By Raymond Matthews
Video games have always been queer because their design allows game engineers to resist sexual and gender norms and they allow individual gamers to do the same through gameplay, says Bonnie Ruberg, a UC Irvine assistant professor of Informatics.
“Queer is an umbrella term encompassing people with LGBT+ identities, or a way of being that resists oppressive norms of sexuality and gender, and what unites all the folks that are queer is that they don’t identify with gender and sexual norms,” Ruberg said in a talk at UC Santa Barbara hosted by the Film and Media Studies department.
Ruberg is the author of “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” and the editor of the book, “Queer Game Studies.” Both of these works assert that while video games may not directly feature queer characters and relationships, they can be played and interpreted in queer ways.
“Queer people can play games in ‘queer’ ways simply by playing a game in their own creative ways that allow their desires to manifest, which often resists the gendered and sexualized expectations found in popular media, including video games,” they said.
Ruberg also said that game designers can engineer games in ways that resist gendered and sexualized expectations of what video games should be.
“Games can resist dominant norms in society. Queerness can go beyond LGBT+ characters and relationships, by the ways in which the games subvert traditions of sexual and gender identities,” they said.
One game designer that Ruberg cited was Robert Yang, an indie video game developer whose work often explores gay subculture and sexuality through a process known as “de-gamification.”
“De-gamification identifies parts of life that have been framed in gamelike structures. Heteronormativity has shown us that sex and intimacy is a game to be won. So through degamification, queer games like Robert Yang’s show sexual experiences as pleasurable processes without a clear goal or objective,” they said.
De-gamification is a way of designing and playing games with no objective or concept of winning and losing, allowing users to focus completely on the gameplay process rather than an end-goal.
Ruberg concluded their presentation by asserting that the gaming community is becoming more welcoming to queer people, as mainstream game developers are making more attempts to include queer representation in their products.
Some popular games that have been noted for LGBT+ characters include Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, League of Legends, and Red Dead Redemption. Games such as Assasin’s Creed Odyssey allow users to engage in queer relationships at their discretion, and some games directly feature queer characters such as Nigel—a gay man—in Red Dead 2 Redemption, or Neeko —a lesbian character— in League of Legends.
“Games developed for hardcore, white, cisgender, straight men aren’t the only real games. Slowly but surely mainstream platforms are making efforts to incorporate LGBT characters,” Ruberg said.
Raymond Matthews is a third year Political Science major at UC Santa Barbara. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.