the 2016 GaymerX4 convention, which occurred in Santa Clara, California from September 29th to

October 2nd. During my fieldwork, I attended panels, visited the many spaces of

GX4, attended concerts and dances, and played various types of games with other folks at the convention, all the while recording notes on my experiences and observations at the convention. Together, participant observation and qualitative 23

interviewing made up my methodological toolkit for further studying queer gamers

and their relationships to games and cultures of gaming.

Identity Markers (Race, Gender, & Sexual Interview eudonym Age Orientation) Type David 27 “gay male,” “cisgender,” “white” In Person Emily 27 “white,5’ “cis woman,5’ “lesbian” In Person Jose 32 “Mexican American/Latino,” “cis gay male” In Person Tina 35 “cisgendered female,” “lesbian,” “Asian American” Digital “gay,” “male,” “mixed,” “half white and half Ethan 35 Digital Black,” “mixed,” “half Black and half white,” “gay,” Pat 33 Digital “cisgender” “trans male,” “white,” “asexual and pansexual,” Gage 23 Digital “South Dakotan” Figure 5. Demography of Interviews from Graduate Level Research. Note here that I asked them about their identity markers, and recorded them above in the order they described them to me.

Worldmaking and Worlding as Queer Gamer Praxis

Two theoretical frameworks guide my analysis and interpretive understandings of queer gamers. The first is the pair of concepts of worldmaking and worlding. Drawing on queer theory and feminist science and technology studies

(STS), I think worldmaking and worlding together to read the relationships between queer gamers, their games, and their communities. The analytic frameworks of queer worldmaking I deploy draw upon Warner and Berlant’s (2005 [1998]) use of the term in their pivotal essay, “Sex in Public.55

By queer culture we mean a world-making project, where world.. .differs from community or group because it necessarily includes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can be mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feelings that can be learned rather than experienced as birthright. The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized 24

lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies. (198)

In calling for a queer culture and counterpublic that transforms traditional understandings of sexuality, Warner and Berlant argue for a queer worldbuilding project—one that reimagines intimacy and sexuality beyond the public/private binary. Queer worldmaking reshapes understandings of “identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or privileged example of sexual culture” (187). Ultimately, Warner and

Berlant’s queer worldmaking seeks to create a geographical and ideological space for queer desires, belonging, and embodiment.

In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Jose Esteban Munoz

(2009) builds upon this understanding of queer worldmaking in order to theorize queerness as “not yet here” (1). For Munoz, queer worldmaking allows us to strive beyond the here and now to imagine alternate modes of being and feeling.

We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queemess is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling of the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. [...] Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world. (Munoz 2009, 1)

Munoz reads queemess and queer worldmaking through the aesthetic and performative. Queer worldmaking happens in novels, in visual art, through performances, on stages, and in discourse. It also happens in playing video games 25

both alone and with others. For Munoz, queerness functions as a hopeful and utopian longing for a world beyond the horizon—“world-making potentialities” that attract us by offering multiple possibilities for social change—“by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be” (35, original emphasis). We strive for queer futures, and queer worldmaking practices are “an invitation to desire differendy, to desire more, to desire better” (189).

As I argue in this thesis, queer gamers participate in queer worldmaking practices, especially in their efforts to imagine a gaming culture that embraces their queer gamer desires and subjectivities. Some create virtual spaces that help them find a sense of belonging, collectivity, and connection; some attend queer gamer conventions as a form of community building; some create games with more inclusive content. These are all types of queer gamer worldmaking practices.

Rather than focusing solely on the queer worldmaking practices of queer gamers, I am also interested in how the games themselves draw in gamers through their worlds. Drawing on feminist STS scholars such as Donna Haraway and

Kathleen Stewart, I borrow the concept of “worlding” to facilitate this discussion.

Feminist STS scholars use the term worlding “to draw our attention to the ways that worlds come together through collective action and how they attract, repel, enroll, animate, and incite us” (Kenney 2013, 137). For Stewart (2011), worldings “matter not because of how they are represented, but because they have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements” (445). Our attention becomes “attuned” to these 26

“atmospheres,” and we are swept up into these worlds through feelings, senses, affects—sometimes purposefully and sometimes not. In writing about queer gamer identity and community, I examine the two ways in which worlding occurs: through player’s interactions with digital landscapes and fictional characters, and through their stakes and claims in creating queer gamer spaces in digital and physical worlds.

Haraway (2016) reminds us that, “it matters which worlds world worlds” (165); worlding as a knowledge practice and a political project is never innocent (Haraway

1997, 191). Worlds are built upon asymmetries and hierarchies of power, and even the most utopian imaginary cannot possibly encompass everyone’s desires.

Accordingly, I ask, what worlding practices become possible when video games grapple with more diverse and nuanced characters and stories? How do these game worlds draw in some folks but repel others? Do some game worlds foreclose worlds for other gamers? I examine these processes of worlding throughout this thesis in relationship to the ways that games, spaces, identities, and desires world queer gamers while simultaneously creating queer worldmaking possibilities for connection and belonging.

Sexuality as a Category of Analysis and a Roadmap to #EveryoneGames

The second theoretical framework that guides my understanding of queer gamer identity and community is sexuality studies. In order to more fully understand the politics of identification, representation, and community among gamers, I center 27

sexuality as a category of analysis. As I note in the literature review above, sexuality rarely becomes a central category of analysis when we think about gamers. I center sexuality in my analysis of gamer identity and community formations in

#Eve?yoneGamery in some sense each chapter captures a different aspect of sexuality.

Below is a roadmap to the arguments I make throughout this text.

In the first chapter, tided “Gamers and Their Games,” I explore the affective engagements and relations between queer gamers and the games they play, arguing that gamers should be understood as socio-technological assemblages, where players and games merge to create affective possibilities for connection, belonging, and worlding. Because I am focused on queer worldmaking, this chapter also unpacks how sexuality functions in games; I show how queer gamers seek out sexual representation in games or, when it doesn’t exist, how they create and read sexuality and queerness into the games they play. I understand both of these practices—of finding and creating queerness in video games—as an approach to playing that I call

“looting.” I conclude the chapter by exploring why diverse representations of sexuality, gender, and race matter to these queer gamers.

In the second chapter, “Putting the ‘Gay’ in Gaymer,” I explore the category of “gaymer.” Tracing its roots to both digital spaces of the internet and the physical space of GaymerX, I construct a genealogy of the category “gaymer.” I argue that identifying as a “gaymer”—for some queer gamers—encourages queer worldmaking possibilities by attuning gamers to the significance of coalition-based politics. I use 28

Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of “staying with the trouble” to think through the category: how does the category of “gaymer” trouble traditional notions of who counts as a gamer, and what are some of the troubles of deploying “gaymer” as an inclusive category of identity?

In my third chapter, “Playing with Queer Gamer Desire,” I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork at the GX4 convention to think about sexuality in terms of desire. I view queer gamer desire as an organizing principle of the space of GX.

Queer gamer desires emerge and manifest in multiple ways at the convention—some celebratory, some frustrating, and some that are subversive. I read queer gamer desire through a queer theoretical framework of the erotic. For many queer scholars, the erotic is a “practice of desire” (Allen 2012, 327) that captures sexual longing but also expands our understandings of queer social formations and belonging. I explore some of the ways that queer gamer desire and the erotic constitute the space of GX4, ultimately arguing that examining the erotic practices of GX help queer gamers imagine a future of gaming in which their needs and desires are met.

I conclude this thesis on a more personal and biographical note. The conclusion,“Memoirs of a Gaymer,” details my personal history with gaming and queer game communities. I consider my relationship to queer gamer identities and communities to emphasize the role of self-reflexivity in conducting this research. I play with multiple genres, from autobiography, ethnography, and visual analysis to 29

capture both the queer worldmaking possibilities of games and the importance of understanding the relationship between sexuality and games. 30

Gamers and their Games: Digital Connections through

Stories, Characters, and Worlds

To read is to be elsewhere, where they are not, in another world; it is to constitute a secret scene, a place one can enter and leave when one wishes... —Michel de Certeau in “Reading as Poaching”

Part of why I like playing video games is to play as other people and like get different stories other than my own— Like if you read a story, you don’t want a story that is just like your life. It’s more like immersing yourself in someone else’s experiences to see it in a different way. And if we have more diversity in games, then you get to a broader experience of other people’s experience. —Emily

As Emily suggests above, digital gamers are readers, even when we don’t have the subtides toggled on. We take in the dialogues constructed for us by developers and writers, and we read the feelings, motivations, and desires of the characters we play and interact with. We immerse ourselves in digital landscapes. We transport ourselves in ‘another world,’ to which we don’t necessarily belong, but within which we still learn to find a sense of belonging. And ultimately, while most gaming practices constitute a “secret” and arguably private scene as de Certeau

(1984) suggests, we are still involved in the process of interpersonal engagement— someone else wrote the story and developed the landscapes, and we as readers engage with their narratives and environments. 31

In this chapter, I explore the relationship between queer gamers and video games through their own stories of and reflections on playing games. I argue in the

first section of this chapter that we should understand gamers as “socio- technological assemblages” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). I employ the language of

feminist science and technology studies to illustrate how gamer identity, subjectivity, and sociality are enacted through gamers’ relationships with these game technologies.

In the next section, I attend to the ways that queer gamers talk about their connections to various games through the worlding and storytelling elements of video games. These stories illustrate how games create affective possibilities for connection and belonging for queer gamers. In the final section, I expand on Michel de Certeau’s metaphor of “reading as poaching” to argue that we should view queer gamers’ reading and playing practices as a form of “looting.” I choose to rework de

Certeau’s concept in order to bring these reading practices into the realm of gaming; as I argue below, “looting” is a metaphor and concept familiar to gamers and allows me to theorize their reading practices in their own familiar terms. Because representation and diversity matter to the queer gamers I spoke with, the metaphor of “queer gamers as looters” allows me to explore how queer gamers both cling to the already-existing queer narratives in games and actively insert their own queerness into games. I conclude the chapter by reflecting on some of the future directions queer gamers imagine for video games, illustrating a queer gamer desire for more diverse stories in games. 32

Gamers as Socio-Technological Assemblages

Gaming can mean a lot of different things. You can play a game of basketball on a residential street, or you can play a board game like Clue or Monopoly with a group of your closest friends. You can also play a multiplayer video game with a headset connecting you to your fellow party members, or you play a mobile game like Candy Crush or Pokemon Go on your daily commute on the train. All of these constitute different forms of playing games. But when asked what it means to be a gamer, the folks I interviewed have some conflicting ideas. For example, for Emily,

“a gamer is anyone who plays video games or board games or any kind of games that aren’t like contact sports.” David, however, makes a distinction between gamer identity for “anyone who takes interest in video games primarily” and playing board games or sports games. “I don’t really think people who play a lot of board games would call themselves gamers. I think they’d just say they like to play board games.. .in the same way that someone who plays football or basketball just say that they like to play football or basketball.” When asked about their opinions of what it means to be a gamer, video games become the common thread mentioned by all of queer gamers with whom I spoke.

Across all of the interviews, my research participants agreed that being a gamer is a practice of self-identification. As Jose put it, “I think whoever says they are one is one. Just like whoever says they’re gay or bi is— I certainly don’t label anybody unless they say it.. .because you find a lot of people who have Xboxes and 33

Playstations in their homes, but they won’t really call themselves gamers.” As I

explore more in my second chapter, all of my interviewees acknowledge that being a gamer is filled with expectations and ideologies that get policed and scrutinized. As

queer gamers who are knowledgeable of these policing and regulatory gaming

regimes, they all agree that, as Jose states, “there are some barriers to what it means

to be a gamer.”

Rather than furthering the debates of who counts as a “real gamer”, I argue

that we should understand gamers as socio-technological assemblages. If being a

gamer is a practice of self-identification related to one’s interests in playing video games, gamer as an identity category emerges through the relationship between games and their game technologies. In her well-known “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna

Haraway (1990) explores how the metaphor of the cyborg opens up new possibilities

for theories of embodiment and subjectivity through the interconnectivity of the natural, social, and artificial worlds. Haraway’s cyborg is a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of

fiction” (191). Foregrounding the metaphor and myth of the cyborg, Haraway is interested in articulating the new and emerging connections of science and

technology with human bodies. A cyborg theory gives us the language to think

through gamers’ relationships to and connections with video game technology.

Reading Haraway’s cyborg as an example of an assemblage, Jasbir Puar writes: 34

Assemblages are interesting because they de-privilege the human body as a discrete organic thing. As Haraway notes, the body does not end at the skin. We leave traces of our DNA everywhere we go, we live with other bodies within us, microbes and bacteria, we are enmeshed in forces, affects, energies, we are composites of information. Assemblages do not privilege bodies as human, nor as residing within a human animal/nonhuman animal binary. (2011, 57)

Puar’s reading of Haraway’s cyborg allows her to understand the image of the

terrorist as an assemblage—enmeshing a particular racialized organic (human) body with the synthetic “appendage” that is the turban (Puar 2007). For Puar, categories

of identity such as race, gender, and sexuality are also assemblages—they “are

considered events, actions, and encounters, rather than simply entities and attributes

of subjects” (Puar 2011, 58). Puar’s terrorist assemblage then can be read as a cyborg body, blurring the lines between organic and inorganic bodies, where human flesh

and hair meet with the turban. Assemblages then allow us to explore the synergistic relationships between bodies, desires, affects, objects, and environments as they encounter each other.

What resonates with me most about assemblage theory is the event-ness of identity. Identities are relational. They become identities at particular crossroads and

encounters with other types of bodies, both organic (like other humans or animals) and nonorganic/synthetic (like the turban). I view the category of gamer in a similar way, using both cyborg and assemblage frameworks to understand gamer identity.

Blurring the line between technology and organism, gamers exist only in relation to

their game technologies. Rather than a simple reading of a cyborg as grafting 35

technology onto an organic body, gamers come to embody Haraway’s cyborg as they

exist betwixt and between the fictional worlds of the game and the physical (and

sometimes virtual) worlds of their lives. As an assemblage then, the category of gamer only comes into existence at the encounter of a physical organic body with the

digital game technologies; it is the relationship between the human bodies and the game technologies that ultimately makes social constructions of being a gamer possible.

As socio-technological assemblages, I am also interested in how games make us rethink who we are—our identities and subjectivities—when we play them. Take the avatar for example. Many games thrust you into the role of a character, while others allow you to construct an avatar of your choosing, even if choices are always limited and within the possibilities of the design of the game. Nonetheless, you become a different character, one who you know is not you, but whose story and life you experience as if you were them. To me, this is a new and exciting way to read

Haraway’s cyborg. Gamers find “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (Haraway

1990, 191) between what it means to be themselves as a player and what it means to be themselves as the character. This blurring of self and other, and material and virtual, facilitates affective connections between players and games.

Viewing gamers as socio-technological assemblages allows me to view games as a subject of analysis for understanding queer gamer identity and sociality. Here games become an object of analysis for understanding players’ affective 36

engagements. Games create the possibilities for both worlding and meaning-making.

As I explore below, many gamers will tell you that they connect with characters, stories, and game worlds in a variety of ways—through joy, excitement, nostalgia, empathy, and anger. These connections with digital bodies are one way we as humans (or players, cyborgs, assemblages, or combination thereof) can have joint kinship with technology.

Social Aspects of Gaming

The “socio-” prefix of socio-technological assemblages gestures to the social aspects of gaming. Despite the dominant discourse of gamers as anti-social and awkward recluses, all of the gamers I interviewed referenced games as social aspects of their lives. Video games facilitate multiple types of sociality. Several of the gamers

I interviewed reference growing up playing video games with their families.

“[Gaming] is something I have always done,” Emily told me. “Like, when I was litde,

I would play Super Smash Bros with my brother. And my whole family would get together and play Mario Kart. So it was a bonding experience with me and my brother.”

Gage also grew up playing games with his family:

Thanks to my brother, the first game I ever played was when I was 6 and it was Pokemon Blue... I didn’t really get to see my brother much, except for like the holidays and stuff because his dad and our mom are separated. And Noah exposed me to Pokemon when he was in his teens, so that was something we connected over. Then my mom and I moved to the other side of South Dakota, and that put even more distance between me and my 37

brother. Then my grandmother bought me a Nintendo 64 for Christmas even though my mom really didn’t want her to. And it created more of this opportunity to bridge with my brother who was eight hours away from me. And it’s something that we have continued to this day.

Games for both Emily and Gage allowed them to have time to bond with their

families. In Gage’s case, this bonding existed across a geographic divide, facilitating a possibility for social connection with his half-brother whom he hardly ever saw. In both instances, games become a medium through which gamers strengthen their bonds and their connections to their families.

Games also have the potential to strengthen bonds between partners and lovers. For Jose, playing games with his ex-boyfriends was one way that they would spend quality time together. “I was with my ex when I played the first Super Mario

Gala>y. And he was always excited! Whenever I came home from work, he’d be like,

‘Ok, I made dinner. Can we play Super Mario Galaxy now?’ And he would sometimes not even play. He’d just watch me play. So it’s a very fun [co-operative] one because other people enjoy watching and playing.” For Tina, playing games is an integral part to sustaining her relationship with her girlfriend. My Skype interview with her was interrupted by the Apple notification ringtone on her end. She said,

Sorry, my texts messages are coming in and my girlfriend can’t figure out what I drew. We are playing Draw Something even though I think that game’s gone into oblivion, [thinking out loud] Oh, it’s an icicle! [Returning back to the interview] That’s how we keep up our casual relationship going—playing Draw Something and Words with Friends. It’s because we have this game to play together and we can be competitive, but we don’t have to talk about anything in particular. It’s just that thing we do together. 38

Tina and her girlfriend’s gaming together is so important to Tina that she stops mid answer to address her girlfriend’s gaming needs. Since her camera cut out halfway through the interview, I am not certain if Tina was also playing games with her girlfriend during the interview process. I heard several notification sounds coming from both her computer and phone, which could have been game notifications. But

I can never know for certain. Nonetheless, both Draw Something and Words with

Friends, which are mobile games reminiscent of dictionary and Scrabble, respectively, were games that kept alive Tina’s relationship with her girlfriend.

Tina also describes a phenomenon in which playing video games satisfies her need for social connection and intimacy. One of Tina’s favorite types of video games is as otome games, Japanese dating simulator games. When I asked Tina why she likes these dating simulator games so much, she said, “I think that’s because I’m mildly single. I’m casually dating someone, but it isn’t really anything serious. So anytime I can play a game that is going to give me some sort of semblance of a date or, you know, somebody’s got my attention, I’m like ‘Ok! I’m interested in this game and I’m having fun with it.’” For Tina, Otome games function as both a digital alternative to dating and an alternative to traditional mobile and virtual dating option. She also told me that her three favorite otome games, made by the indie game company Voltage

Games, all include at least one lesbian romance option. “They’re so good, and I’m so attached to them. They’re like my three digital lives.” As we can see, Tina invests her 39

time in these dating simulators; the way she talks about them hints that these otome games fulfill some of her social needs for romance, connection, and intimacy.

The stories above expand our understanding of how games can function as sites for digital sociality, both for multiplayer gamers and single-player games. Games facilitate social bonds between players and between the player and the fictional characters. In the section below, I explore some of the different ways that gamers connect to, empathize with, and immerse themselves in video game through stories, characters, and worlds.

Affective Possibilities

If Adrienne Shaw (2015) is right in her claim that identification is not the primary mode of engagement for gamers with their games, what are the different ways that gamers connect with game worlds, stories, and characters? While it is beyond the scope of this project to create an exhaustive taxonomy of gamers’ affective modes of connection with games, I explore several possible modes of connection through an analysis of seven interviews that I conducted queer gamers.

Drawing connections across the interviews, I identify three broad mechanisms that mediate my interviewees’ game-playing experiences and affective connections: the worlding elements of games, the practices of storytelling, and the gamers’ own personal experiences. I then explore the stories of three specific game series that recurred across interviews. These stories and their specificities bring games to life 40

and illustrate the possibilities for player’s “inanimate affections” (Chen 2011) with video games.

Worlding Elements of Games

The first of the mechanisms that mediates game-playing experiences are elements of worlding. Game mechanics, interactivity, immersion, and atmospheric landscapes and soundscapes function as particular worlding elements of digital games as a distinct medium. An excerpt from Ethan’s interviews illustrates all of these worlding elements of video games.

I remember being in my room playing Baldur’s Gate by myself, and it was raining and lightning in the game. I think I had headphones on so it was super immersive. Then it was actually raining outside in real life, and I remember there being a point where I forgot that I was in my room.. .it just felt like I was inside the game. Then the music was great and I think that just kind of sucked me in too. Then in Tomb Raider; I remember distinctively feeling like I was Lara Croft, because there is a point in the game where you turn a corner and there’s a T-Rex there. So I remember being genuinely terrified.. .like I wasn’t able to control the character at all. I was panicking. But it felt like I was actually in the game.

The first game that Ethan references, Baldur’s Gate, draws him into the game world through its atmosphere and music. He was so caught up in this atmosphere that he felt like he had been lifted from the comfort of his room and dropped into the world of the game. He is immersed in this world. In the second game, Tomb Raider; Ethan feels like he is in the game because of the fear of creature in the game world. The game calls him in through this surprise, which is so effective that it physically stunts his ability to play the game. He panics, and his interactivity and kinesthetic agency is 41

diminished. Games as interactive media allow players to immerse themselves in these game worlds, to get swept up in digital atmospheres, and to get lost in virtual landscapes and soundscapes.

Storytelling Practices of Games

A game’s storytelling practices are the second mechanism that facilitates a gamer’s bonds with games. Also a part of the worlding experience, storytelling is not unique to digital games. However, the queer gamers I spoke to reference interesting stories, nuanced and developed characters, and plot twists as three different ways that games give players a sense of interest and connection. Tina states that while game atmospheres are not particularly important to her, “I think I need to have the right story and character I can relate to really draw me in. With stories where I can go, cOK! I can’t figure out the structure of the story,’ then they’ve really done a good job with it.” For many gamers, stories and characters that they relate to can draw them in. However, relating to these stories and characters does not necessarily mean connecting with them through a means of identification— gamers can relate and empathize with stories and experiences that they themselves do not have, as I will illustrate below. More important for Tina and Jose, whom I mention above, was a story that can surprise them with interesting plot development and narrative twists; these twists and turns draw them into the game worlds, further immersing them in 42

these digital fictions and creating a sense of investment and belonging in these game stories.

All of the gamers that I spoke with said that they were partial to role playing games, or RPGs. In these RPGs, players are thrust into a world where they control and make the decisions for their character. Oftentimes, this is a character with a pre- established history, personality, and motivations. Emily’s quote at the beginning of the chapter illustrates how these pre-established characters matter to gamers.

Characters with already developed personalities, as opposed to characters that are completely customizable, allow gamers to experience worlds different than their own. Emily appreciates that she can immerse herself in someone else’s perspective.

She can get lost in these stories and characters, sometimes as a means of escaping the atrocities of the physical world. Emily says, “One of the reasons that I play video games is so that Pm not bombarded with war and stuff that is happening in this world. Because you can explore different dialogues in games without having it be set in reality. Like the story itself can be a metaphor for different things that happen in this world.” While Emily still plays games filled with violence, death, and crime, the storytelling aspect of games transports her out of this world, so that she can temporarily forget the tragedies of the world. It is important to note that her escapism is a form of privilege; she can choose to escape reality and disengage from material realities of the physical world because of her social position. But it is in the digital nature of these games that stories, characters, and escapisms become possible. 43

As I show with interviewee’s specific stories below, storytelling and character

development are a main site for gamers to connect with games and be affected by

their narratives.

Connections through Personal Experiences

Lasdy, while not a specific element of video games themselves, the personal

experiences of the player make it possible for a player to enjoy and relate to a game.

The personal experience might be sharing an identity marker with a character, just as

Tina shares when she realizes the similarities between her and Aurora James, a lesbian character from one of Voltage Games. “I don’t know how many times I was playing through a Voltage game, and I took a screenshot of it and sent it to my best friend to say that this woman gets me she’s not even real.... Aurora James says something like, £Oh, every good lesbian has a “treasure box.’” She was talking about having a box of sex toys, and I took a picture and sent it to my friend. I said, ‘I swear to god that she just gets me!”’ Because the character of Aurora James is a lesbian and references a common experience that lesbian women have, Tina feels a connection to her—that this fictional character understands what it is like to be a lesbian.

For some folks, characters share particular traumatic or difficult life experiences with the player. David mentioned that he felt particularly connected meeting Zoe Quinn and being able to play her game, Depression Quest, since he too grapples with depression and anxiety. And for others, the personal connections they 44

have with games relate to reconnecting to the past. For example, Emily tells me that she enjoys the “cultural significance” of th e Assassin’s Creed games. “I like immersing myself in the history and just exploring those cities. In Assassin’s Creed2, you get to explore Venice and Florence and climb up the Medici Chapel and the San Lorenzo

Basilica and the Florence Cathedral. I like to travel and I have been to some of those cities. Then when I played the game, it was like, "Hey! Fve climbed up that in real life before. Now Fm climbing up it as an assassin.’” Because personal experiences are carried along with the game as the encounter game stories and worlds, they are an integral component to possible ways that players can connect with games.

Final Fantasy and Journey as Case Studies

Below I look at two game series that were referenced multiple times in the interviews I conducted. These games are the Final Fantasy series and Journey.

Exploring these two specific game series allow me to world you, the reader, into the affective possibilities of games. Close readings of these games and my interviewee’s stories about them allow me to animate some of the ways that players forge connections with specific games. All of these games are RPGs, which world the players through their use of atmosphere and storytelling. I also provide a brief plot description of the game when it is necessary to understand the stories my interviewees tell. 45

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy has been a popular series of games since 1987. These Japanese

RPGs take place across several science fiction and fantasy worlds that include advanced technology, magical creatures, and the typical hero’s journey in which the protagonist and their party members set off on an adventure to save the world from an impending doom. Below Tina, David, and Pat all reference different characters in different games that they feel connected to. I explore the specificities and implications of each of these connections.

Tina has been playing Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) online with her brother while he is stationed in Japan. As a massively multiplayer online role-playing game

(MMORPG), FFXIV allows Tina and her brother to play together, along with millions of other people, across an oceanic divide. Because FFXIV is an MMORPG,

Tina assumed that the plot would not be especially strong. The non-player characters, or NPCs, in games tend to be very cut and dry, granting the players quests and missions and giving them rewards for the completion of these quests.

However, FFXIV is an exception to this rule, especially for Tina. “I’ve never had an

MMOfRPG] that made me cry because of a character. It’s got a very involved story, and I think that’s why I’m so invested in it. After about sixty levels and so many story quests, I’m super attached to some of the characters. And then they go and kill some of them, and I’m like you can’t do this to me. I need to keep going [with the 46

main plot arc.]” I asked Tina for some of the specific characters she longed for after they died, and she was quick to reference Ysayle Dangoulain.

The game made me cry because it gets you really attached to this resistant leader named Ysayle. You become very attached to her because she has all of these ideals—and it helps that she is really cute. And at one point she disappears, and then you realize she has died and you can’t get her back like you were able to with some other characters. I got all teary-eyed because I realized I could never get her back. I actually can’t see this character anymore except for a portrait of her that we have in our guild house. So that was kind of depressing. [...] You had ended up teaming up with to help fight in the war and you’re trying to quell everything and bring everyone to peace. In the expansion, she has turned over a new leaf and is fighting for the same causes as everyone else, and so you really bond with her. She sacrifices herself to push you forward in the fight.

Tina notes several ways that she connects with Ysayle’s character. Initially, Tina bonds with Ysayle because of her character design and profile—she is cute, has ideals, and experiences personal growth and character development the more time she spends with the player’s party members. Secondly, one of the game’s twists leaves Ysayle to sacrifice herself for the good of the party. Ysayle’s death hits Tina so hard that she texted her best friend to tell him what she had gone through. “I told him Ysayle was gone and that I was going to go cry in a corner and could really use someone to talk to.” This is a particular memorable moment in games for Tina, one full of emotional connection and loss. Ysayle’s dying in the game also facilitated a connection, an intimate moment, between Tina and her best friend, providing another example of how games can be social. Ysayle’s nuanced story and developed 47

characteristics make it possible for Tina to feel a connection with her and to feel

such a loss when she is gone from the game.

Final Fantasy also played an important role in David’s history with gaming.

He spoke to me about his connection with a character from Final Fantasy IX named

Freya. For David, Freya functioned both as a strong female character that he hopes

to see in games as well as a character whose story he feels he can relate to.

I can feel myself getting emotional just thinking about it. I really responded to Freya probably because she’s the strongest, because she has a very tragic arc in the first third of the game. She is also the quintessential strong female character in the game that almost every Final Fantasy has. Yet there was this fragility to her in regards to her past. She lost the love of her life, and upon finding him, she discovers that he lost all of his memories and has no idea who she is. And, she was just, you know, devastated by that. At the same time, she loses her home. And she still survives and still persists as a strong role model the main character; she manages to push through that tragedy to still represent a sense of strength.

Freya’s story is about abandonment, loss, and emotional resilience. I asked David to explain a litde more in detail about why he felt so emotional about Freya’s character and her story. Tearing up, he mentions that he is able to “empathize with her” and that he can “relate to her situation.”

I think the sense of being forgotten and what she had to go through. [Continues to tear up more.] I think it’s kind of a hidden phobia of mine—it ties back to friends disassociating themselves from me. Like in my childhood, where suddenly they just didn’t want to be my friend. They didn’t want to be around me. They didn’t want to associate themselves with me at all. And Freya goes through that with her lover. [Still lighdy crying.] And she still finds meaning in her life and works her way through that. [...] I feel like I know what she goes through when suddenly she isn’t recognized or she has nothing to go back to. 48

David sees a lot of himself in Freya’s character; he connects his own personal history of abandonment with her story of emotional hardship and resilience. It also seems to me that David views Freya as this strong emotional role model for himself. He strives to be resilient like her when she “finds meaning in her life and works her way through that.” It is through Freya’s story that David too affirms that he is also capable of that resiliency. Like Tina, David too feels an affective connection to this

Final Fantasy character, one whom he describes as one of the most memorable characters from a video game.

Similar to Tina and David’s connections with Ysayle and Freya, respectively,

Pat also describes a strong personal connection to a character from the Final Fantasy series. When I asked Pat about some of his favorite characters in games, he was quick to relay Hope, a character from Final Fantasy XIII; his connection with Hope stems from his own understandings of himself as a mixed race gay man.

So one of the big things for me about being gay is the ability to be both strong and vulnerable and also masculine but also submissive and dominant. I guess the characters that resonate with me the most in games especially are ones who can do both. [...] Characters who actually have dimension. Like they can be masculine but they can also have feelings. I get a lot of shit for actually liking Hope from Final Fantasy XIII. Everybody thinks that he is a whiny emo kid, but I actually think that he is more interesting, especially because he develops in the series into an adult. And he is thoughtful, but also a guy. So he is somebody who I think of as like characters that I find appealing.

While Hope in Final Fantasy XIII is not coded as queer, Pat reads a sense of complexity in Hope’s ability to transgress gendered expectations and relates his 49

experience of being gay to Hope’s story. Pat views Hope’s character as having

“dimension,” and he is able to relate to a character who can transgress social norms and expectations to be themselves. Pat understands his queerness here to be relational, and therefore is able to read Hope in a queer lens, even though he isn’t necessarily stating it in those worlds. Pat also references Yuna from Final Fantasy X as another character who is able to transcend social scripts of gender.

Yuna from Final Fantasy X—as long as we’re sticking with Final Fantasies— she is another character that I really, really appreciate. A lot of the female characters are these sort of princess-y healer types who just are submissive and need to be rescued. She sort of starts out as that, but she makes these very strong choices to like have a lot of agency, but also in a way that she isn’t like, “I’m like super tough, grumpy”—not acting like a stereotypical male character just rendered female, but she’s still sort of sensitive and still very emotional and strong when she needs to be. Those are the characters that I appreciate the most and are drawn to. Maybe this is unfair to all the straight people out there, but that is a major component of the gay experience as a gay male is for me: having both of those things and not being particularly shoved into a box.

Pat’s experiences as a gay man facilitate a lot of his connections to games and their characters. In the above excerpt, Pat hints that these nuanced characters who are able to blend both masculine and feminine, dominant and submissive personalities are what draw him into game stories. Pat reads both Yuna and Hope in new queer ways, examining the ways that their stories transgress gendered scripts of what it means to be a man, a woman, queer, or heterosexual. These characters, according to

Pat, become interesting and relatable because of their ability to challenge binary gendered scripts. Because Pat had mentioned previously that he does his best to 50

insert queerness into games in any way he can, it is no surprise that he employs a queer reading strategy in order to relate and empathize with both Yuna and Hope.

As we can see in these above stories, the Final Fantasy series does an excellent job in its ability to create complex and relatable characters and telling interesting stories. As an RPG, Final Fantasy gives us a lens into understanding some of the multiple ways that queer gamers connect to games. The story arcs of Ysayle and

Freya move Tina and David. Tina cries and connects with her brother overseas through Ysayle’s death. And through his connection with Freya, David begins to understand his own ability to grapple with past traumas and his fears through her development and perseverance. And lasdy, Pat connects with Hope and Yuna’s complex and nuanced character qualities and their abilities to transcend binary understandings of gender. These characters are important to these players in different ways, but all three of them find connections to stories and characters that help them understand their own senses of self. 51

Figure 6. Screenshot from Journey opening sequence. Here we can see the pilgrim (bottom center) looking off towards the mountain and the piercing light.

Journey

Both David and Emily also reference Journey as a game that they feel deeply connected to, but for very different reasons. Journey^ an indie game that was released in 2012, opens with a piercing ray of light shooting through the midday sky across a vast desert. The camera rolls over the sand dunes of the desert to reveal a faceless and genderless red-robed and scarfed pilgrim sitting in the sand. Walking the pilgrim over to the nearest mound with two monuments on it, your pilgrim looks forward to reveal a giant mountain with crevice lit by another ray of light. Given no other clues, you assume the journey of reaching the mountain in the distance in order to complete your pilgrimage. 52

Journey is an RPG that thrusts the player into a speechless and texdess story of a pilgrim making their way to this mountain. Along the way, you (the pilgrim) leam of the history of your people, a once-thriving civilization split apart by war for a magical cloth that makes up your scarf. On your way, you traverse the ruined landscapes of your people’s civilization, meeting other pilgrims who are other players in real life who are also trying to make their pilgrimage. At one point at the base of the mountain, you and another pilgrim are met with harsh snowy terrains and winds that make it impossible to make it; to push further and further, you two must cling to each other to keep each other warm. However, you both end up collapsing in the snow just before you’re able to make it to the top. Your pilgrim walks up to find six giant white-robed characters who give your character a renewed energy to make it up to the top of the mountain. The summit is a beautiful and serene landscape that you fly through and explore as you make your way to the shining pinnacle of the mountain. You are reunited with the partner that you traversed the harsh snowy weather with and together you reach the center of the mountain. The end credits reveal the mountain to be in the shape of two pilgrims clung to each other, and a new ray of light pierces through the sky and back to the desert. The ray hits the sands where the game began, and your pilgrim emerges again and is given the option to embark on the journey once more.

Daniel’s interest and connection to this game is based on what he calls the

“artistic merit” of the game—in particular, the soundscapes of the game. 53

IVe come to realize music disproportionately affects how I feel about a game. That’s why Journey was so big for me, because the soundtrack to that game is as breathtaking as the visuals. To the point where it’s the kind of music where you wonder whether the emotions you’re feeling are genuinely because of what’s being shown to you or whether the music itself is pulling that. You know, you hear violin strings and you want to start crying or whatever. And sometimes that can come off as disingenuous, because it’s being elicited from that music, but it came off in Journey as authentic and really fit so well with the narrative it was telling that I fell in love with it. And I fell in love with the soundtrack on top of that. I’ve got the soundtrack, inadvertendy, three different ways.

Because Journey is texdess, the game atmosphere and sense of purpose lie in the stories of the landscapes and soundscapes of the game. For Daniel, it was the game’s soundtrack that drew out his emotional connection to the game. At one point, he even questions if his emotions are genuine or not—is he actually connecting the stories, environments, and characters in this game, or is it just the violin strings that are eliciting his emotions? He concludes though that it is the musical quality as well as the unique storytelling aspects of the game that made the game feel “authentic” in drawing him into the game and this world.

Emily also noted that the games’ visuals and music were also beautiful and effective, but that wasn’t her main reason for connecting with the game.

I have a really personal experience with Journey. I started playing it at a time in my life when my best friend was like out of the picture. And I kinda felt a little bit isolated. But then two really good friends of mine showed me the game. And then I met my first Journey companion in the game, and it was just such a beautiful nonverbal, hopeful communication that we had. We went through the whole game together, and we helped each other out. It was one of those beautiful, fleeting connections that you have with someone that like really changes your life. And it happened to me in a video game. And it was 54

marvelous! I will always remember that first time I met another player in that game.

Emily experiences the game at a moment in her life where she feels isolated and disconnected from her best friend. This personal experience paired with the game’s programmed social interaction with another player in the game really gives her an opportunity to feel connected. She befriends this other player/pilgrim through nonverbal communication, and despite only seeing that player’s pilgrim—who looks identical to her pilgrim I might add—she feels a “beautiful, fleeting connection” with this player. Because of the mechanics and programming of the game, players are paired together to complete a pilgrimage in the game’s beautiful world; only at the end of the game do you learn the different user names of all the other pilgrims you encountered along the way. These social aspects of Journey are the most important element for Emily, allowing her a social and digital connection with another player that leaves her fulfilled with her life changed.

Both Final Fantasy and Journey give us a glimpse into the different ways that players connect with games. Both games use worlding elements and storytelling practices to draw their players into the games, and these players are able to relate the narratives of gameplay to their own personal experiences. These affective and worlding practices illustrate how games as digital media create immersive, interactive, and storytelling possibilities. These unique characteristics of games allow gamers to come to understand their own senses of self. 55

Queer Gamers as Looters

Revisiting his quote from the epigraph of this chapter, de Certeau argues in

“Reading as Poaching” that readers themselves act as producers, rather than simply consumers who take for wholesale the literal meaning of any text. “The reader neither takes the position of the author nor an author’s position. He invents in texts something different from what [the author] "intended.’ [...] He combines their fragments and creates something unknown in the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings” (de Certeau 1984, 169).

Gamers also make their own meanings of games in multiple ways. As illustrated in the stories above, we identify with some characters over others, connect with certain plot lines, analyze symbolism and apply it to our own lives. We also play games multiple times, recommend games to other gamers, buy gaming paraphernalia, get gaming tattoos, and sometimes even dress as characters through costumed play

(cosplay). No matter what the intended meaning of a game is, we as gamers make our own meanings and connect games to various aspects of ourselves. The gamer is a poacher in the lands of games, “like a hunter in the forest, he [sic] spots the written quarry, follows a trail, laughs, plays tricks, or else like a gambler, lets himself [sic] be taken in by it” (de Certeau 1984, 173). As textual scavengers, gamers are “travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across the fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). De Certeau is referencing nomadic and diasporic peoples, who 56

poach and scavenge as a means of survival. For de Certeau, reading is also a survival tactic, allowing readers to create their own meanings and relationships to texts, sometimes in ways that texts weren’t meant for.

Drawing on de Certeau’s reading as poaching in his understandings of the

Star Trek fan community, Henry Jenkins (2006 [1998]) writes:

Behind the exotic stereotypes [of Star Trek fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, or mindless consumers] fostered by the media lies a largely unexplored terrain of cultural activity, a subterranean network of readers and writers who remake programs in their own image. Fandom is a vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, and so on) to pry open a space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; fandom is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a fashion that serves different interests. (40)

For Jenkins, fans of media texts employ poaching techniques to create more inclusive stories with which they can connect and identify. Fans, including many gamers, “employ images and concepts drawn from mass culture texts to explore their subordinate status, to envision alternatives, to voice their frustrations and anger, and to share their new understandings with others” (60). Queer gamers themselves are experts in reading as poaching, as we have already seen in some of the above stories.

We queer gamers are excellent textual nomads, scavenging from game texts bits and pieces that come together to produce our own metaphorical sustenance, cultural meanings, and textual interpretations.

In this section, I expand de Certeau’s “reading as poaching” to understand queer reading practices in gaming as looting. A theoretical shift to the concept of 57

looting situates my analysis squarely into the realm of gaming. Looting * is a commonly known term to gamers. The gaming image that first comes to mind for me is playing an MMORPG and running around killing enemies to gather items and resources to become more powerful. Take for example World oj Warcraft (WoW). One of the main premises behind WoW is to complete dungeon quests that pit a player up against large enemies known as bosses and their minions in an attempt to loot from them their treasure. Oftentimes this treasure (or loot) is randomly generated, so there are chances an enemy might drop a rare item that can make a character more powerful. However, sometimes—maybe oftentimes—these rare items are ones that aren’t particularly useful for one’s character. (Good luck getting your Night Elf Priest to make use of that rare two-handed mace!) A player might go and auction it off or disenchant it, but nonetheless it isn’t directly useful to their character.

Gamers are adventurers. Therefore, I like to think of any act of gaming as a form of looting. Imagine each game is a different dungeon; some dungeons have loot—characters, stories, environments, morals—that we can take and make applicable to our own lives. Gamers are looters insofar as they loot from games the treasures and items that are useful for them to produce their own meanings, interpretations, and applicability. Queer gamers are especially good at these forms of

*1 do want to note here that “looting” does also conjure up a history of racialization in the U.S., especially in regards to contemporary anti-Black media representations of BlackLivesMatter protests. While I use it here in a different context, it is hard to shake that history of anti-Black racism. I will note that contemporary BLM scholars have argued “in defense of loo ting” (see Osterweil 2014 and Chasmar 2015) as an attempt to reframe the term as a justifiable act of protest and resistance. 58

looting, especially as it relates to finding sexuality in games and “to compensate for the lack of representation” (Shaw 2009, 232). Many of the gamers I interviewed articulate an understanding that the game industry produces games mosdy for heterosexual white men. In spite of this, as I argue below, queer gamers are excellent at both finding the canonically queer representation in games and making games queer in their own rights and terms.

Only recendy have games begun to include LGBT/queer characters in games. Finding the already-existing queer representation in these games is one form of queer gamer looting. Emily, for example, recalls playing Mass Effect and really seeking a queer romance option.

EMILY: In the first Mass Effect game there wasn’t like a solid queer romance. I mean there was Liara, but she’s technically an alien doesn’t have a gender even though she appears feminine. I mean, of course though, I romanced her. [laughs] With a female Shepard, because of course! Yeah, when I first started playing Mass Effect, I was like, “I’m going to make a male Shepard and romance a male character.” Cause I thought that could be done. But apparendy that can’t happen until Mass Effect J, so I didn’t want to sit through two whole games being a straight character just to get to the third game where I could then play a queer character. SPENCER: So did you restart the game? EMILY: I did restart the game, and I romanced Liara. It was disappointing though, because I had come to expect from the other Bioware games like Dragon Age that there are queer options. And there wasn’t and I was disappointed.

Emily describes starting Mass Effect planning to find the queer romance. Because she is a big fan of the Dragon Age series, all of which have bisexual character options— that is, they are romanceable by player characters of any gender. Because Emily had 59

come to expect this, she was disappointed with her first playthrough of the game that she wasn’t given the option for a gay male romance. She makes a bold decision to restart her game, so that she can pursue a queer romance option with Liara, a genderless alien whose species is coded as feminine. In the eyes of many gamers— most likely straight, white, heterosexual men who are the targeted audience of most games—this is a ridiculous decision. However, for a lesbian like Emily, this desire for a queer romance option changes how she plays the game. Several times over, Emily states, “given the option I always take the queer romance option.” Emily is an experienced queer looter who is dedicated to finding the already existing queer romances and stories that exist in games.

Finding the queerness in games can have an important impact on a queer gamer’s sense of self. Gage, an asexual and pansexual trans man I interviewed, recalled stories he read about other trans guys connecting with the trans narratives in

Dragon Age: Inquisition. One of the NPCs in Inquisition, Krem, is a trans man who fights under the leadership of one of your party members, Iron Bull. In a cinematic cut scene where your character finds out Krem is trans, Iron Bull tells the story about how his people’s culture embraces those who transition, telling Krem that they too have a place in society and aren’t looked down upon. In a following cut scene, your character has a dialogue option to misgender Krem when he isn’t around; without skipping a beat, Iron Bull metaphorically slaps the player character’s hand and reiterates that “[Krem] is not a woman,” further reaffirming Krem’s identity to 60

the player-character. Gage reflects on hearing stories of trans men who played

Inquisition and experienced a sense of gender affirmation.

I remember reading about Dragon Age Inquisition and reading about some trans guys who played through it. There’s when Iron Bull is like, basically, “I don’t care. He exists! Whatever.” People were just like, “this isn’t something that I experience in real life.” So for people to experience that sort of thing in the game—someone saying that “I don’t care if this group of people don’t recognize this,” it’s great! Like it’s great that there is someone in the game that doesn’t care that you are a trans guy because you exist as a guy and that’s who you are. And that was really validating for them, even though you’re not direcdy involved in that story necessarily.

Iron Bull’s affirmation of trans lives and unwavering support function in response to the player-character’s misunderstanding, actively grappling with transphobia and issues of gender identity. Both Iron Bull and the game itself behoove you to take

Krem’s gender identity seriously, which is one of the first AAA games to actively grapple with the lives and experiences of trans characters. For this trans gamer who played through this scene, Gage imagined that he felt a sense of validation and authenticity in seeing a trans narrative in a game. Pre-existing narratives of queer and trans lives in games send an important signal to these queer gamers—like Gage and the trans men he talks about—that they both exist and that their stories belong in places like video games. Attempts at addressing transphobia like in Dragon Age:

Inquisition also creates possibilities for educating non-trans gamers on some of the common experiences of trans people.

Pat identifies an example where the queerness is Bully challenges the dominant expectations and assumptions of heterosexual men playing the game. 61

One of my favorite things that developers have ever done in a game was in the Xbox version of Bully. They made an achievement that you can only get by kissing boys, and so for all of the people who are completionists and wanted to get 100% on everything, they had to go and kiss a boy at some point. And it’s not like my goal is to indoctrinate all the straight boys, but I think that the fact that you wanted to get to this thing, you had to have this one experience that all the gay people have had to had—playing through all the straight characters. And like for this one moment, your character was at least bisexual. And you had to experience that. And that made me incredibly happy.

In both instances of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Bully, game mechanics and storylines provide an alternative possibility to how games can grapple with issues of gender and sexuality. In both game scenarios, queerness is persistent and made explicit, turning the tables on the cisgender heterosexual men who expect to experience the status quo. Sadly, both of these examples are easy to miss and not necessarily mandatory experiences anyone who plays these games must have. Nonetheless, they serve as excellent examples of how queer gamers loot existing queer narratives and create these affective bonds with these narratives and characters.

Unfortunately, the examples of queerness in games are still relatively few and far between, making the looting of pre-existing queer narratives difficult. However, queer gamers have also developed their own looting techniques to insert queemess into games that don’t already have it. One common example is for queer gamers to look for queer subtext in games, employing an example of Eve Sedgwick’s

“epistemology of the closet.” Emily addresses this example in her interview.

Cause like a lot of the relationships I see in previous games are like really close friendships. Like, maybe they didn’t want to like make a statement 62

about like making them into actual like partners. Like, in Kingdom Hearts, Axel and Roxas are like “best friends.” And I mean you can read a lot into that. But they didn’t like take that one step further to be like, “Oh yeah, actually together.” But they’re just “good friends.” But I interpreted them as together! [laughs]

The Axel/Roxas pairing—or “ship” as it is known in the fandom community—is a common one among queer gamers. As Emily suggests, the limited amount of queer representation in games means that she must turn to her own interpretations of queerness in games. Jenkins (2006 [1988]) finds similar practices in Star Trek fans’ shipping of Kirk and Spock. Fan reading and writing “necessarily involves the appropriation of series characters and a reworking of program concepts as the text is forced to respond to the fan’s own social agenda and interpretive strategies” (58). In her story above, Laura loots the story of Axel and Roxas’s friendship and reinterprets it in a queer light. Again, reading Axel and Roxas as queer and in a relationship is common among queer gamers. Fans loot this pairing and produce a lot of fan art, giving them more opportunities to see, interpret, and create more stories that they want to see.

My favorite example of queer gamer looting is Pat’s example of playing Final

Fantasy Tactics. In his interview, Pat references his efforts to create characters named after his friends as well his own hacking and modifying of games to insert queermess.

One of my favorite RPGs [role playing games] is Final Fantasy Tactics—I make my own characters and name them what I want, and name them after all my friends. Customization stuff. Anything that has that I tend to be into. Usually it is very much about me, people I know—yeah it’s me and my friends and inserting them into whatever game universe I can. Sometimes I’ll 63

do other things I did hack up Tactics save file just because—originally it was because I wanted to put in some of the characters that you don’t get to use until later into the game. But then it turned into this long elaborate thing where I was like, well you know what if the main character’s best friend.. .like actually they admitted that they were totally in love. And none of the other crap in the story happened because they didn’t fuck everything over. Yeah, so I can get stupid with that, [laughs] Mosdy it’s me, people I know, and adding more queerness to things because there isn’t any.

Even though Pat plays Final Fantasy Tactics as a single player, we see the different ways that this is a social game for him. By naming his characters after his friends, he is creating digital representations of his friends so that he can symbolically play with them. Additionally, Pat is the only gamer I talk to who references the ability to hack into a game’s code and modify its storyline. In Final Fantasy Tactics, he “mods” the game’s code to create his own original queer narratives—he creates queer characters and dialogues for his own social satisfaction. Pat conducts what I think is the most technical form of queer gamer looting, literally altering the game to write more queer characters. He uses his hacking abilities to take a game with no queer representation and creates his own queer Final Fantasy game that consists of all of his friends.

Ultimately, I imagine these practices of queer gamer looting are another way that gamers form affective connections to their games. All of these queer gamer looting practices are examples of what Eve Sedgwick (2003) calls “reparative readings;” through these actively queer readings and playings, queer gamers are able to create more hospitable and sustaining game worlds where they can see stories about themselves. Looting becomes a queer reparative practice for marginalized 64

gamers of all varieties. Maybe it’s that we’re more likely to empathize with a character’s struggles because of our own? Maybe it’s hard to find people who recognize our value and worth, but games are a space we can always be rewarded for our achievements? Maybe it’s something completely different? But no matter what, marginalized gamers aren’t afforded the privilege to have most characters’ stories map neatly onto our lives, so we’ve learned to loot what we can. This is the process of gaming as looting that I find so generative and reparative.

Future Directions for Games

If games are so important to gamers, both in terms of making up their socio- technological identities and in facilitating affections with inanimate game technologies and digital stories and landscapes, then I conclude here with imagining the future of games. I ended each one of my interviews with the following question:

“If you could change one thing about video games, what would it be?” While all of my informants found this to be a very daunting question, all of them concluded by saying that they would make games more diverse. I want to present Pat, Ellison, and

Daniel’s answers as three possible future directions for creating more diverse games.

At the end of his interview, Pat reflected on the importance of race, gender, sexuality, and diversity in the games he wants to be able to play in the future.

Race, gender and sexuality matter to me because they are part of who I am. They are part of how I approach games, and I want certain things out of games that are different than what other people want because of my race, my gender, and my sexual orientation. [...] I get grumpy when all I see is white 65

people and the same looking white people in every game. I find that frustrating and tedious and boring, and I get really excited when I see other people and other stories and stuff. And I am like, “Wow! This is great.” And I think I am bothered by seeing stuff like the same stupid female character over and over again. There are games where I just get bored. Like Pm sure the game mechanics are wonderful, but I just don’t really want to see the same boring people again. They are just awful. I actually want to see more stories about more different kinds of people. Yes, gay guys and also queer people, but also people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds and with different experiences. I want different stories. So that’s what I actually want, but I think the thing that will actually make that happen is having more people in game development that are more diverse. And having people who actually know how to tell those stories properly because they have experiences with them and they have sort of lived with different things.

Rather than just seeing more LGBT/queer narratives and stories, Pat embraces the desire to see more diverse stories in games, whether or not they are stories and experiences he has had. Ethan also expressed this desire for more diverse representation in games.

People want to see themselves in what they consume, and I think what you consume tells you a lot about what you’re potential in life is. It’s not okay that every hero is white. I think it makes things more interesting when there are more diverse perspectives represented. Having the same buff white guy with blond hair in every single game over and over is just kinda boring. And games are made primarily by white men, so they don’t know how to represent or create characters that are non-white and that are fully human. Also not having LGBT characters is a big problem. Not having LGBT characters, Black characters, Latino characters, Arab characters, Asian characters, non-sexualized female characters in games tells children, teenagers, and young adults that they’re not worthy of being included in the game.

Both Pat and Ethan desire games that tell different stories and that are made by difference kinds of folks. When I asked about specific stories of characters, none of the gamers I spoke to mentioned a character of color and their specific experiences 66

of being a person of color. I think this is illustrative of Ethan’s claims: that games do not yet include diverse or even “fully human” stories about people of color. If we hope to continue to build more livable worlds that value diversity, we as queer gamers need to further promote and advocate for the inclusion of diverse representations of people of color in games, especially since these worlds of play cannot be abstracted from social hierarchies.

At the end of our interview, David and I played with some ideas for one specific possibility for a game—where the choices you make about your characters’ racial, gender, and sexual identity truly affect your game playing experience.

I mean a big thing that I think has not quite happened yet in games that would piss a lot of people off—maybe even the queer community—would be something like say you play a game where you’re able to choose the gender of your character, and you choose to be female. Imagine you interact with someone who is misogynistic. And they are only misogynistic to you if you’re playing a female character. And maybe you played this game once as a male character and you didn’t have this sort of interaction with him when you were male, and now suddenly you’re being confronted with a guy who you’re discovering is a bigot. [...] I believe having interactions like that is the next step. To explore the interactions between gender identities is important. But these are social issues that we’re not going to be able to address in games unless we’re willing to get uncomfortable.

I followed up David’s idea—which I think is brilliant as a form of games for education or games as empathy simulators, like the scenes in Dragon Age: Inquisition and Bully above—with a similar concept for skin color, where maybe a slight change on the gradient means that characters treat you differendy. We both admitted that it would be a difficult task to create the types of social commentary we wanted in 67

games, but together he and I began to imagine some concrete possibilities about the future of games.

As I have argued in this chapter, games create the possibilities for queer gamers to be social, forge connections, and understand themselves both as gamers and as queer folks. Examining the connections that gamers have to game worlds, stories, and characters gives us a glimpse into the affective possibilities for games.

Queer gamers are socio-technological assemblages who find meaningful stories, characters, and atmospheres in games and use them for their own needs and desires.

In taking seriously my overall claim that sexuality is an analytic category through which we can more deeply understand gaming and gamers, then understanding how sexuality mediates their connections with games is the jumping off point for more diverse representations in games. In the next chapter, I shift specifically to how sexuality organizes queer gamer identity through the category of “gaymer” and the possibilities, limitations, and messiness of queer gamer worldmaking. 68

Putting the Gay in “Gaymer”: Queer Gamer Identity and Community

Being a gaymer isn’t just a label, it isn’t even part of my identity, but it’s become something representing where I belong. —Skye

To be a gaymer is to be outside of that normal “gamer”; even if you aren’t part of the LGBT group, you can still be a gaymer. —Emmerson

Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devasting events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. [...] Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts or apocalyptic or salvic futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings. —Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Queer gamers trouble the category of “gamer” by challenging common sense notions of what it means to be a gamer. Carly Kocurek (2016) reminds us that “the representation of gaming, and of video gamers, is bound to certain ideals of white middle-class male identity through the exclusion of diverse narratives of gaming and through the exclusion of gamers who do not fit assumed notions of race and gender”

(51). Expanding upon Kocurek’s insights through my own ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that foregrounding sexuality as category of analysis sheds lights on the recent politics of gamer identity. In this chapter I explore a queer, feminist, and racial genealogy of the category of “gaymer.” I use Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of

“staying with the trouble” to think through the category: how does the category of 69

“gaymer” trouble traditional notions of who counts as a gamer, and what are some of the troubles of “gaymer” as a category of identity that attempts to be inclusive? In response to the cultural perception of gamers as white, middle-class, heterosexual men, I argue that “gaymer” troubles dominant constructions of gamers and subversively re-imagines who has access to the category of gamer. “Gaymer” as an identity category emerges as a cyber-queer subject position that has been utilized by

LGBT/queer gamers to craft both digital and physical spaces for queer worldmaking. I begin by examining both the digital and physical spaces central to the proliferation of gaymer and queer gamer worldmaking. I then examine how different types of queer gamers understand both the possibilities and the limitations of the category. Holding fast to the understanding that no worldmaking practices are ever innocent (Haraway 1991), the last section examines how the “gaymer” category has a few troubles of its own through its gendered and racialized implications. However, staying with the trouble pushes the category in new coalition-based (Reagon 1983) ways. Ultimately, I argue that complex and nuanced critical discourses of race and gender open up the possibilities for diverse queer gamer dialogues and coalitions to occur within the category of gamer. These dialogues and coalitions trouble “gaymer” to be more inclusive and to further expand the possibilities of queer gamer worldmaking. 70

Imagining Gaymer: Queer Cyber Community, History, and Geography

As I argued in the previous chapter, we need to understand gamers as socio- technological assemblages. Building on those arguments through a genealogy of the

“gaymer” category, I argue that gaymer here is a “cyber-queer” subject position

(O’Riordan 2007) that allows queer gamers to form community and find a sense of belonging and affirmation of their desires. O’Riordan (2007) states, “Queer/cyber subjects have been understood as being produced through those practices where digital media and queer cultures intersect and are produced through each other” (15).

The mode of relationality between the cyber and the queer is important here.

“Cyber” operates in two distinct, yet intertwining ways. First, gaymers navigate cyber- and techno-subjectivity through their interactions with games and technology.

Both “gamer” and “gaymer” become possible identities through the relationship between the organic body of the player and the inorganic game technologies, blurring the line between technology and organism. Ga(y)mers come to embody

Haraway’s cyborg (1990) as they exist betwixt and between the fictional world of the game and the physical worlds of their lives. As a socio-technological assemblage, gamers’ relationships with game technologies is what makes their identities, practices, and desires possible. Second, gaymer as an identity category emerges as a cybersocial subject position first in virtual spaces of the internet that allow queer gamers to craft their own sense of community and then spreading to physical geographies, such as

GaymerX. 71

The first emergence of the term “gaymer” as a collective identity is a contested one. The earliest documented use of the term occurs online in a private

Yahoo Group Forum tided “Gaymers.” This private group was created in 2000 and describes itself as a “non-political roundtable for queer folks and their supporters who’re into gaming” whose only restriction is “We will NOT tolerate gay-bashing or homophobic remarks. That’s a one-strike-and-you’re-outta-here rule.” The two interesting points of analysis here are that the group describes itself as “non political” and for “queer folks and their supporters.” Note that gaymer here signals not just gay male gamers, but also other queer gamer identities, earlier marked on the site with “L/G/Bi/Tr/Tv and their allies.” Even in its early deployment, gaymer attempts to function as an inclusive category, one that seeks to hail gamers of all genders and sexualities. Although, somewhat contradictory and troublesome for me, the use of gaymer here encourages gamers of all genders and sexualities in this space to be “non-political.” I read this as an attempt to limit the discussion of politics within the forum, in the hopes to quell potential tensions and debates within the community. In this sense, “non-political” functions to erase potential difference within the community to (problematically) promote an illusion of a cohesive and coherent gaymer identity. The focus of the site then is to create a space for gaymers find others to play with and talk about games, while not engaging in discussions of politics. In this regard, attempting to create “safe space” by not allowing gay-bashing is not perceived as political. Moreover, that they do not say no sexism, racism, 72

classism, or ableism might mean that these other forms of systemic oppression might count as politics. These readings of “non-political” illustrate the forum’s goal to build a perceived “safe space” of gay gaming that foregrounds gaymers’ similarities rather than their differences.

While it seems that this private Yahoo forum was one of the first gaymer spaces to emerge, three other queer online spaces helped grow the category:

GayGamer.net, Gaymer.org, and Reddit.com. Both GayGaymer.net and Gaymer.org came about in early 2000s as queer gaming spaces dedicated to discussing the intersections of queerness and gaming. Both spaces utilized the forum/bulletin board format for queer gamers to post topics about gaming and queerness and to interact with other gamers. However, both spaces, at least in their early days, were designated for mosdy gay male audiences, as indicated by the popular slogan of GayGamer that it was “For boys who like boys with joysticks!” and by the Gaymer.org’s description that the site allowed some gamers to become “friends, some even boyfriends.”

Nonetheless, these forums provided a space for gaymers to talk about their favorite video games and swoon over hot and sexy characters. And while neither of these sites explicitly mentions being “non-political,” it is interesting to note that the content found on these sites mosdy involves gaming and LGBT representation rather than discussions of LGBT/queer politics. 73

| EZsHEEB fflB B B E3E3E GRYMER5 ______wrwwJEiEa 1 rising | controversial | top | grided | wiki | promoted K Sabotage, the first DLC pack for Cali of Duty®: Infinite Warfare includes four new MP maps: Noir, Renaissance, Neon and Dominion, a re-imagining of the Call of Duty<&: Modern Warfare 2 classic, 'Afghan / Plus the next terrifying Zombies installment: ’Rave in the Redwoods'. (wwwj3iSofttuty.com) promoted bv CattO*Dufy iW 1* prom oted

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Figure 7. Screenshot from the front page of the r/gaymers subreddit. Accessed January 30th, 2017.

In contrast to Yahoo! Gaymers, GayGamer.net and Gaymer.org—all sites that no longer exist—is the subreddit forum, /r/gaymers. The /r/gaymers Reddit forum is a “community for LGBT and straight alliance redditors.” Similar to the three sites mentioned previously, members are able to post comments, links, and discussions to an online bulletin board. Unlike the previous forum sites, /r/gaymers frames its purpose as “NOT solely dedicated to discussing gay themes in gaming.”

Instead, the community moderators state that you should “expect to be offended by something you see here at least once,” which can be interpreted as making the space for multiple and conflicting thoughts, beliefs, and discourses. In some sense, saying 74

that the site isn’t solely about gaming hints at the ways the /r/gaymers subreddit functions as a political space for dialogue. Within the forum, you can find discussions of presidential debates, LGBT politics, gender and sexuality in gaming, as well as the typical posts with humorous memes and posts about sexy video game characters. This troubles and contradicts the previous deployments of “gaymer,” seeking to actively create a space that acknowledges the political engagements of gaymers. The /r/gaymers subreddit also acts as a site of coalition. Bernice Johnson

Reagon (1983) uses “coalitional politics” to describe activist spaces that account for and acknowledge differences in desires, beliefs, and visions for the future. Reagon describes coalition-based spaces as “stretching” and “difficult,” because coalition spaces seek attend to differences rather than creating a unitary sense of identity. As a coalition space, the /r/gaymers subreddit seems to fight an idea of a unitary and monolithic identity of gaymer, by both inviting allies and by gesturing toward gaymer differences in stating “you should expect to be offended.” This is also a larger cultural phenomenon that exists on reddit more broadly, but within these queer gaming contexts hint at queer worldmaking practices of coalition.

In the examples of the Yahoo Gaymers Group, Gaymer.org, and the

/r/gaymers subreddit, the category of gaymer is deployed as a collective category of identity in order to build community. In an Althusserian understanding of the subject and ideology, it is the deployment of “gaymer” that interpellates cyber/queer subjects, hailing them to see their own connections as queer and gamers and to take 75

on the identity category subject position of “gaymer.” Building on Althusser,

Foucault (1976) argues that the creation of categories through discourse and the politics of classification ultimately produce both subjects who identify with these categories and assertions of truths about these subjects. Applying this to the queer gaming category, these cyber/queer spaces themselves proliferate the category of gaymer, hailing those “queer folks and their allies who enjoy gaming” (as quoted from the Yahoo “Gaymers” site) to participate in these sites. Furthermore, this interpellation (Althusser 1970) of subjects is reliant on a set of cyber/queer practices and modes of production—that is, the consumption of video games, the navigation of online spaces, and the prior identification with the LGBT/queer communities or ally ship.

GaymerX and the Category of “Gaymer”

While virtual spaces have played a central role in the emergence of gaymer as a collective category of identity, it is most apparent that the spread and proliferation of the category owes its thanks to the GaymerX convention. In 2012, creator Matt

Conn and several other self-identified gaymers across a variety of genders, orientations, and races set out to create a convention focused around gaymers and their allies. Conn’s goal was to create a physical space that embodied the online community of gaymers. In July of 2012, Conn announced that GaymerX (originally known as GaymerCon) through a Kickstarter project, seeking crowd-sourced 76

funding of $25,000 in one month to put on a queer games convention in 2013. In that one month, Conn raised almost $100,000 and had gather more than 1,500 backers who had donated to the convention’s cause. That successful project on

Kickstarter put GaymerX on the radar for queer gamers all over the world and has led to six successful iterations of the convention as of April 2017.

GaymerX #EveryoneGames $91,388 pledged of $25,000 goat 9 San Francisco. CA # Video Games 1,531 backers

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Community is important. We believe that there are a great number of Gay. Lesbian. Transgender. Gender Queer, and Bisexual folks out there, of every color and creed, that at the end of the day, love to geek out. Geek about video games, tabletop games, tech, comics - all that fun stuff. And we believe that creating a community for these folks, Gaymers as they are affectionaily dubbed, is important to help shape a more tolerant and safer space in gaming. After all, everyone games.

Figure 8. Screenshot from original GaymerX Kickstarter page. Accessed January 30th, 2017.

In addition to being a critical event and space for the queer gaming community, the success of the first three GaymerX conventions have led to an increased popularization of the term gaymer. Due to its tide the GaymerX convention drew attention to the “gaymer” identity, bringing more and more queer gamers and their allies into the category. On their original Kickstarter page, Conn notes that the convention “isn’t just for gay white dudes either. We want all genders, races, and sexual identities including our straight friends and allies to come together and have a gay, geeky good time.” Again, gaymer here is deployed as a more inclusive 77

collective identity category, encompassing a range of genders, races, and orientations.

Throughout its website, GaymerX uses gaymer multiple times to describe its potential participants, in the hopes to build community through this “queer space/5

A closer reading of Figure 8 hints at these queer worldmaking practices of creating communities; their descriptions of community building through a physical convention address questions of identity, interpellation, and coalition that I engage throughout this chapter. Firsdy, the original Kickstarter attempts to describe the different possibilities for folks to identify as gaymers. The “About the Project” hails all types of geeks—of all sexual orientations, gender identities, colors, and creeds— whose interests span technology, video games, board games, and comics into the category of “gaymer.” This is why “community is important”: to create a space for these “affectionately dubbed” gaymers at the margins of gaming culture. If it is true that #everyonegames, then creating a more tolerant and accepting space for all types of gamers is the most prominent queer worldmaking project of the gaymer community.

Using Google Trends to comparatively trace the popularity of the terms

“gaymer,” “GaymerCon,” and “GaymerX”, the graph in Figure 9 illustrates the influence of the convention on the proliferation of the term. On the internet, the term “gaymer” peaks in popularity at four points between 2012 to 2014, three of which relate major hallmarks in the evolution of GaymerX: the August 2012

Kickstarter Project, and the two GX conventions in August 2013 and July 2014. 78

From the graph, we can also see that the launch of GaymerX led to the increased and steady popularity of the term gaymer since the first convention in August 2013.

Gaym er GaymerCon Gaym erX

Figure 9. Google Trends on "Gaymer,M "GaymerCon," and "GaymerX." Accessed December

10, 2015.

With the rise of the convention, GaymerX and its gaymer participants received online coverage from a variety of news sources, from queer gaming spaces like GayGamer, to mainstream tech journals like Kotaku (Good 2012; Totilo 2012), to business sites like Forbes (Pinchefsky 2012), and even in general American online news sites like The Huffington Post (Burra 2012). This news coverage not only furthered the popularity of the term, but also both the convention and the identity category out into the mainstream. Because of this, GaymerX and gaymers have been embraced and heralded by some, but demonized by others—mostly straight white male gamers who feel that sexuality and gender have no place in video games.

Nonetheless, GaymerX has done a significant amount of work growing the gaymer community and popularizing the term “gaymer.” 79

In these two sections, I have explored some of the digital and physical landscapes where “gaymer” as a category of identity emerge. Each of these spaces deploys a different understanding of the term “gaymer,” moving from a supposedly

“non-political” identity category to a space for queer gamer worldmaking at the margins of gaming culture. The political salience of many of these spaces, especially

/r/gaymers and GaymerX as they still exist, emerges in relation to the controversy of

GamerGate. When manifestations of such vitriol threaten those who are perceived as not true gamers, as I describe in the introduction, then queer gamer spaces emerge as a form of community building. In the next section, I explore how gaymers understand their own subjectivities in response to the dominant cultural perceptions of gamers as white, heterosexual, cisgender young men.

Qualities and Characteristics of Gaymers

What exacdy is a gaymer? The online crowd-sourced site UrbanDictionary defines “gaymer” as “a gay person who is also a gamer.” Gamer with the inserted y then at first glance becomes a simple portmanteau, literally putting “gay” into

“gamer.” However, this merging of two identity categories carries significant symbolic and cultural meaning for the queer gaming community.

Many of the gaymers I interviewed for my research note that they had experienced feelings of fear, alienation, and discrimination in both the mainstream

LGBT community and dominant gaming culture. Additionally, in the recent 80

documentary on queer gamers, Gaming in Color (2015), several gaymers express how hate speech and bigotry are common in online gaming spaces. In many online games, gamers use headsets or type in chatrooms in order to communicate with players across the nation or the world. “That’s gay!55 and “Faggot!55 are commonplace for non-queer gamers to use in both text and voice chat in many online gaming spaces, leaving many queer gamers to feel offended, alienated, uncomfortable, or even fearful to participate. The frequency of this alienating and discriminatory speech is made possible, I argue, because of the heteronormative design and content of video games. Much of the content in video games in their short 50-year history has forced you to “play the straight guy,55 embodying a hypermasculinized white heterosexual male protagonist saving the “damsel in distress.55 A classic example that most folks are familiar with is the Super Mario Bros. series, where players control Mario, an Italian plumber, rescuing his love interest, Princess Peach, from the maniacal grasp of the villain, Bowser. Very few representations of queer bodies, same-sex practices, and nonnormative desires have emerged, and even they are few and far between. While some of these games, like Rockstar5s 2006 Bully and BioWare5s 2012 Mass Effect 3, contain LGBT content, you are never forced into the role of playing a queer character and instead have to follow the very specific line of play to make your character queer. This “default straightness,55 as I call it, is illustrative of the gaming industry's ideal gamer: straight white cisgender men. Historically, this has left very little room for queer gamers to exist. 81

In addition to this marginalization within gaming culture, most gaymers also express feelings of isolation from mainstream LGBT community. One of my informants, Brian, said:

It’s the stereotype that all gay men are these super trendy, perfect 10 sex- fiends who only spend time in the gay bars and clubs, the gym, or the mall. [...] I’m just not into that trendy stuff. And I don’t care if I am or not, but the perceived stereotype is that not only should I be following [the trend], but setting it as a gay man. [...] I don’t follow fashion, I like to play video games and watch cartoons. [...] If I mentioned gaming to another of "my nation,” I’d get the look that says “This guy’s kinda nerdy, abandon ship!”

Brian articulated feeling isolated and outside the dominant constructions of what it means to be a good gay man. For Brian, his desires to play video games and watch cartoons are irreconcilable with the cultural perceptions of gayness. Gaymer as an identity category then creates the ideological space for queemess and geekiness to exist simultaneously for those at the margins of two already-marginalized groups, where LGBT/queer folks are marginalized by systematic structures of hetero- cissexism and gamers are marginalized through the negative stereotypes of being anti-social and obese addicts who live in their parents basements. Part of being a gaymer for Brian are his feelings of isolation and shame for expressing his “true self.” It is interesting to note here though that Brian is able to find his “true self’ within his practices of consumption. While Brian’s gaymer subjectivity falls outside of normative economies of sexual desire, his own sense of sexual selfhood is mediated through participation in capitalist spaces of production and consumption. 82

Another of my informants, Skye, discusses the role of gaymer in relation to this multiple marginalization. He says:

What Gaymer as a label does, of course, is unite being queer and being a gamer. [...] Neither being gay nor gamer is fully accepted by society and so there’s always some degree of masking required in what we do. Combining the two and creating a community around it creates a place where both masks can be taken off and left at the door, and it becomes very, very comfortable. For me, being a gaymer isn’t just a label, it isn’t even part of my identity, but it’s become something representing where I belong.

For Skye, the category of gaymer allows him to find a sense of authenticity and belonging while simultaneously building a community in which he is able to express himself as a gay gamer. Skye isn’t the only one who sees ‘gaymer’ as creating a community. In Gaming in Color, one gaymer mentions, “Even though I usually don’t like the idea of labeling oneself, you need a flag to bear once in a while. You need to have a term to bring yourself together. Gaymer with the cy’ is als° an issue of branding. It gives us a common flag. And I think it’s more about being a part of a community than simply saying, ‘I am a gay man’ and ‘I play video games.’” For this gaymer, being a gaymer is about being a part of a community, rather than simply being a gay man who plays games. Whereas he isn’t a fan of labels generally, here he makes an exception to “bear a flag.” This practice of identification allows for him to view himself a part of a community of queer gamers and functions as a queer worldmaking practice.

The desire for diversity in games is another staple in gaymer identity. Queer gamers express a desire to have had characters at least somewhat like them growing 83

up as children. For example, Emily told me: “Not seeing any lesbian characters until a couple years ago was rough. Like we didn't see any queer representation for a while. It’s a form of gatekeeping. If you aren’t represented in games, then you internalize that they aren’t for you.” One gaymer in Gaming in Color stated that visibility in games is a form of recognition from the games industry that you exist and are a valid part of society—providing a sense of affirmation and belonging in the community.

Because of the lack of representation in the mainstream gaming community, games by diverse independent (indie) developers have risen in popularity. In Gaming in Color; queer game developer Naomi Clark describes games not only as a participatory medium for audiences, but also as allowing queer developers to work through and share their own experiences at the margins of gender and sexuality.

Rather than waiting for the game industry to “not be afraid to market to us,” she argues that gamers should support the indie developers who are inserting their personal narratives into the games they create. This conversation about diversity in games also manifests at GX. Emily told me, “Diversity is a really big conversation that especially happened this past year [at GaymerX3]. There were a lot of panels about adding in mote diversity into games. And making our own queer games that progress our own narratives. Like instead of waiting for the AAA games to create diverse content, we should shoot off and make our own games.” For this reason, 84

many proponents of diverse games—game scholars, indie developers, and even players—have argued that folks should start to tell their stories by making own their queer games (Anthropy 2011; Brice 2012). Some of these folks have put on workshops, game jams, and development classes at conferences like GaymerX or the

Queemess and Games Convention to teach folks how easy it is to create their own games through the use of computer programs, mobile design apps, and game console programs that make development accessible and easy. To these gaymers, diversity is a top priority that promotes affective connections with game texts and structures how gamers understand video games as worldmaking and community- building through media production, consumption, and representation.

The Troubles of Gaymer and the Politics of Naming

Community building and worldmaking are not innocent practices. Feminist science and technology studies scholars such as Donna Haraway (1997, 2016) and

Anna Tsing (2010) remind us that worlding practices do not exist outside of relations of power, while queer scholars Miranda Joseph (2002) and Margot Weiss (2011) argue that community building and identity politics are inextricable from systems of oppression and exclusion. Community is often organized around similarities between community members and deemed a “safe space” for those included, more often than not erasing differences within the group in the name of cohesion and unity and excluding those whose differences cannot be erased. Failing to acknowledge or 85

discuss these differences often leads to a hierarchy of privilege (Lorde 1984), one here constructed through gender and race. Staying with the trouble of gaymer means tending to the complexities, nuances, and exclusions of the category, which I explore below.

Gaymer, like any category of identity, is filled with multiply contradictory and conflicting discourses. Many of the LGB gamers I spoke with during both research projects viewed “gaymer” more like a fluid umbrella category, functioning similar to queer rather than simple interpellating gay male gamers. Kristal, a self-identified gaymer (who also identifies a pansexual, genderqueer woman) views gaymer as a collective term for “non-normative gamers and all those who are left at the margins of society.” For Kristal, gaymer incorporated those who deviate from the normative straight white male subjectivity to include queer and trans folks, women, gamers of color. This argument is similar to Cohen’s (1991) analysis of the radical potential of queer politics to include all those who are marginalized by heteronormativity, such as poor single Black mothers, whose regulation by the state may be greater than many white gay men. Adam, a white gay male gaymer, put it this way: “Gaymer is a term that doesn’t specify gay male gamers, but all gamers of alternate sexualities and gender expressions, as well as their allies.” These two understandings seek to imagine gaymer also as a site for coalition, creating affiliations across different folks marginalized by the dominant gaming industry. 86

However, several of the trans gamers I interviewed and spoke with in

chatrooms had mixed feelings about the term. When asked about their thoughts,

Tristan, a trans and genderqueer gamer said:

It’s okay, but not great for people who don’t identify as gay. I know it’s supposed to be an umbrella term, but transgender people don’t really get lot of visibility from the LGBT acronym as it is, so I don’t feel like applies to me as a transgender person. It’s difficult enough explaining to the average person that trans isn’t the same thing as gay.

Kel, a lesbian trans woman on the GaymerConnect site, told me: “I don’t have a

problem associating with it myself, but I don’t feel like it describes me as a trans

gamer. I don’t identify as gay, so I feel like it at least partially doesn’t apply to me.”

However, Gage, a trans, pansexual, and asexual guy I interviewed in 2017, told me

that “gaymer” was “kitschy.” He went on to say, “I don’t see it as just gay. It’s

anybody under the LGBT spectrum. I see it as a silly umbrella term, and this is who

we are.” Despite these mixed feelings toward the term “gaymer,” the trans gamers I

spoke with still planned to attend GX conventions and participate in the online and physical spaces organized around “gaymer.” Rather than being rooted in any

essential sexual or gender identity category, the folks I spoke to view gaymer as

rooted in and connected to the GX community, and several of these trans gamers

seemed attracted to the gaymer community of GX in spite of its name. To account

for these feelings of exclusivity by the category of gaymer, one of the organizers of

the GX convention, Toni, who herself identifies as a queer trans woman, ensured

that each GX event would have gender-neutral bathrooms, meet-up events 87

designated trans-identified spaces, and that every participant was given pronoun stickers on their badges. While the category of gaymer fails to hail all these trans gamers, the gaymer community and GX organizers seek to provide a more inclusive space that takes seriously the needs, desires, and concerns of trans gamers.

Similarly, while the community of gaymers does include a large number of gaymers of color, several of those gaymers expressed concern that the first few GX conventions didn’t include enough discussion about the representation of race in video games. Gaymers of color I talked with also felt that many of the panels and speakers were predominandy white gay men, and ultimately pushed for a broader discussion of race in the second GX convention, which took place in July 2014.

When these critiques of inclusivity and diversity were brought to the attention of the

GX organizers, efforts were made to structure the future conventions differently.

Topics such as intersectionality in gaming, Black and Latino gaming culture, and conversations about the “default whiteness” in games permeated the second year’s convention. Building on this diversity for the third convention in 2015, organizers brought on Tanya DePass as Diversity Liaison and Panel Organizer. DePass is the founder of #INeedDiverseGames on Twitter, working to create and mobilize games activism and shift the dominant narratives in video games; she is known for her writing on gaming diversity, feminism, and race and racism in games. With DePass on staff, GX3 and GX4 (which took place in December 2015 and September 2016, respectively) included more diverse panels on trans inclusion, race and 88

intersectionality, cultural appropriation, and racial and gender equality in the tech world. At the Opening Ceremonies of GX3, DePass noted that while the GX3 team strove to include more diverse panels at speakers at this year’s convention, she was excited to work with the team to help further bring race into conversations at

GaymerX. As I discuss in chapter 3, during the GX4 opening ceremonies, DePass beckons to the people of color in the room: “Brown people in the audience, I see you! I want to see people of color presenting [at GaymerX East in the coming months] on topics that don’t necessarily have to do with race.” Here, DePass, a

Black bisexual woman, hopes to diversify the discursive landscape of the panels, creating space where people of color are not relegated to their experiences as racialized subjects. Additionally, the burden of discussing race does not fall solely on gamers and designers of color; as I discuss in the next chapter, one white panelist discusses her reasons for creating queer characters of color as romance options in her games, even when these characters see less play and interactions. Promoting conversations about the racial and gendered troubles of gaymer identity and community function as a utopian longing for more inclusive and diverse worldmaking practices without erasing the social hierarchies that make the gaymer identity and community possible. 89

Conclusion

Drawing on feminist STS scholars and feminist scholars of color, I read the category of gaymer and the space of GX as sites of queer gamer worldmaking.

Haraway (2016) writes that rather than giving up hope and asserting that there is no possibility to make things better, we should instead “learn to inherit without denial and stay with the trouble to damaged worlds” (150). Gaymer communities need to continue to inherit their racial and gendered trouble without denial if both the identity category and community hope to continue to promote diversity. Gaymer as an identity does create worldmaking possibilities in troubling the traditional notions of “gamer,” but tending to the category’s racial and gendered troubles creates further possibilities for coalition building. Articulating the difference between home spaces—places for comfort, joy, and rejuvenation—and coalition spaces—places for organizing across difference to effect social change—Bernice Johnson Reagon (1983) writes, “If you feel the strain, you might be doing good work” (362). The gaymer community has been constituted as a space for marginalized queer gamers and their allies, but attending to gender and racial hierarchies within the margin gestures towards a more radical queer politics that Cohen describes. Staying with the trouble means that must we critically reflect on our positions within the worlds we are making and that we must actively engage in making these environments more livable. “It matters which worlds world worlds,” (Haraway 2016, 165), and as I suggest above, the 90

gaymer community seems to sustain and nurture its participants while simultaneously striving to become more diverse and inclusive.

My theoretical and methodological approaches to the gaymer community can be understood as a loving critique of queer community building through reparative reading practices (Sedgwick 2003). Like my fellow gamers, I am hopeful for a sociocultural shift that will bring about broader awareness of race, gender, and sexuality in gaming culture. And the cultural transformation doesn’t come without work: community-building, worldmaking, and finding a sense of belonging lie at the heart of a lot of survival for many queer and otherwise marginalized people. Given the political climate that currently engulfs us, finding sustainable and meaningful worldmaking practices helps us build more livable worlds for more kinds of folks.

For many queer gamers, both the category of “gaymer” and playing games do just that. As I explore in the next chapter, there are many ways that playing games world queer gamers. Playing games is one of these reparative practices through which gamers find a sense of community, belonging, and authenticity. “What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 2003, 150). The emergence of the category of “gaymer” allows queer gamers to find the worlds they feel most comfortable and safe inhabiting, even in pop culture and in video games and gaming communities. 91

Playing with Queer Gamer Desire:

The Space of GaymetX and the Uses of the Erotic

29 September 2016, 7:23PM, “VIP Party-Outdoor Pool ijounge ”

Clusters o f people are gathered around the various high standing tables around the hotel lounge and pool area for the GaymerX VIP Party. Several attendees stand in line at both cash bars, and several others are pickingfingerfoods and snacks from the outdoor buffet. To the left of one of the cash bars sits a pianist behind a keyboard. He has been playing various songs from video game music, of which I can identify a soundtrack from Final Fantasy VII and the theme from the

Mario series. The sun has already set, and only a few lights and space heaters dimly light the outside space. Jason and I wait around on an outdoor couch for a guy, John, we're meeting from Grindr. A few moments later; John spots us, introduces himself and joins us on the couch. The pianist finishes his song, and we take the brief moment to clap and cheer before we start asking John about his trip out West. From the East coast, John informs us that he is visiting for Folsom Street Fair and

GaymerX. He attended GX last year with some friends who weren ’t able to come this year, which would explain why he would use Grindr to find nerdy gay men to hang out with for the weekend.

We talk about his experience at Folsom, which he says was a good time, but that he spent way too much money here in California already. “It was really nice to be able to catch lots of Pokemon at

Fisherman's Wharf though! Lots ofMagikarp and Psyduck!” He also mentioned that when he explained to hisfriends at Folsom that he was going to a queer gamer convention, they ask if it’s like the Folsom of video games. (They make fun of me for it!” 92

The atmosphere of the GaymerX convention is constituted through encounters of bodies, gaming practices, and queer desires that attendees bring together during the scheduled event. As I note above, the spaces of the hotel patio and pool area are reconstituted as a queer gaming space through a pianist playing video game music, a dimly lit area which feels awfully similar to a house party, a cluster of queer gamers united for food, alcohol, or conversation, performing identities through their nerdy regalia—like Jason and his Pokemon tie and/or sexually suggestive outfits—like my unbuttoned shirt revealing my hairy chest. These collective performances hint at a desire to transform the hotel—a space often conceived through normative ideas of family vacation, business trips, and capitalist consumption—into a space that brings together both geek aesthetics and queer sexual cultures.

This is especially appropriate given John’s story about his Folsom friends making fun of him for coming to GX. As mentioned in the previous chapters, many of my informants express a sense of irreconcilability of their queerness and their identities as geeks and gamers. Gamer/geek and gay/queer are seen as separate spheres of identity, oftentimes leaving queer gamers to feel isolated in both communities. John’s story illustrates this. His friends from Folsom Street Fair cannot begin to fathom the possibilities of a queer gaming event like GX. And when John tries to explain, they assume that the possibility for more sexual encounters is what makes the convention enticing. While I imagine this to be the case for some, as I 93

explain later in this chapter, the GaymerX convention is a space for queer socialities that include and exceed sexual longing and desire.

This chapter takes a “desire-centered55 (Tuck 2009) approach to understanding how queer gamers organize and construct space at GaymerX. To understand the multiple and contradictory forms of desire that manifest and emerge at GaymerX, I turn to feminist and queer understandings of the erotic to expand the possibilities for what counts as queer desire—a queer desire that both includes and goes beyond sexual longing. I argue that GaymerX is constituted through an atmosphere of the erotic that foregrounds multiple types of queer gamer desire— some that celebrate, some that frustrate, some that are subversive, some that succeed, and some that fail.

Queer Desire and The Uses of the Erotic

Queer gaming events create worldmaking opportunities that might “make our lives. . .richer and more possible55 (Lorde 1984, 87). In her pivotal essay, “The

Uses of the Erotic,55 Black lesbian feminist scholar Audre Lorde (1984) theorizes the erotic as a way to connect with folks through our similarities and across our differences in order to build more possible worlds. Existing beyond the bedroom,

Lorde defines the erotic as “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us55 (89). The erotic constitutes “our deepest cravings55 (90) that form “the power which comes from 94

sharing deeply any pursuit with another person” (88). Therefore, Lorde argues that the erotic should be embraced in all components of our lives. “Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable o f’ (89-90). The erotic grows our desires and expands what we see as possible, asking us “to not settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor? the merely safe” (90), but rather to build the worlds we desire most.

For me and my fellow GX convention goers, the erotic is characterized by feelings of longing and connection.

Building on Lorde, queer anthropologist Jafari Allen views the erotic as “an embodied human resource, composed of individuals’ personal histories and (sexual, social) desires and directed toward deepening and enlivening individuals’ experiences” (Allen 2012, 327). Like Lorde, Allen views the erotic as force that exists beyond just the sexual, traversing bodies, social spaces, and events. The erotic functions as “a practice of desire” that is constituted by and through embodied social categories such as race, gender, sexuality, and identity (326).

In this chapter, I trace moments of intimacy and expressions of sexual desire through my fieldnotes from GaymerX and across my interviews with queer gamers to examine how the space of the convention is constituted through the erotic. My examination of the erotic takes up Eve Tuck’s call for “desire-centered research”

(Tuck 2009). For Tuck, “desire-based research frameworks are concerned with 95

understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives”

(416). Rather than focus solely on how GX seeks reparations from the mainstream gaming industry through the logics of better representation in games, I focus instead on the manifestations of queer desire already present at the convention. I document

“loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of the lived lives and communities” (417). For the queer gamers I examine and interview, desire manifests in ways that allow for celebration and satisfaction, but also at times disappointment, refusal, and subversion. As I argue below, the space of GaymerX allows for these multiple and sometimes contradictory manifestations of desire.

Many queer ethnographers grapple with the ways that their erotic subjectivities and desires affect the communities that they study. Conflicts between desire and ethics in fieldwork (Newton 1993) are nothing new to queer ethnographers (see Wekker 2009 and Fields 2016). Considered one the earliest queer ethnographers, Esther Newton (1993) writes:

So, by the “erotic dimension,” I mean, first, that my gay informants and I shared a very important background assumption that our social arrangements reflected—that women are attracted to women and men to men. Second, the very fact that I have worked with other gays means that, like straight colleagues, some of the people who were objects of my research were also potential sexual partners, and vice versa. Partly because of this, my key informants and sponsors have usually been more to me than an expedient way of getting information, and something different from “just” friends. Information has always flowed to me in a medium of emotion—ranging from passionate (although unconsummated) erotic attachment to profound affection to lively interest—that empowers me in my projects and, when it is reciprocated, helps motivate informants to put up with my questions and intrusions. (10-11) 96

Here Newton challenges many of the unspoken anthropological assumptions that the erotic (and thus the sexual subjectivity of the ethnographer) does not—or at least should not—manifest in fieldwork (Newton 1993). Rather than denying the possibility for connection and longing, Newton actively and reflexively addresses the erotic possibilities in conducting queer ethnographic fieldwork. The erotic provides a unique opportunity for affective connections with her informants, strengthening her rapport and her emotional investments in the folks with whom she works. The erotic in fieldwork can also help bridge the gaps between differences amongst participants and differences between participant-observer and interlocutors. Lorde reminds us that through the erotic, “the sharing of joy.. .forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference” (88). Building on Lorde, Fields (2016) writes, “the erotic bridges what may seem like disparate worlds, allowing moments of shared desires; but those desires, and so research, are marked by the intersecting personal and social histories of love, loss, discrimination, violence, and intimacy”

(47). Foregrounding the erotic in the analysis of my fieldwork illustrates the ways that my participants and I are affectively tethered to one another through the space of GaymerX, even across our differences. As Fields suggests, the erotic “traces and bears trace of the ways people’s bodies, desires, and relationships are inhabited by the worlds in which they live” (47). 97

Newton’s reflexive approaches to the erotic inform my own fieldwork at

GX. At a convention full of queer gamers of many genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, body types, and interests, there were many times when I noticed a participant’s glance linger a little too long on the sexy cosplayer or the gamers across the table or the passerby in their regalia. There were several times, some of which I describe below, when I was the person whose gaze lingered longer than normal, or when I was the object of someone’s gaze. Because of this, I critically reflect on some of my own experiences of the erotic in the field, discussing moments of attraction, satisfaction, discomfort, and unease through my own eyes and feelings. Rather than shy away from these moments, I critically engage in these feelings of desire in order to illustrate how the erotic shapes the space of the convention.

It is important to note here, however, that not all desires that are imagined or that manifest at GaymerX, or anywhere else, are always met with satisfaction.

“Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well”

(Halberstam 2011, 3). While queer desires oftentimes fail in regards to heteronormativity, gender binaries, ideologies of reproduction and capitalist consumption, queer desires are also left unmet, leaving the desiring subject with a feeling of lack and unfulfilled longing. Failing, too, is also common among gamers.

Any person who has played a game can attest to the feelings of frustration and anger when you lose a game. Metaphorically speaking, failing to win the game and to have one’s desires met are especially common for queer gamers, as well as trans gamers and gamers of color. For example, desires for more trans characters and characters orr coior i are son ,‘it inaroiy 11 iuiimcu. r ir*n i t»ucca,u;>c uir uiis, uic cApiuiau _i j_* .011 uic luc-i au u t m _ j_i_:uu^ chapter examines some of the affective and material possibilities for understanding how some queer gainer desires are left unsatisfied, oftentimes feeding a deeper longing for change. The erotic points “to want and to wanting—that is, to the ways race, gender, sexuality, and other social differences and inequalities inflect desires, their satisfaction, and their denial” (Fields 2016, 47). Through an examination of manifestations of the erotic within the space of GaymerX, I attend to the multiple ways that desire is expressed, carried out, met or unmet in the space of GaymerX. In tracing the erotic in my fieldwork at GaymerX, I argue that the manifestations of queer gamer desire at GX4 gesture towards a queer future of gaming that is not yet here (Munoz 2009).

The erotic allows for me to weave back and forth between queer sexual desire and queerness as political desire. I use queer gamer desire in this chapter to mean any expression of political or sexual longing; queer gamer desires manifests as longings for diversity, more nuanced stories and worlds, more rich social connections, and more deeply gratifying moments of sexual fulfillment. It is my ultimate goal to tend to the messiness of desire and the erotic to better understand queer gamer sociality and queer worldmaking possibilities of video games and game communities. 99

The Celebration of Desire

One of the most common ways that desire manifests itself is through the celebration of queerness and gaming within the space of convention. For those who have attended previous GX conventions, it is a time for reconnection; for those new

to the convention, it is a time for making new connections with other queer gamers.

The community celebrates similarities in shared knowledge, passions, and identity while also valuing differences among the queer gamers who attend the convention.

Celebration is one of the main ways that the erotic and desire manifest within the space of GaymerX. As I address below, these celebrations create the possibility for the flourishing of queer desire and sociality.

Queer Gaming Ronds

29 September 2016, 11:30PM, Hotel hobby

Jason, Laura, and I have just arrived in Santa Clara at the hotel for GX4 around

11:30am. We wait in the lobby, since we aren't allowed to check into our room until 3pm. Laura’s volunteer orientation begins at 12pm, so we sit in a square on some couches to pass the time on our phones.

One of our close friends, Kensuke, sneakily walks up to the couches and takes a seat next to Laura on the couch opposite of me. “Heeey!” I voice over at him. “How’s it going?” We all exchange a few words about his travelsfrom Tennessee to get here. Two more friends, Alex and

Brian, spot us and join us on the couches. Brian, Alex, Laura, and Ken all begin talking about 100

volunteer training. As a few minutes go by, one of them opens up the Pokemon Go application and announces that there are three Grow lithe nearby. Excited, the rest of us pull out our phones and immediately open up the application to catch the Pokemon. Ken remarks that Growlithe are really hardfor him to find in Tennessee, but he seems to have found a lot here in California. We share our experiences about what we have caught, what levels we all were on in the game, and which Pokemon are native to our geographic regions.

s is 12pm approaches, my volunteerfriends wander off for training, leaving my boyfriend and me alone on the couches. He rests his head on me and starts to play Hearthstone while I continue my observations. I notice that there are two other conventions going on in the same space: participants of one marked by their red lanyards, and participants of the other marked by the fan

From the Duff skateboard to the colorful graphic tees to the flickering of fingers while playing Pokemon Go, all of these behaviors and signals allow for attendees to identify each other and to signal their connection to the queer gaming 101

community. For queer gamers, playing games produces many of the manifestations of celebratory queer desire and queer sociality. In the excerpt above, we all had the

Vokemon Go game on our phones, and we were all eager to catch the Growlithe once someone announced they were present. We were all eager to share our experiences playing the game. Since VokemonGo had been a popular video game over the summer for those with smart phones, it was no surprise that the game would appear in multiple spaces and multiple occasions during the convention. I recall a moment during the VIP party when I was sitting around a large round table with ten other convention goers, half of whom I had never met before. Almost all of us were engaged in a conversation while also pressing our fingers in a distinct fashion on our phones, hinting that most of us were playing Vokemon Go. One of my new friends, whose phone is close to dying, tells me to let him know if any rare Pokemon spawn.

I nod in agreement, and he begins to converse with the gamer next to him.

GaymerX brings together folks who oftentimes feel isolated because of their queer geekiness, and I argue that games function to promote a sense of what Karen

Tongson describes as “remote intimacy” amongst the attendees at the convention.

According to Tongson (2011), surburban queer youth are drawn together and affectively connected through their musical interests; their connections to songs from popular culture—which for Tongson are forms of queer of color community building—manifest in spaces such as the dance nights in amusement parks. Tongson writes: 102

And yet these artifacts of viewing continue to resonate in the queer of color suburban imaginary, creating collective intimacies out of what may have been solitary viewing practices in the past [...] We may not have read that book, seen that show, or heard that song together, but we do so now, not in the spirit of nostalgia but as if it truly is the first time. Together, it is the first time. (2011, 24; original emphasis)

Figure 10. Image from GX4 of two gamers playing Dance Dance devolution. Another group of gamers spectate the game. Photo taken by Ugly Machine Productions.

I expand Tongs on7 s framework to include video games by suggesting that though gaming is often an isolated practice, game technologies allow for connections across time and space. Shared knowledge of games at GaymerX create a sense of belonging that draws people to the convention. Games can be encountered all over the convention. In the arcade space of the conventions, folks play Super Smash Brvs.,

Dance Dance devolution, and giant Jenga together. On the second floor of the hotel, there is an entire tabletop and board game room with games for folks to play together. And in the Expo Hall, there are independent game developers who have 103

brought demos of their own games—both digital games and tabletop—to share with the world.

Recalling one of his favorite moments at the third GaymerX convention,

Jose mentions playing Rock Band 3 in the middle of the Expo Hall with a group of 25 people watching him and a few other participants jamming out together. Jose says:

Playing Rock Band J, that was really, really fun! [...] Um, I don’t remember.. ..I think I did sing. But just being there—like it was an open area—and with people who were just willing to watch as well. And to jam along with the songs and sing along. Like, I think it was like noon or one o’ clock in the afternoon, and people were just so lively. But also the fact that it was such an open space. I think that a lot of people assumed.. .that gamers tend to be—well nerds in general—tend to be awkward and anti-social, and this was not the case at all. Which has been true about every GX. [...] You’re here which means that you’re willing to let people bring you out of your shell. And those people were; they were just in it to win it. I loved it!

For Jose, playing Rock Band 3 at GaymerX was one of his favorite memories. As if he were actually performing on stage with his fellow bandmates, Jose had an audience of passersby who were also worlded into the game through the space made by

GaymerX. They connected with Jose and the other players. In this open space of the

Expo Hall, full of vendors, sponsors, and developers showing off their games, this group—both players and spectators—came together because of the affective experience of Rock Band J, and in doing so, challenged the stereotypes and assumptions of the sociality of gamers. The open play of the setup—the pleasure of playing with others, of being watched, and of feeling famous—is erotic for both the players and the spectators. As Jose mentions, the collective experience of gaming in 104

the space of GaymerX has the possibility to “bring you out of your shell” and to draw you into the experience of GaymerX. A shared sense of queer gamer collectivity form through playing and experiencing these games together; collectivity forms through shared moments of intimacy of playing together.

What Tongson’s “remote intimacy” describes is an affective experience of intimacy that is mediated through shared practices and desires. While Tongson’s understanding of intimacy is mediated through telecommunications, I extend her theoretical framework beyond televisual media to gaming. At GX games function as that glue coheres the community and constitutes the social space. They world the attendees: they bring us together and create new possibilities for connection with one another because of our shared identity, even despite our differences. One such difference is geographic. It is an accomplishment that we all are able to come together: Ken lives in Tennessee, Brian lives in Texas, Laura lives in Oregon, and

Alex, Jason, and I live in the Bay Area. The economic burden to take off work and travel such a distance to indulge in a celebratory weekend of queerness and gaming is not an easy feat, only accessible to those who are afforded the privilege and have the excess time, money, and energy. Nevertheless, some decide to make economic sacrifices for their queer gamer bonds at GaymerX. Some folks take a weekend off work; some fly in from different parts of the globe; some sign up as volunteers and dedicate 10 hours of service over weekend to help mitigate some of the cost of the 105

ticket. These queer bonds are a form of queer gamer celebration that revels in

collective sociality that games facilitate between gamers over the weekend.

Diversity and Representation

As I have argued in the previous chapters, diversity in both video game

representation and in game communities is one of the main queer gamer desires. In

her interview, Emily says, “Part of the reason I like playing video games is to play as

other people and get different stories other than my own.. .If we have more diversity in games, then you get a broader experience of other people’s experience. [...]

Diversity is a really big conversation that especially happened this past year. There were a lot of panels about adding in more diversity into games.” These panels that

Emily references call for more racial, gendered, and sexual diversity in games and celebrate the already existing diversity that exists among both AAA games and indie games.

30 September 2016, 12:30AM, 'Games Made Me Gay (And Other Happy Endings)”

I walk in late to the panel room, but luckily a few friends of mine have saved me a seat near the front of the room. As I sit down, I notice game artfor an indie game called “Kisses and

Curses. ” The panel\ which consists of three women from the indie game company, Voltage

Entertainment, spoke about the games they have created that center on LGBT romance, l^auren, the main speaker; discussed how seeing a lack of lesbian characters in mainstream games pushed her 106

to write a game with lesbian and queer romance options. Specifically, she wanted to write stories

where the lesbians don’t die, with happy endings rather than tragic story arcs.

Lauren flips the slide to more game art and points to the audience; in a salesman-like

voice, she states, 6CYou, too, can make gay games!” The audience members laugh. She continues to

say, ‘We want more people to make games, and we want to play more gay games... that I didn H

make. ” The audience laughs again. Lauren and her crew begin to talk about different game engines

that are easy to use, cheap or free, and are user friendly. Among them are Twine and RenPy, to

which someone in the audience stands up and says that there will be a workshop here at GX4 on

RenPy so that people can i(get theirfeet wet” with the program.

The panel opens up for discussion and A. An audience member asks about moments for the panel when diversity didn’t work—like are there examples when they received backlash for diversity. One panelist discussed how they specifically only make romance games, which means they can only do certain work that other types of games can’t. They note that they hear a lot of fans discuss how they wish other dominant game genres would “queer up the routes, ”which is another reason why they decided to focus on LGBT romance games. Lauren discussed how, because they do track the choices that players make through telemetry, they have noticed that the darker the skin of the potential romance partner, “the less that fans seem to go after them. ” This was in regards to a specific Black character in Kisses and Curses. Lauren adds that despite this, 6 We’re gonna keep doing it because they want to keep open routesfor people of color. ’’Lauren also explains that after one of theirfirst games, fans had said something along the lines of “Come back when you have a non-binary romance, ” to which they created the character of Alex, who is a non-binary character in 107

one of their games that is romanceable. Lauren and the other panelists discuss that one example of

this isn't enough, but that it's important to start that conversation and explore the possibilities of

what a non-binary romanceable character would look like.

The final question posed to the panel is whether they plan to ever create an asexual

character. They mention that as a main character, they haven't made one yet. However, they

definitely plan to create an asexual romance option. They mention that this possibility would stretch the lines of thinking that separate sex (acts and desires) from romance and sexuality. Nonetheless, they say that these kinds of questions are what start the conversations about creating more diverse

romance options in games. We need more types of these questions.

This is the first panel that I attended at GX4, tided “Video Games Made Me

Gay/’ and its content is pretty similar to other panels. Each panel lasts about 50 or so minutes; the panelists sit in front of an audience with a slide show presentation and leave the last 15 or 10 minutes for Q&A. Panels are a large part of the GX space, and it seems that many of the attendees go to at least one of the panels at the convention. There are panels on all different sorts of topics, and each panel is categorized online on the GX4 schedule. “Video Games Made Me Gay,” for example, was given the tags of “Board/Card Games,” “Comics and Literary,”

“Digital Games,” “Geek Diversity: LGBTQ,” “Geek Diversity: Race and Culture,” and “Geek Diversity: Women and Feminism.” These categories and tags are searchable on the GX4 schedule site, allowing users to pick and choose which panels they hope to attend. 108

This panel, along with many of the others, focused on diversity in games.

LGBT romance options were the focus of the talks, driving home the point that

representation in games matters to the attendees of GaymerX. The online

description of this panel describes its goal: examining “how media (video games,

comics, movies, etc) can help people with their identity in a variety of ways, what representation in media means to you, and how we can continue to make it better for

future generations.” Diversity matters to these gamers because it creates more interesting narratives to which they can connect. It also creates more possibilities for marginalized folks to see themselves in games. This desire for diversity paints a picture of the types of gamers who attend the event and the shared values among the attendees. There are moments when I can hear participants take up these values and discuss why the convention is important. Here in this panel, we see how the speakers are critical of a lot representation of LGBT issues and romance in mainstream games. Rather than seeing games kill off the queer characters (oftentimes specifically lesbians, as referenced in this panel), known as the “Bury Your Gays” trope, Lauren desires to see queer characters that thrive and live. But because those are few and far between, those games oftentimes need to be made by indie developers. This is illustrative of Anna Anthropy’s (2012) argument that more people—such as housewives, queers, freaks, normals, dropouts, and dreamers—need to create games so that we diversify the stories told in video games. When games fail to meet the expectations of their players, that is a motivator for more people to take up making 109

games to tell the stories they want to hear, see, experience, and play. And as both

Anthropy and this panel suggest, it is fairly easy to find the tools to make video

games that capture more nuanced and complex stories and that tell stories that we want to play.

This panel in particular gets at two unique themes I want to explore and

think through. The first is that this panel focuses on diversity in romance games.

While queer game scholars have taken up the question of LGBT representation in video games, most of this discussion has focused on LGBT romance options, which is illustrated here. It is interesting to note that when we think of LGBT and queer content, the conversation is often reduced to which types of characters are romanceable or if a game has a queer romance option. But what types of queerness get foreclosed when we focus on romance options? Are there other ways that queerness can be deployed in games? What are the possibilities for queerness beyond romance or even beyond representation (Ruberg 2016)? While these questions arise in my mind, I want to stay true to the values and conversations that are happening at the convention. Romance options for queers matter, and people care about having those options available. These conversations are so important that indie companies, like Voltage, have specifically taken on the genre of “romance games” in order to bring more diverse romance options in video games. In this regard, many of the conversations of GaymerX are constituted through the erotic—the queer sexual desire to include queer romance and sexual options in games. 110

And while diversity is a shared value of the attendees of GaymerX, it is interesting to note which types of diversity matter and to whom. While gender and sexual diversity seem to be the talking points of this panel, Lauren suggests that gamers allow racial diversity to fall by the way side. What is it about the players of this game that they rarely pursue romance options with the Black character? Studies of sexual racism show that in marketplaces of desire, black bodies are seen as less desirable than white bodies (McGlotten 2013, 68), especially in gay sexual economies.

Lauren’s observation that fewer queer gamers romance Black characters leads me to notice the racial disparities in the world of games. When it comes to romance, white bodies are more desirable, and characters of color are left to the side, much like

Black queer men on gay dating apps. What it is inspiring, nonetheless, is Lauren and her team’s commitment to racial diversity in their games. The panelists—all of whom

I read as white—refuse to stop making queer characters of color just because players avoid romancing them. Their continued creation of characters of color, despite existing consumer desires, is an example of erotic optimism and utopian longing.

Lauren refuses to accept the queer sexual desires of gamers as the here and now— where Black characters are devalued and seen as lesser—and instead looks beyond the horizon to imagine a future where queer characters of color enjoy the same erotic potential as white characters. This optimism is another form of queer gamer desire that views racial, gendered, and sexual representation as a social justice issue to be celebrated and embraced. Ill

Another space where the celebration of diversity is played out is in the

Cosplay Pageant. Every year at the GX convention, there is a pageant for cosplay, or

costumed play: where fans dress up in the style of their favorite characters. At the pageant, contestants walk onto the stage, show off their costumes—either

homemade or a pre-made purchased costume—and are given a few minutes to talk

to both the panel of judges and the audience. The Cosplay Pageant tends to draw in a large crowd and typifies much of the celebratory queer gamer desire of the convention.

2 October 2016, 11AM, “Cosplay Pageant”

I walk into the large room that was once panel room A and B combined. A stage has been formed\ on which sit the panel of judges to the right and to the left are Miss Kitty Powers—an

Australian drag queen dressed in a Sonic the Hedgehog themed dress—and Matt Conn—the main organiser of the convention. The room is full\ which leads me to believe there are about 350people in the room, including the 50 or so cosplayers who stand in the back. Matt and Kitty Powers call the attention of the crowd\ and some contemporary pop music plays.

Thisyear there are more than 50 cosplay participants, all of whom are here to show off their costumes and to try and snatch a trophy and one of the six cash prices. The first group of cosplayers is a group of eight people cosplaying as different characters from the Super Smash Bros. game. They all take the stage, strike a pose in their characters styles, and the crowd goes wild. They exit stage right so the judges can view each of their costumes. They have entered the pageant as one 112

group entry. One of the next cosplayers to take the stage is a grown-up version ofUnk from The

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time game. However; this participant's version ofUnk is a bit more of a sexy take: rather than a green tunic, he is wearing a green tank top and green short shorts,

revealing his hairy chest and large calves. Kitty Powers, after announcing the cosplayer, comments:

“It's a grown up bear Link! It's like adult Link from my fantasies!” The crowd cheers for this

beared-up version o f Link. A few contestants later comes another group entry, this time three cosplayers dressed up as the Eevee Brothers, who appeared in the original Pokemon series. Their costumes are comprised of colorful hair.; tight yellow shirts that reveal their muscular chests and arms, a Pokeball belt buckle, and tight skinny jeans. One of them performs a deathdrop on stage. Many in the audience cheer and swoon, myself included. They turn to the panel of judges, and in striking a pose, each of them rests their hands on the ass of the adjacent Eevee brother, all for the audience to see. More cheers roar from the crowd, and I hear a few whistles. The next contestant is a crossplayer—or a cross-gendered cosplayer who is dressed as a character of a different gender. Matt and Kitty Powers announce her costume as Handsome jack, the hypermasculine main antagonist of the Borderland ££#71 series. And one of the last participants is dressed as a character named

Koadhog a fat-bodiedfugitive bikerfrom the game Overwatch. His costume is intricate and meticulous, matching the character's mechanised armor and even his large roadster tattoo on his belly. The crowd screams its loudest for this cosplayer; at least from what I can tell. This concludes the co splay ers 'performances.

Thejudges take a few minutes to deliberate, and within a few minutes, the results are in.

After a few of the categories are announced, including that the Levee Brothers had won the ‘Best 113

Queering o f a Character; ” Kitty Stryker, the head organiser of the cosplay pageant and one of the judges, takes the mic. ‘7 would like to say that it's so exciting to see so many fa t cosplayers. ”

Stryker herselfprides herself on being a fat cosplayer; and after her comment the crowd cheers and shares in her excitement. She announces that the Best in Show - Audience Choice goes to Roadhog.

The crowd roars once again for the Roadhog cosplayer: After he is given his cash pri^e and trophy, the rest of the cosplayersjoin him on stage so they can take a photo for the GX photographers.

Figure 11. Group photo of all the cosplayers from the GX4 Cosplay Pageant. Photo taken by Ugly Machine Productions.

The Cosplay Pageant illustrates the celebratory nature of queer gamer desire through its merging of queerness and geekiness. Here, queer gamers literally take the stage to perform their favorite characters with their own queer twists as a way of 114

reimagining their own belonging to these game worlds. The celebration of sexual identity and gender performance is illustrated through the queering of characters, such as the Eevee Brothers, the grown-up bear version of Link, and the gender bent cosplay of Handsome Jack. Additionally, there is celebration of already visibly queer characters present in pageant: Alex, the non-binary character from the Voltage Inc. game mentioned above, makes an appearance, as does Sailor Uranus, a queer character from the Sailor Moon animated series. This celebration of queerness and gaming/geek fandom animate the convention, affectively tethering the participants of the Cosplay Pageant together, drawing them into the celebratory space of GX. We also see the celebration of diverse body types here at the convention, culminating in the Roadhog cosplayer’s win of Audience’s Choice of Best in Show, the most prestigious tide of the pageant. Collectively, the cosplayers, the hosts, the judges, and the audience come together in this designated space to celebrate queer sexual desire and gamer and geek identity.

These ethnographic slices paint an image of the space of GaymerX as embracing diversity and inclusion through the celebration of queerness and geekiness, both within video games and within game communities. While some contemporary queer theoretical approaches are critical of diversity as a part of liberal inclusion (see Ward 2008), diversity here at GX creates queer worldmaking possibilities that sustain and affirm queer gamers’ sexual and gendered desires, subjectivities, and performances. Diversity becomes one of the core tenets of the 115

convention, as well as the topic of conversation that dominates most of the spaces of

GaymerX.

The Sexualization of Queer Gamer Desire

As mentioned above, the space of GaymerX is constituted through the erotic, a queer longing that both embraces and moves beyond sexual desire. In the ethnographic scenes above, we see that the sexual is celebrated through queer romance options, centering queer characters marginalized in games , the queering of straight characters, and the sexualization of cosplay. However, the manifestation of individual sexual desire hardly emerges as an organizing component of the space. In fact, some of the participants I talked to seek to actively desexualize the space of

GaymerX. Emily, for instance, is critical of how “a lot of queer spaces are sexualized” and she speaks of GX as a non-sexualized space. However, like John’s queer non-gamer friends, outsiders of the community often assume that GX is a just a space for hooking up. In many ways, the sexualization of queer spaces often feeds a stereotype of queer folks being hypersexual. In order to grapple with the nuances of queer gamer sexual desire, I complicate this either/or positioning—GaymerX either as a non-sexual space or as a hypersexual space—by examining my own sexual desire in the space and the sexual desires of others I saw at GaymerX. These queer gamer sexual desires, I argue, create possibilities for queer worldmaking and queer utopian longings. 116

30 September 2016, 8:35PM, GaymerX Concert

It is the end of the first night of the convention. I am in the large combined Panel Room A and B for the GaymerX Concert with several of my GXfriends. About to take the stage is my friend, Adam, who is one of musical guests for the convention. I had heard him perform at the very first GaymerX, and I had fallen deeply in love with his music. His specialty is chiptune music, or synthetic techno music that incorporates musical elements like that of oldfashioned 8-bit cartoons.

He wields an 8-bit pixelated violin as his musical weapon on his stage. I know most of the songs he plays, which makes my dancing to his music that much more lively. He begins his set-list, and I lose myself. Emily and I join a group of people to the right of the stage where Adam is playing, and we create a dance circle. There is a feeling of intimacy in the room, as eyes linger across the dancing bodies. My shirt becomes mostly unbuttoned to reveal my chest hair and sweat; Tm attempting to attract a cute gamer boy to come join me in dancing. My eyes also linger on Adam. I am enthralled by his music, as it seems everyone else is. I am also enthralled by the way he dances on stage while playing his violin. He too seems lost in the music, working and sweating across the entire stage.

While relatively empty given the amount of space with maybe 40 people, those who are here seem to be lost in the music. The lights are dimmed and a mesmerising video display plays to the right stage and a light show fills the room, creating the atmosphere of a club. Dan, a furry whom I had met before and whose sexual advances I had dodged, is wearing his paw gloves and his furry tail. We make eye contact, and hejoins my dancing circle. He shakes his tail in my general direction, in what

I assume is an attempt to get me to dance with him. I stick to my own space in the group, but I am 117

rather unfa^ed. I am still lost in the music. The audience cheers for him at the end of every song; he has captured their hearts and energy with his tunes.

I pull severalpeople from our dance circle to the center; so we can be closer to the performer.

I look around the room of sweaty dancing bodies. I continue to attempt to make eye contact with

Adam as he and I dance, performing my knowledge of his songs and of my own sexuality in an attempt to impress him. We exchange eye contact once or twice, but I move my focus to group o f dancers around me. One of the dancers moves to the center of our circle, claiming the spotlight. She busts a move, but moves back to the outer circle. We cheer for her; and we wait for someone else to take the center. After a few moments, I decide to take it, showing off some fancy footwork I had learned playing Dance Dance Revolution and spinning in circles. They cheerfor me and I move to the outer circle. Everyone in the circle has taken their turn in the spot light. I notice Emily's eyes linger a bit on the woman who first took the center. Her ga%e Ungers longer than I expect. This dance continues for another 15 minutes, until the lights are brought back up and the set-list is complete. Emily and I leave the dancefloor, and we escape to our hotel room, exhausted but energised. Or at least I am!

The site of the dance club has been theorized in terms of queer place, queer time, and queer community (Halberstam 2005; Allen 2009). As a space for queer longing for connection, sexual desire, and queer gamer community, the GX Concert illustrates the atmospheric pressures and forces of the erotic. In this queer place and time—that exists outside of heteronormative and capitalist structures of family and production and that embraces sexual desire outside of procreation—the previously 118

designated panel rooms are re-oriented into a space for queer sexual embodiment through the music, the lights, and the dancing. In this space, erotic glances linger over bodies lost in the music. It is an intimate space for queer gamer sexual desire that brings bodies in close contact with each other; it blends familiar queer club spaces with video game aesthetics of chiptune music. My own performance of sexual identity and longing come the fore: my unbuttoned shirt, my bodily synchronization with the music, my aim to impress the performer. And it is not just my own body that is caught up in this erotic “atmosphere55; both Emily and Dan are also “attuned55

(Stewart 2011) to the erotic. They yearn for acknowledgement from those on the dancefloor who have caught their eyes. The GX Concert becomes a space for connection, longing, and community—a queer world made possible through the atmospheric elements of queer gamer sexual desire. This utopian longing for connection and community echoes Munoz's discussion of utopic hopefulness for a queer futurity that is not yet here. The erotic here expands our understanding of what forms of connection are made possible between gamers, their desires, and their relationships to games.

But any vision of utopia can manifest as someone else5s dystopia. For example, in the scenario above, Emily, Dan, and myself are all left empty handed, our desires unmet, our longings failed to be sated. While the erotic and the sexual are celebrated in this space of the dance, we leave unfulfilled and still longing for a more successful connection: Emily for the green-haired dancer, Dan for me, I for Adam. 119

However, like Munoz’s queer utopia, it is impossible to be fulfilled; rather, this longing functions to promote a queer gamer sociality that embraces, rather than dismisses, sexual desire and erotic longing.

Beyond the space of the dance, the rest of the convention is also in part constituted through sexual desire and sexual signaling. And unfortunately, this isn’t the only time I reject Dan’s advances for Adam’s presence.

29 September 2016, 8:15PM, “VTP Party-Magnolia Room”

After migrating into the Magnolia Room from the pool area for the VIP party, I make my rounds, greeting my friends whom I haven’t seen in a year. I make my way to a round table, where Jason, Emily, Matt, and John are all sitting. Several otherfolks we collectively know fill the empty spaces at the table, and we go around and do introductionsfor everyone. Dan, is wearingfluffy tail and animal paws gloves, comments on my red BadDragon drawstring bag from across the table.

“I know where you got that one, ” he mentions, referencing that he too was at Folsom Street Fair and that he too must have picked up a bag. i(lt came mth so many goodies: stickers, teeny wienies.. .and that lube!” I realise that my BadDragon bag might have given the assumption to

Dan that I was a furry, luckily, techno music began to play in the middle o f our conversation, and

I notice on the other end of the room that my friend, Adam, is DJingfor the party. I disengage from

Dan to look at Emily and Jason, and I comment, “I think thats Adam, DJing the VIP Party. ”

While I ultimately deny Dan the opportunity to talk more about the contents of the BadDragon bag, I do want to note that I believe what makes him interested in sitting at our table and willing to talk to me was the signaling of my queer bag. As 120

Emily points out in my interview with her, attendees feel safe assuming the queerness of others at the convention, which makes it easier and potentially less intimidating to strike up conversations with strangers. This assumption of queerness, here in this scene with Dan and me defined through the sexually erotic, speak to the possibilities of the worldmaking of the GX convention. I imagine queer worldmaking here as a way to challenge the assumed heteronormativity of public spaces. Sex is public (Warner and Berlant 2005 [1998]), as bodily performances, sartorial choices (my BadDragon bag and Dan’s furry tail), and lingering looks become subversive performances of queerness that contest the heteronormative understandings of public space.

As I hint above, despite the celebration of both queemess and geekiness through a queer gamer desire, some desires are left unfilled and unmet. To tend to these failed longings and unmet desires, I turn to the gendered and racialized erotics present at the convention.

Queer Gamer Failures: Tending to Gender and Racial Politics

While many of the illustrations of GaymerX above focus on the fulfillment of queer gamer desire and how the erotic worlds queer gamers, I shift my focus here to the forms of queer gamer sociality that go beyond sexuality, a queerness that captures a desire for gendered and racial transformation of queer gamer spaces. To do so, I unpack the forms of queer gamer desire that I notice both in my fieldwork 121

and interviews that go unmet or even fail. Unfortunately, those most susceptible to unfulfilled desires and longings both within the games community and society at large tend to be those multiply marginalized: trans folks and queer people of color.

However, by addressing these gendered and racial queer failures of desire, I argue that the conversations that happen at GaymerX seek to expand queer gamer desire beyond the sexual to include a desire for social justice for those within the queer gamer category.

30 September 2016, 10AM, ‘"Opening Ceremonies

I step into the room full of GaymerX attendees. Vm slightly late because of breakfast. Most of the seats have been taken, so I stand off to the left side of the room next to the garbage and the water dispenser. The panel consists of Toni, Matt, Soraya, Tanya, and Rachel. The room is packed for the opening ceremonies, and more people trickle in every few minutes. A t 10:05, Matt welcomes everyone to GaymerX. Each speaker goes down the line, giving their introductions, welcomes, and hopes for this year's festivities. And the end of the line, Tanya, the diversity liaison introduces herself and also begins talking about GaymerXEast, set to happen in the next month in NYC. 'Brown people in the audience. I see you!” She then beckons to those in the audience to apply to present on panels at GXEast: iCL want to see people of color presenting on things that don V necessarily have to do with race. ”

The microphone gets passed to Matt, who fills us in on the agenda for the opening ceremonies. He mentions the awesome programs that were made for this year, which resembles a video game strategy guide. The microphone is passed to Toni, who wants to go over several key parts 122

of the program. Toni asks that, as a group, we read the inclusivity statement on page two out loud as

a group. Afterwards, she says a few closing remarks, which I recorded a few o f the important lines:

‘This is a community. You’re not anonymous. You’re a person within the community, and we see you. And if there are any changes or concerns you have about the convention, let us know. We can

talk about stuff. Also know that people are going to make mistakes this weekend, but we’re all here for each other. ”

Before letting us off to explore the convention, Toni makes one more note that everyone’s

badges has a pronoun ribbon on them, and she states emphatically, ‘USE THEM!” Toni also

states that if you ’re talking to someone and can’t see their pronouns, it doesn’t hurt to ask them

what their pronouns are. Someone from the audience chimes in, “Orjust default to \they ’”, to which

Toni responds very briefly and somewhat quietly but still into the microphone, “It’s complicated. So always try to ask their pronouns if you don’t see their ribbon. Otherwise, have fun and be safe!”

This is the first official event to kick off the GX festivities, and it is similar to many of the other opening ceremonies that I have attended. The room is packed and gamers are ready to get the weekend going. These moments in the opening ceremonies show how GX functions as a community. The staff even state it during the talk; Toni explicidy says that because GX is a community, that people who are here matter; they are not “anonymous” and they are seen, heard, and appreciated.

Not only should queer geeks and gamers feel belonging here in this space, they should also know that they are seen. I think this in particular has to do with how many queer folks and people of color and women often have to go unrecognized in 123

the work that they do. To say that you’re not anonymous implicates you as an actor in the community and as someone who is valued and appreciated in this space. This is also illustrated when Toni and Matt discuss how any feedback about the convention should be communicated to them; they take that feedback very seriously.

However, the Opening Ceremonies hint at a few moments of failure. Firsdy

Tanya calls on people of color to submit panels. That staff not only want POC on panels, but they also want them on panels that don’t necessarily have to do with race.

Tanya implies that gaming conventions in the past, both GX and others, fail to have people of color talking about issues other than racism. Queer gamers of color are experts of many different types of experiences, yet oftentimes they are valued only for their ability to speak to their experiences of racism and oppression. Tanya seeks to diversify the panels by actively shaping the ways that QPOC contribute to the convention. Rather than flatten their experiences to those about race and racism, we need to have more diverse representation of POC in the all types of panels and in the gaming community overall.

Toni’s last discussion about using correct pronouns also nods to a potential failure, the possible failure of gender affirmation. In order to remedy the potential microaggressions against trans folks by being misgendered, the convention each year has provided pronoun badges for all its attendees. Everyone at GX writes down their pronouns on their badges when they receive them from registration. They are also given a ribbon that goes on their badge to clearly mark which pronouns people use. 124

The ribbons simple yet effective aesthetic and color—black writing on a white ribbon—is easy to find among the colorful badges, and the jarring simplicity of the colors of the ribbon in the visual landscape of colorful images on the badges and on people’s shirts illustrate their importance. They are meant to stand out and be easy to find. That GX takes pronouns seriously illustrates how queer social issues—here gender affirmation—are also a part of the worlding of GX. The commitment to social justice worlds GX, influencing the practices, values, and cultural artifacts of the space.

Conflict Resolution! Accidents occur? We’re aW human. Here arc some super easy and heipful guidelines to get past them! lli 4 ) If you say something that H found offensive, and are catted out on K take me following steps: A: Avosd being defensive or taking it as a personal attack, B: Listen to the person speaking and let tfiem speak without interruption. C: Believe what the person is saying and not attempt to disqualify their pewits, ■ D: Ask for tips/hefp with avoiding making the offense in the future. wSm* I: Apologize for your behavior. Do not expect or demand forgiveness,

F: stop interacting with the person if they ask you to and 0 0 NOT pursue them. v. G: If all else fails, ask a GaymerX Sprite or staff member to help moderate the situation. © If somebody offends you and you wish to address H with them, please try the following: A: Focus on the action rather than die person: avoid stating that the individual is sexist, racist, etc, rather than their behavior. B: Inform them that what they have said or done is offensive, privately if possible. C: Try to help them understand how to avoid it in the future (if possible). O; Stop interacting with the person if they ask you to and DO NOT pursue them, E: if an else fails, ask a GaymerX Sprite or staff member to help moderate the situation.

These guidelines can help you have a fun and hassle-free time at GaymerX! Please remember them through your stay and feel free to use them further in life. GaymerX staff will use their own discretion in resolving any disputes and attempting to take advantage of our rules may have consequences.

For full list of our rules, check out gaymerx.com/rule*

Figure 12. Conflict Resolution page from the 2016 GX4 Program. 125

However, the staff also directly addresses the inevitability of failure here in the space of GX. According to the staff and as illustrated in the program, people are expected to make mistakes. It might be that someone misgenders another attendee; it might be that someone says something offensive. Nonetheless, room is made for these failures, and the staff address ways to resolve conflicts in order to remain respectful of others and learn from your mistakes (see Figure 12). There’s something queer it seems to me to making space for these failures. Illustrating the possibilities for queer failure, the convention organizers seem to embrace failure, acknowledging its likelihood rather than shaming and sweeping it under the rug. These failures also make space for different forms of affective engagement, ones that might be darker or less celebratory.

In my interview with Jose, he addresses two examples of these queer failures that he has experienced at the GaymerX conventions he has attended. The first is his own potential misgendering of a cosplayer at the second GaymerX convention.

Jose says:

So my favorite movie of all time is Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World., and there was a person walking by, and they were Ramona. With the circular backpack with a star on it. They had their hammer. Blue hair. I think a nose ring, but that might have been theirs without the cosplay. Just a very cute looking Ramona. I was like, “Guys, look at that! [...] Oh my god it’s Ramona!” And my friend was like, “or Ramon.” Because this person could easily be assumed to be a male crossplaying. So we sat in [the Cosplay Pageant] and the person cosplaying was sitting right in front of us, [...] and so I was like, “I love your Ramona! This looks great! You have the hammer and everything. Scott Pilgrim’s like my favorite movie of all time.” And they were like, “Thank you!” And I was like, “Great Ramona.. .or Ramon.” And they looked at me, 126

and were like, “I don’t.. And they were probably about say something like, “I don’t think that’s very nice of you to say.” Or something like, “I don’t appreciate that.” Or something like that. And right when they started to speak, Matt got on, or whoever got on, and was like, “Hey everyone! Welcome to Cosplay!” And I remember thinking, I have literally gone through sensitivity training twice, and I did what I’m supposed to tell people not to do. You know? And that always bothered me. Like, really Jose, you know better than that! And then, I saw them the next year volunteering, and [...] I lost the nerve to apologize to them. And to this day, I still wish that I could apologize to them. And I just still haven’t. So it was a really bad mistake on my part. And I seriously doubt that—well, I shouldn’t say that— but they most likely are not losing sleep over it. But I just hated the fact that I feel so, so, uh, included and comfortable in this environment, and I just made someone feel the opposite, I’m assuming. That was one of my least favorite parts.

As we can see, Jose feels especially tom because of his faux pas. His comment

“Great Ramona.. .or Ramon” hints at his inability to correcdy gender the cosplayer’s performance. And because the cosplayer is unable to complete their sentence due to the interruption of the Cosplay Pageant, Jose is left only to speculate about how much harm he has actually done. In my interview with Jose, I notice this shift in his affective state—he stutters on his words, gets caught up in the moment, and finishes his story in a very solemn tone. I shift out of interview mode and into caring friend mode, hoping to accommodate what seems like his need for affirmation.

SPENCER: Yeah, that’s fair. You mention though that when we are volunteers, we go through that sensitivity training. So in a way it’s kind of expected that we are going to fuck up? In a sense. Like that fuck-ups are going to happen over the weekend. And I remember Brian’s conversation last year, cause I wasn’t at this year’s training, where he was like, “Hey! We’re all going to make mistakes.” JOSE: Right. 127

SPENCER: And it’s like it doesn’t mean that we should necessarily walk away from those mistakes feeling especially distraught. Like it’s going to happen. JOSE: Yeah. Mhmm. SPENCER: It’s part of what it is. Especially being a big group of queers. Like mistakes are going to happen. And we’re going to do someone wrong. So in a sense it’s kind of expected. But then again that doesn’t necessarily help with your emotional state about it. JOSE: Yeah... I think that if I see them next year, I’ll just be like, “Look! This has been bothering me for years. I know it’s probably not even an issue with you anymore, but like—” SPENCER: They probably don’t even remember. JOSE: Yeah, probably, [lightly chuckles]

Jose leaves it at that, and quickly shifts to answer another portion of my original question. As I mention to Jose, the convention organizers expect that failures will to happen. Because of this, volunteers, known as Sprites, are required to go through volunteer training, which mosdy consists of how to support marginalized gamers— trans gamers, women gamers, gamers of color, disabled gamers—and how to handle tough situations that might arise. As illustrated in Figure 12, the GX4 program included a Conflict Resolution guide for “if you say something that is found offensive and are called out on it” or “if somebody offends you and you wish to address it with them.” This precautionary training and the conflict resolution guide hint at a queer gamer desire for inclusivity and diversity, nodding to social justice oriented organizing and the creation of a coalition-based space.

Later on in his interview, Jose also describes a second scene where he thinks he offends someone. 128

My friend, Max was volunteering with me, and we were waiting in line to start training, and this person was like—literally, they started in a very dramatically raised voice, “Oh, that’s okay! Cut in front of me.” And there was a line, and this person was legitimately like—had to be four feet away from the line. It looked like they had been standing and waiting for somebody though. And they were like, “Go ahead and cut in front of me.” And we were like, “Are you waiting?” And they were like, “Yeah! But I’m invisible here, just like everybody thinks.” And we were like, “Well, it’s open now.” And initially in my mind I was like “It’s fucking open now, so go! Quit crying, you know?” But that’s just assuming that that person is able to get over things like I am, and that’s not fair. So they were like, “No, I just thought that...” and they started crying... “I thought that this would be one of the places where I wasn’t invisible.” And they walked away. [...] So the training was about to start, and I was like, “I think I am going to go talk to them.” So I went outside, and they were crying. And I was like “Hey! I wanted to let you know that we honestly didn’t know that you were waiting in line. And there’s no line now if you want to go in. You can just walk in.” And they were like “No.” And I was like “I hope to see you inside. We all hope to see you inside. This is a safe space.” And they were like, “I know. I didn’t expect that to happen here.” And I was like “It was an honest mistake. I’m Jose, by the way.” And they were like, “Danielle.” And I was like, “We would love to see you inside, and we want you to know that you’re welcome here. You’re not invisible! Everyone sees you.” So I tried my hardest to be understanding that they are clearly going through something that I don’t know of. [...] I didn’t see them the rest of the con, and I hope they made it in. [...] Maybe this person is still outside. Maybe they left, I don’t know. That was my least favorite part because clearly this person had gone through a lot in this life.

Jose’s failure to acknowledge this person’s existence is one of these moments of

failure. In Jose’s story, Danielle yearns for a queer space where they can be visible—

they “didn’t expect that to happen here.” Unfortunately, even before the convention

starts, Danielle’s desire goes unmet, and almost immediately they feel unseen and unacknowledged. The expected safeness and inclusivity of the space of GX fails in

this moment for Danielle, causing them to get upset and walk outside. Jose’s initial 129

reaction is even a bit judgmental, but he is quick to check himself and to

acknowledge his mistake and attempt to address it. He uses his prior training

experience as a Sprite to de-escalate the situation and to make Danielle feel included;

he attempts to call Danielle into the community, apologizing for his mistake and

ultimately drawing on the recurring theme of “being seen” that Toni also soon

addresses in the Opening Ceremonies.

Failure is inevitable in any attempt at creating a queer safe space. For whom

is the space safe? Who is granted the privilege to speak? Who is given the

opportunity to be seen and acknowledged? While failure characterizes these

moments above, through the misgendering of a cosplayer and the overlooking of

someone’s existence, failure also allows for those in the community to work towards

a more inclusive and accommodating space. As Halberstam (2011) reminds us, “in losing we will find another way of making meaning in which.. .no one gets left behind” (25). While a bit too utopic in his claims, I do believe that “cruising utopia”

(Munoz 2009) is a political goal of GaymerX, that the moments of failure—both

those that are anticipated and those that surprise—animate a queer gamer desire in which “everyone can be seen.”

The Raciali^ed Desires of Queer Gamers of Color

The desires of queer gamers of color often go unfulfilled; the denial of

Brown and Black bodies in games and the denial of nuanced non-stereotypical 130

characters of color are two of the biggest forms of these failure. Through the

conversations at GX as well as online, queer gamers of color are able to articulate the ways that dominant gaming industry has failed gamers of color. For these gamers,

their longing for diversity, inclusion, and acknowledgement are always racialized.

Thanks to the work of Tanya DePass, the Diversity Liaison and Panel Coordinator,

the GX3 and GX4 conventions included more diverse speakers and panels about race in games and game communities. A queer Black woman gamer herself, DePass

sat on many of the panels, either as a moderator or as a queer woman of color

talking about her experience playing and writing about games. Below I describe a panel I attended that was organized by DePass in order to illustrate the ways in which the desires of queer gamers of color for nuanced racial representation are played out in the space of GaymerX.

1 October 2017, 12PM, “When Fandom Ain’t Fun: A Frank Talk by QPOC”

The room is filled with gamers here for the panel. Before the audience is a panel of five queer gamers of color, including Tanya DePass, the Diversity Uaison. The description for the panel:

“Queerfans of color are often left out, pushed out and talked over in our chosen fandoms. A lot of times the discourse becomes more about hurt feelings than actually listening to those affected by the racism and racist actions. ” Tanya, who hasjust conducted a mic check with AV Sprites at the back of the room mentions that this will probably be the saltiest panel that has ever existed at GX, and it is the panel she was loo king forward to the most. Scanning the rooom, she notes: “I see a lot 131

of non-POC people in this room, and we're going to have some caveats. ” Tanya explains that she

organised this panel as a space for queerfans of color to voice theirfrustrations with both the gaming

industry and the fandoms that revolve around games and geekdom. She discusses that QPOC often

experience a lot of backlash Justfor wanting Brown folks in games. " The panelists introduce

themselves: one is a comic book artist, another a game developer; one an academic gaming critic and journalist, and another anindependent media critic and previous industry employee.

Tanya starts off the conversation by asking the panelists about their personal experiences

beingfrustrated with games. One example of herfrustrations is the fact that many games don't even provide options for making Black and Brown characters. She cites Dragon Age’s lack of natural

Black hairstyles, while another panelist mentions “Nintendo's fucked up sense of humor"for providing many different shades of white skin-tones butfailing to provide multiple shades of

blackness. Sarcastically, another panelist chimes in, ‘They probably don't see color." Sad laughs

come from the audience and the panelists. Other examples of racist tendencies in gaming andfandom

come up, such as using mythical races to stand in forPOC, games taking place in fictional places

that resemble Europe, and the whitewashing of canonical characters of color in fandoms. One

example that is brought up is how the mythical race of the Qunari in the Dragon Age series are

coded as people of color. Tanya states that she hears people mention that they “Rode the Bull many

times," referencing having sexual relations with the Iron Bull, a pansexualQunari character in the

Dragon Age: Inquisition game who is widely adored by the fandom. Tanya contemplates: “I

wonder if people would actually love him if he were Black!" The panelists discuss how the erasure of

POC by using mythical races as stand-ins is extremely harmful to POC, especially in the context of 132

BLM and the murdering of Black and Brown folks mentioned everyday in the news. One of the panelist says, “Can I have my Black woman?! Just one, please!”

Another issue brought up by the panelists is “brown paper dolls, ” a term that I had never

heard before. One of the panelists explains that brown paper dolls are the characters of color that are

created by white game/ story designers that fail to depict a nuanced narrative around that character's

race. These are white folks who are creating characters with “pretty skin with no drama, ” according

to Tanya. These characters function as “digital blackface” since they read and present as white

characters, and therefore are “exploitative” in their attempts to be diverse. [...] A member of the

audience, whom I read as white, asks the panel, “Doyou think that there are any conditions under

which white folks should write characters of color?” One of the panelists seems wary in the audience members asking. Another panelist suggests that if they want to include diverse characters, which they should' they should be sure to “consult with POC, ” and not just as “free emotional labor; ” but actually paying them “consulting rates. ”

In the above panel, the speakers, all of whom are queer and/or trans gamers of color, address the failures made by both the AAA gaming industry as well as fandom. Tanya implicates the non-POC folks in the room by saying, “we’re going to have some caveats,” encouraging the non-POC folks in the audience to create space for these Black and Brown queer gamers to voice their concerns, angers, and frustrations without being “talked over.” This space and this panel, which again is a packed room full of both gamers of color and non-POC gamers, exists in an attempt to fulfill the queer gamer desire for dialogue on racial diversity and representation in 133

games. DePass writes elsewhere, “media doesn’t exist in its own litde vortex. You’ve

got people who see these tropes repeatedly, and it sends a message. Games aren’t for

people like me. I don’t get to be here. Unless it’s as a joke, a trope, or a half-assed

stand-in via non-humans and a tepid version of issues I face in the world” (DePass

2017). Imagining the queer gamer desires of DePass and other gamers of color

accounts for some of the frustrations, negative affects, and differences between

gamers. DePass and other gamers of color are frustrated by the assumed whiteness

of the larger gaming community and games industry. In this space for queer gamers

of color to articulate “when fandom ain’t fun,” DePass and the panel assertively

create a dialogue to center issues of race as a part of the queer gamer desire for

inclusivity and diversity. I also read a sense of optimism here from DePass—a sense

that talking about these issues will help create more nuanced and diverse representations in video games for queer gamers of color. Again a form of queer gamer utopian longing, these discussions of race and racism in games help stimulate the possibilities for queer worldmaking experiences that center the experiences of queer gamers of color.

The Collision of Desires: Queer Gamer Desire as Resistance

As I have argued above, queer gamer desire in the space of GX is made up of a longing for connection, diversity, sexuality, and social justice. Some of these desires manifest in the forms of queer gamer celebration, while others are left unfulfilled and 134

motivate the community to push for greater diversity both by the games industry and

the GX community. I end this chapter recalling my favorite example of queer gamer

desire at GX. This moment was spontaneous, in the moment, and somewhat silly,

but it illustrates all of the points I argue above.

2 October 2017, 2:15PM, Meyganine Floor Board Games

I sit down with a few friends at a table on the Mesganine floor outside of Panel Room C

and the table top board game room. In front of us is a game called ‘Meta-Game, ” and my friends

and I decide to give it a shot. It’s a bit like ‘"Cards Against Humanity” or *'Apples to Apples, ”

with an element of debating. Two gamers, Lauren and Fletcher, ask to join us, and we decide to

deal them in. We all introduce ourselves and share our pronouns, and we continue to play the game,

making queer jokes when we can. There are seven or eight other large round tables with people gathered around them playing other board games from the table top room.

From my seat, I can look over the me^anine balcony; I see a football game on a television

on the wall of the firstfloor. The firstfloor of the hotel in the main lobby is full ofpeople in football jerseys of theirjavorite team. Sportsfans crowd the bar and the televisions on the firstfloor. Lots of

chattering drifts up to the mezzanine floor. In the middle of the round, Lauren explains her pick of

which card is more masculine. She is interrupted by a collective cheerfrom the downstairs sports fans.

‘Yeeeeah!” I respond with a feminized ‘Yaaas!”, invoking a valley girl voice and a common stereotype about gay men. A few minutes later, another cheer comes from downstairs, and another person at my table also responds with another “ya s!”I joke to my table that next time it happens, we should collectively count to three and scream “ya s” in response to their loud cheers. A couple 135

minutes pass by, it happens again, 0/// our plan! It happens twice, others from surrounding tables join in the second time.

The organiser of the board game room, Tom, walks up to our table, and tells us how much

he loves the “ya s” response to the “sportsballfans. ” He tells us he wants to get the entire me^anine floor to do it so he can record it and post it on Twitter. We agree to participate, and he quickly goes

and tells the other tables. Afterwards, he goes to stand on a chair with his phone. A couple minutes

later, another cheer comes from downstairs. Tom counts us down to three, and we all collectively let

out a collective (Yas!” Afterwards, we all cheer, and we everyone goes back to playing their games.

There is a collision of desires in this moment. There are competing affective

worlds: the supposed downstairs world of football, beer, hypermasculinity, and

heterosexuality; and the known upstairs world of gaming, geekiness, and queerness.

In his interview, Jose discusses an interaction he has with a trans gamer during the

“sportsball” game:

m w s year I was guarding the safe space area, and a transgender female came up and asked—and the reason why I know this is because she said she’s like potentially worried. But she was like, “Is there any way to get down to the Expo Hall without going through...”—this was the night they had the football game there. And I was like, “Actually, I did discover.. .it’s like a long walk, and those heels look cute, but they look painful. You can go all the way there. Or it’s much quicker if you just go down.” And she was like, “Okay.” And I asked her if she wanted me to go with her, cause I would totally go. And she was like, “Um.. .1 think I’m okay.”

While it isn’t direcdy stated, I assume the woman in Jose’s story seeks to avoid the

downstairs because of the football game. I assume she is worried navigating through

the masculinist and patriarchal world of football and sports fans to get to the Expo 136

Hall. This collision of desires—of the sports fans in the lobby and of the queer

gamers on the mezzanine—creates a space for the fear of safety for this trans

woman in particular. She attempts to avoid the game in order to stay safe. In this

moment, the world of the sports game re-appropriates the once queer space of the

hotel lobby, colliding up against a queer temporality and geography of GaymerX.

For my fellow gamers on the mezzanine floor, the football game downstairs

acts as a disruption of the queer time and place of GX; the heteropatriarchal outside

world rears its head with sports fanatics drinking their beers and glorifying

competition. These fanatics’ celebration of masculinity, violence, and competition

interrupts our desires for queer gamer social bonding; their cheers put a halt on our

conversations and our games. In their collective cheering, they attempt to make the

space of the hotel a sports fandom world. In our efforts to resist this disruption of

our queer geography, the queer gamers on the mezzanine floor enact a “performative

subversion” (Butler 1990). We unify in a parodic act of subversion—which the “yas” itself is a queer stereotype—in order to push back against the encroaching

heteropatriarchal world of the football game. In this moment, our queer desires for

subversion and parody actively assert ourselves in the space of the hotel, and the

longing for queer existence, geekiness, and connection manifests in a form of resistance to heteropatriarchal time and space. 137

Conclusion

In the GX4 program, Toni Rocca, one of the co-chairs of the GX convention writes in the welcome section:

Many of us don’t get a space that we can call our own. For queer people especially, we have to carve and create spaces for ourselves. That’s why GaymerX exists. Because people like you, me, and all the many people who make this event work wanted it. We needed a space where we could feel welcome. A space that people like us—and different from us—would feel welcome. [...] Most importandy I want everyone to take their desires, demands, and standards that you have for us and apply them to all the other events you go to. [...] Let’s make sure we take the tools that we’ve built here and use them where they’re needed the most.

Toni direcdy mentions those “desires,” those queer gamer desires that I explore above. These queer gamer desires, erotics, and longings structure and constitute the space of the convention. You can find them in the panels, in the ways folks play games together, on the dancefloor during the concert, and in the bodily acts of the attendees of the convention. Some of these desires thrive and cause gamers to celebrate; some are born out of frustrations of unmet needs, pushing us to ask more of the worlds we inhabit; and some are born out of the need to assert our existences and to ensure our survival.

The queer desires I describe include sexual longings—like those queer romance options and the lingering glances on the dancefloor—and social justice oriented yearnings—for gendered inclusion, for racial diversity, and for queer existence. These erotics together constitute the space of the convention, transform the space of the hotel, creating a world the queer gamers, if only temporarily. This 138

queer gamer world expands the possibilities for what counts as queer desires and what can be classified as the erotic. Ultimately, this queer gamer world allows GX

attendees to play with desire—sometimes winning and sometimes losing—but in

attending the convention, queer gamers create this queer gamer space for themselves.

And in playing with desire, they embody the social justice frameworks and sexual

subjectivities needed to sustain themselves and articulate their needs and desires within the broader gaming community and society at large. 139

Conclusion: Memoirs of a Gaymer

Video games matter. As I have argued in this thesis, dominant constructions of who gamers are have left litde room for queer gamers to carve out their own spaces in dominant gaming communities. However, in the spaces they have been given—or that they have actively created themselves—queer gamers employ queer worldmaking practices in relationship to the games they play and other gamers they play with in order to affirm their existence and build a queer gaming community.

These sorts of queer gamer worlds are what sustain us and allow us to find senses of affirmation, belonging, and connection to our game technologies and to each other.

I conclude now with an academic memoir of how I got to where I am today as a queer game studies scholar. In reflecting on my own personal biography playing games, finding community, and studying games, I hope to synthesize and drive home the main points that I argue in this thesis. I play with genre in this memoir as a way to move beyond ethnography and capture different modes of understanding queer gamer subjectivity, community, and desires.

The Fire

Flames have always come for me. I lost my home the summer I turned nine to fire started by my cat, Tuffy. My sister had a tendency to leave candles and incense lit in her room, and Tuffy had a tendency to knock anything he could off tables, counters, and shelves. In the end, it didn’t really work out. Ash-covered bricks lay 140

where my childhood home once stood. Luckily, my family and pets were safe and sound. On top of the house fire, I had just caught the flu. Because I was completely drained, I don’t remember much about that night, other than watching the smoke from my neighbor’s house and crying myself to sleep in my parents’ van. They tell me that I was most distraught over losing my Pokemon cards and my video games.

To this day, it still doesn’t surprise me that’s what litde Spencer missed most.

Figure 13. Still of an 8-bit candle. Accessed 20 April 2017. https://media.giphy.com/media/4Ev86GEC6XVGE/giphy.gif.

Following the fire, my parents scrounged up the money they had to buy a used motor home. We parked it next the mother-in-law unit on our property that my mother previously used as an antique shop. We had some money leftover, so my mom bought me a Nintendo 64 that summer; I spent most of my days playing Pokemon Snap, luegend ofZelda, and Kirby 64 to cope with my loss.

Games had become my escape from my own personal tragedies, and they were catalysts for meaningful human connection and community in the toughest of 142

*m ¥ mm. tW ***£ # ^

gfe W F tlt Spin

Figure 14. Image of Charizard card.

In losing my home, my nine-year-old self had lived through fire’s destructive potential. But I had also experienced firsthand the possibilities that fire creates for new life. Games, in many shapes and forms, have been one of my fiery passions, and

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that my history with games ignites the passion for my research. What are the ways that race, gender, and sexuality influence marginalized gamers and their communities? What brings marginalized gamers together and how do they organize? Both my personal and academic histories inform my research on marginalized gamers. 143

Figure 15. Image from Classic Pac-Man, a video game arcade classic.

A Child of the Arcade

All throughout my life, my parents have had a gambling addiction. Even with our lower-middle class status, barely making enough to survive on my dad’s disability check, my parents still found a way to gamble at least twice a week. Sometimes they gambled at local casinos, 20-40 minutes away from our home, but other times it meant travelling to Reno or Lake Tahoe. We would spend a few nights in a complementary room they received as a reward for their frequent gambling, and my parents would send me with some cash to meander the arcade for several hours while they themselves dropped quarters into machines.

I like to think I was raised by coin-operated machines on the savannahs of the arcade. It’s a more romantic and magical image of my childhood. It was through those landscapes that I became a world-saving zombie fighter, a racecar driver, and a disco-dancing capoeira martial artist. I loved every minute of it! I would find 144

temporary companions who would quest alongside me in interactive game worlds and alternate digital realities. I was an expert in making friends and playing with others across differences. I played with almost anyone I could find despite their differences in age, race, or gender. I didn’t think anything of it, and that’s refreshing to remember. Given the shitty current state of representational politics and diversity in digital games, there’s something magical and magnificent in my childhood willingness to connect with a variety of people just for the sake of play. Is it childish naivete or blissful acceptance? “Sometimes I think we need to risk naivete to discover new ways of being in the world.” * Maybe I shouldn’t think too hard about it...

Scholarly Beginnings

I took a brief break from gaming when I moved away to college. I had convinced myself that I needed to grow up and leave my gaming days behind me.

Now talk about childish naivete! Litde did I know, gaming would continue to be such a positive influence in my life even at university. I moved into the “Gender

Neutral” dorms at Humboldt State University, housing specifically designed for

LGBT students and their allies. Several of my suitemates and I bonded very quickly through queerness and our love of digital games. After learning that games could bring me new friends, even in college, I decided that on my first trip back home, I

* A comment I received from one of my mentors for this section of my thesis. It was too good of a comment to not include. 145

would gather up all my gaming devices and bring them with me to my new playground in the redwoods.

Games never really took center stage during my years at Humboldt. I wanted to focus on my schoolwork and develop myself as a scholar, so I really only played games during the summer, in between semesters. When school was in session, I dedicated my time to learning all I could about social inequalities, cultural awareness, and social justice activism through the fields of anthropology and critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. Theoretically, I found a particular interest in queer studies, intersectional feminism, and digital anthropology; methodologically, I found a particular passion for interdisciplinary scholarship and ethnographic fieldwork.

During my final two years as an undergraduate, I committed to finding the perfect research project that would bring all those frameworks together. Skye’s quote from

Chapter 2 has moved me more than I could have ever expected. He articulates many of the same senses of belonging that I felt growing up as a queer gamer kind.

Because I was always taught “repetition for emphasis,” I reproduce it below.

What gaymer as a label does, of course, is unite being queer and being a gamer. [...] Neither being gay nor gamer is fully accepted by society and so there’s always some degree of masking required in what we do. Combining the two and creating a community around it creates a place where both masks can be taken off and left at the door, and it becomes very, very comfortable. For me, being a gaymer isn’t just a label, it isn’t even part of my identity, but it’s become something representing where I belong. — Skye 146

Around the same time, a friend of mine had sent me a link to the GaymerX

Kickstarter page. GaymerX was the first LGBT gaming and technology convention in the making, and the creators sought financial support through crowd-sourced funding. In the end, they raised enough money to both make the convention happen and to create GaymerConnect, an online social networking forum for attendees to meet and game together before the convention. I participated in those forums everyday for several months, and I saw deeper connections than I had anticipated.

Participants shared their experiences with interracial dating, offered advice for coming out to family and friends, and even shared strategies for navigating social anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. I grew very close to my

GaymerConnect friends, and I knew I had found not only my ethnographic project, but I had also found my sense of authenticity and belonging in the queer gaming community.

“For the Good of All of Us”

I had never felt so at home than when I sat down behind the registration table the very first day of the very first GaymerX. The Kabuki Hotel had a line out the door that stretched around the hotel. There are even YouTube videos about it.

That day I met so many folks I had been talking to on the GaymerConnect site. They knew me as Keychain Dandy, which was my gamer handle on the site. I registered at least 15 people that I had been in digital conversation with over the past several 147

months. I got to put faces to their names, and I had never found a sense of

community like that.

Just a short description on how I feel about the site. A_A Th-s place m truty amazing,f have neve" had an experience on the internet iwe ths before. I have met so many true and genuinely caring friends here, before I came here i felt helpiess about coming out to anyone about me being gay. After ?af

Without this site, I wouldn't rave anything rea!?y exciting planned this year, I wouldn't have made so many friends that \ cannot wait to meet >n person.

Figure 16. Image from my original research on GaymerConnect. Screenshot from the GaymerConnect site take by author in February 2013. Site no longer active.

I had made lifelong friends at the first GX convention. I had friends in Australia,

Iran, England, Brazil, Ireland, and all over the U.S. I was dedicated to continuing our

friendships digitally, just in case the convention didn’t happen again. It was such a

success though, and I knew that I needed to come back to this space no matter what.

This community was my new home. I am reminded of GLaDOS’s words that I

begin this thesis with.

This was a triumph. Vm making a note here. Huge success! It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction! We do what we must because we can For the good of all of us except the ones who are dead! 148

Welcome to the Outlaw Club!

I gave a talk at a TEDxHumboldtBay event in December 2014. The theme was "Oudaws." I knew the curator of the event, and she was more than thrilled when

I applied to be a speaker. I wanted to think through my own life as an oudaw and how it changed my worldview. I wanted to engage with how we can empathize across our shared, but oftentimes, differing oudawry. Love, community, and transformation fall at the center. I reproduce three excerpts below from my talk.

Embracing Your Outlaw, Transforming Our World | Spencer Ruelos I TEDxHumboldtBay TEDx Taiks 1 year ago * 207 vtews Spencer shares how finding himseif* loving himself - as an outlaw «n his hometown world, has shown him how to transform others ...

Figure 17. Screenshot from authorfs TEDxTalk. https://www.y outube.com/watch?v=PaXhlCGUfmI&t

When you really think about it though, we’ve all been social outcasts and oudaws at least once in our lives. We’re all a litde weird and quirky; we all have our own oddities. Some of us don’t ever want to get married or have children. Some of us want to put on make-up or shave our legs. Some of us want to fall in love with more than one person. And some of us just want to dip our French fries in our chocolate shakes in peace. And, at the end of the day, all of that is okay! There’s an oudaw in each and every one of us, and we need to learn to embrace it! And if you honesdy don’t think you’ve ever felt this way, well let me be the first to welcome you to our club, because you’re surrounded by weird, quirky people. Hit me up after the event, and the shakes and fries are on me! 149

Learning to embrace our inner outlaw becomes a process of self empowerment and transformation. Instead of constantly self- criticizing our bodies, desires, and identities to the point of self- deprecation, we need learn to celebrate our diversity, our weirdness, and our quirks. Rather than conforming to what society tells us is correct, we can begin to express ourselves in any which we choose, showing off all of our curves, our imperfections, and our humanity. Whereas society actively dehumanizes outlaws by pushing them to the margins of society, finding your inner outlaw and learning to love it acts as way to actively reclaim and restore your own humanity. And from there, it’s just a matter of finding other outlaws like you and beginning to change the world.

Realizing our connectedness in a shared sense of outcast-ness, we can work together as outlaws across our differences to push social norms and truly build a world that thrives on our uniqueness, quirks, and diversity. Ultimately, if we fail to embrace the outlaw inside, then we can never really love ourselves enough to build a world loving of others. Because “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love anybody else?”*

Playing Queer Apocalypse in Life Is Strange

Like many of my informants, I too have always been drawn to playing games queerly. If a game that I play has queer content, I am sure to find it and play it through to the end. In the beginning of 2015,1 picked up Ufe Is Strange, an interactive story game in which you play as a young women named Max who learns that she has time travel powers that allow her to save her best friend, Chloe, from being shot. The game was episodic, meaning that a new chapter was released every few months. In the first couple of episodes, I had sensed some lesbian subtext, but imagined the AAA game company that produced the game, Square Enix, would

The concluding words from RuPaul that end every episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race 150

never actually create a lesbian plot line. The end of the last episode, which I retell below, proved me wrong. ***

Max and Chloe stand on a cliff before a tornado and reflect on their journey together. It was just five days earlier that Max had discovered her powers of time travel and had used them for the first time to save Chloe’s life. And over the course of five days, Max would save Chloe’s life many times more. In doing so, however,

Max had triggered a butterfly effect, distorting time so much as to bring on an environmental apocalypse, set to destroy her hometown of Arcadia Bay.

Max: "This is my storm. I caused this... I caused all of this. I changed fate and destiny so much that I actually did alter the course of everything. And all I really created was just death and destruction.”

Chloe reassures her of her choices and tells her that it was the only way for them to learn what they did about Chloe’s missing (girl)friend. She looks at the picture of the blue butterfly that Max took just before saving Chloe’s life. If Max wanted to, she could time travel back to that moment and let Chloe die. This would be the only way to stop the destruction of Arcadia Bay and their loved ones.

Chloe: "There’s so many more people in Arcadia Bay who should live.. .way more than me. [...] Max, you finally came back to me this weekend, and you did nothing but show me your love and friendship. You made me smile and laugh, like I haven’t done in years. Wherever I end up after this.. .in whatever reality.. .all those moments between us were real, and they will always be ours.” 151

You then remember it’s a game. The screen prompts you for the biggest decision you’ve will make: Sacrifice Chloe OR Sacrifice Arcadia Bay. Square OR

Circle. I don’t want to be a square, so I push circle.

Max rips up the photograph and throws it into the ocean toward the tornado.

“Max, I’ll always be with you forever.” Chloe and Max hold hands as they watch the tornado approach Arcadia Bay. As it takes out several homes and businesses on the marina, Max turns into Chloe and looks away. They embrace, and Max begins to cry.

In the final cut-scene of the game, Chloe and Max drive through the dilapidated

Arcadia Bay; there are no survivors, except for a few deer that come to explore the wreckage. Before leaving Arcadia Bay for what is imagined is the last time, Max gazes at the debris. This was her decision, her doing. Chloe pats her on the shoulder. Max glances back at Chloe and smiles, showing the tiniest semblance of joy, hope, and excitement. The camera pans to Chloe and Max driving into the distance, out of

Arcadia Bay, in a new direction to find a new life.

It is in this moment where queerness and apocalypse become intertwined, and digital materiality of this world falls onto the player’s decision. Max and the player face two conflicting apocalypses: the environmental and the personal While

Max's decisions to alter the past have lead to the impending environmental apocalypse of Arcadia Bay. She and the player are collectively pulled toward a personal apocalypse: the sacrifice of the protagonist's love interest. Along the way, 152

Max has already lived multiple lives where Chloe has died, and she continues to use

her powers to save the life of her friend and lover. Max cannot imagine a life without

Chloe, and she personally airs on the side of sacrificing Arcadia Bay to be with her.

Despite the environmental monster heading for their town, Max views her potential

future with Chloe as utopic—that their future lives together—a future filled with love, desire, and companionship—would make the destruction and death worth it.

The game worlds the player into these apocalypses and the queer desire of these two characters, ultimately calling the player to create a new queer world, Ufe Is

Strange utilizes this sci-fi mechanic of apocalypse to engage in deeply emotional stories of queer desire, morality, loss, and trauma. Apocalypse and life itself become queer.

Like Emily, when given the option, I play games queerly. I saved Chloe as a form of queergaming and of queer gamer looting. For me, "queerness is not yet here” for Chloe and Max, but rather I feel "the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Munoz 2009, 1). A queer future exists for both the lesbian couple and for me as they drive off into the redwood horizon. It is through this queer utopian longing that I create a queer world for both my protagonist and for myself. Through an environmental apocalypse that destroys the heteronormative spatio-temporal structures of the "here and now,” I am able to choose a reality where queemess is alive, well, and thriving. Playing the game and choosing to let

Chloe live are worldmaking experiences for me as the player and as a queer gamer, 153

and they help me to imagine gaming futures that center queerness and sexuality in their narrative structures of play.

Cosplay and Queer Gamer Alternate Realities

Figure 18. Image of author and friends cosplaying Vokemon characters from GX4.

In the image pictured above, several of my friends and I use cosplay as a technique for envisioning a different world and alternate reality. In the center is the iconic pair, Ask Ketchum and Misty from the original Vokemon animated series, played by myself and my boyfriend, respectively. On the sides are two of our friends cosplaying as Ash and Misty’s trusty Pokemon, Pikachu and Togepi. There are several alternate realities brought to the fore in this image, and each one does specific worlding and worldmaking work in order to merge multiple realities and ways of belonging together. 154

Firstly, cosplay itself constructs alternate realities by bringing a particular fictional world into the purview of the “real world.” In this image, all of us are extreme Pokemon fans, and decided to bring our love and connection to both the animated and the video game series into the space of GaymerX. The characters come from the world of Pokemon, but when brought into this world, embody notions of geek/nerd/gamer/fan authenticity and belonging. Additionally, the cosplayers above each put together their costume, both nodding to their own work in bringing these characters into this world and also allowing for new possibilities in their own interpretation and deployment of these characters.

Secondly, on the topic of deployment and interpretation, my boyfriend and I decided to cosplay both characters as sexy—sexier perchance?—versions of their original manifestations. This does several things in the method of worlding. Firsdy, it allows my friends and I to imagine ourselves as part of the world of Pokemon. We become the characters with our own unique twists. Secondly, it brings both sexuality and gender to the fore of our cosplay, which in the context of GaymerX, asks the industry and other fans to take seriously our (queer, both sexually and politically) love for these characters. For example, my boyfriend also decides to cosplay as a female-bodied character, redeploying her as a sexualized male swimmer. This gender- bent cosplay (also known as crossplay) also does interesting work in allowing my boyfriend to imagine an alternate reality where Misty is male and the sexual tension between her (him?) and Ash now becomes homoerotic and queer. It is also through 155

our deployment of sexy Ash and Misty that my boyfriend and I also seek to imagine a world where we are comfortable in our bodies—one that allows us to expose our bodies and not be met with judgment, ridicule, and shame, but are rather embraced for our bravery, our fandom love, and our queer deployments of these characters.

Tattooed Conclusions, Reparative Reflections, Queer Gaming Futures

“What we can best learn from such [reparative] 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.”

— Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re SoParanoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You

It only seems right for me to end where I began with Pokemon and fire. In

2014 I got a Pokemon tattoo on my left ankle. It consists of Red, the main character from the first series of Pokemon games, and Charmander, the evolutionary predecessor of Charizard. Wherever I go, I carry a bit of that flame on my body. It’s a constant reminder of the importance of gaming in my life and the faith I have in transformative potential of the gaming community. As much as the mainstream gaming community reinscribes notions of hegemonic masculinity, racism, sexism, and homophobia, I found within it others at the margins who were both just as critical and just as in love. So I’ve dedicated my intellectual and personal inquiries into the reparative prospects of the gaming community. I’ve followed the passion, the love, the fire, and it’s brought me to the academic crossroads of queemess and 156

gaming. I leave behind flames, arcades, Kickstarter pages, and queer gamer singing sessions, and I forge my own path ahead out of the ashes of the past. But I keep that fire in my heart and on my ankle, because it’s forever a part of my future. Flames still come for me, and I continue to play with the fire.

Figure 19. Image of author’s Pokemon tattoo. This tattoo is located on his ankle and incorporates the main character from the original Pokemon games, Red (left) and the author’s favorite Pokemon, Charmander (right). 157

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