Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games

141 Pages·2022·3.01 MB·English

by  Gaspard Pelurson

Manifestations of Queerness in
Video Games
Taking the reader on a journey through queer manifestations in games, this
book advocates for video games as a rich, political, and cultural medium, which
provides us with tools to navigate the future of gaming.
Situated at the intersection of New Media, Game, Cultural and Queer Studies,
the book navigates diverse interspecies relationships, queer villains from the past,
Pokémon memes on border politics, flânerie in post-industrial cities, and one-
sided erotic fights. It provides new critical engagements with the works of Jose
Esteban Muñoz, Bonnie Ruberg, Guy Debord, and Jack Halberstam, examining
queer representation, gaming subcultures, and dissident play practices. Making
the bold claim that video games might be the queerest medium today, this book
provides organic, self-reflective and, ultimately, thought-provoking thinking in
which both games and gamers are queered.
This book will be of interest to not only scholars researching game studies, sex,
gender, and sexuality in new media, but also readers interested in literature, digital
media, society, participatory culture, and queer studies.
Gaspard Pelurson is a Lecturer in Creative Media and Global Industries at
King’s College London.
Routledge Advances in Game Studies
The Playful Undead and Video Games
Critical Analyses of Zombies and Gameplay
Edited by Stephen J. Webley and Peter Zackariasson
Hybrid Spaces
Crossing Boundaries in Game Design, Players Identities and Play Spaces
Edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Ragan Glover-Rijkse
Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games
Michelle Herte
Independent Videogames
Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics
Edited by Paolo Ruffino
Comics and Videogames
From Hybrid Medialities to Transmedia Expansions
Edited by Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noël Thon
Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games
Andrei Nae
Videogames and the Gothic
Ewan Kirkland
Longing, Ruin, and Connection in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding
Amy M. Green
Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games
Gaspard Pelurson
Manifestations of Queerness in
Video Games

Gaspard Pelurson
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Gaspard Pelurson
The right of Gaspard Pelurson to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-90064-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-31157-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02226-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003022268
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
1 Sporting Moustaches, Riding Bulls, Flashing Bums –
Dorian Pavus’s Queer Odyssey 1
2 The Sissy & the Cyborg – or How to Set the World on Fire
in Fabulous Robes 23
3 ‘Gotta Smuggle Them All!’ – Queer Détournement, Drag,
and Border Politics 44
4 Wandering Through Paths and Pixels – The Queer
Meandering of the Gaming Flâneur 59
5 Flawless in Defeat – In and For the Margins 83
Conclusion 107
Ludography 113
Index 115
Acknowledgements
Writing a monograph in the middle of a global pandemic was no easy task, and
a few essential people helped me push through. I thank Tanushree for being a
responsive and understanding editorial assistant, and Jayne a great research men-
tor. I cannot thank enough my beloved proof-readers and friends: Zoë, Tom, Matt,
and Keir, who have been with me until the very end. Finally, I thank my sister
Pom, my dad, and recomposed family, who kept me sane despite being across the
Channel for most of the last two years.
Introduction
Traditional storytelling has the power to take its listeners to distant shores in a
matter of seconds. Folk tales with extravagant premises and dénouement are often
said to be metaphors of real-life events and embodiments of the psyche. The more
eccentric the tale, the more convincing it will be; listeners will suspend, if not
dismiss, their disbelief, and gladly accept the construction of a gingerbread house
or the curse of a beast condemned to never find love.
Social media aside, video games remain part of the contemporary circle of nar-
rative art forms, with one significant twist: their experience is more difficult to
translate from words of mouth than their direct screen competition. As I write this,
neither the BBC News nor Le Monde websites have a section dedicated to gaming
in their ‘culture’ section. The same goes for The New York Times in its arts sec-
tion. Video games are often related to the ‘pixels,’ ‘digital,’ or ‘tech’ sections, in
which investments, subscriptions, and visuals are privileged, indicating a linger-
ing reluctance to consider video games as a worthy cultural product.
Moreover, the overall ignorance and lack of desire to engage with video games
academically remain commonplace in the humanities, and the short spotlight
that the medium benefitted during the pandemic rapidly waned. Despite many
uncertainties, it is suggested that things are going to get ‘back to normal,’ even
though our understanding of normality has changed. Virtual entertainment has
once again been relegated to its secondary status, newspapers have found new
real-world events to comment on and there is no more space for Animal Crossing
or Among Us anymore. But video games have more to offer than relief from a
constricting environment. In many ways, video games and folk tales have a lot in
common, both giving us the opportunity to combine escapism with introspection.
They require both attention and engagement, promise immersive experiences, and
display an incredibly wide range of narrative possibilities.
One of these possibilities is that of a young man, new to the Tokyoite jungle, put
on probation for the wrong reasons as he tried to defend a woman being harassed
in public. He soon enough discovers that the world is populated by demons, who
corrupt adults’ minds. Gathering a group of troubled teenagers oppressed by con-
temporary society, he resorts to otherworldly powers to fight the dark forces that
govern the world, while maintaining a(n almost) normal high school student life,
made of karaoke sessions, exams, dating, and mysterious phone apps. If you play
viii Introduction
the game right, after dozens of hours, the young man saves Japan from Yakuzas
and unscrupulous politicians. Articulating the profound anxieties of Japanese soci-
ety and its growing clash between generations, Persona 5 (Atlus 2017) is as much
about mental health, insecurities, bullying, and suicide, as it is about Miyazaki-
style cat buses, penis monsters, and heart-stealing gentlewomen thieves.
Another narrative is that of a mysterious illness known as the malichor that deci-
mates cities on a continent. You play as the representant of the merchant congre-
gation, a young envoy who has been tasked to find a cure on a newly discovered
island full of dangers and wonders. Two other nations have already settled there
and clash regularly with the indigenous population. As the most recent newcomer,
you must find your place within these competing factions and negotiate your way
to the cure. GreedFall (Spiders 2019) is clearly reminiscent of colonisation narra-
tives, in which the protagonist, presented as ‘neutral,’ is hailed for resolving con-
flicts between ‘backwards locals’ and aggressive settlers while dismissing their own
privileges. But GreedFall is a little more complex: the fictional continent is already
quite diverse when it comes to gender, race, and sexuality. As such, the oppression
still occurs, but is detached from real-life past historical events and solely focuses
on the invasion of another group’s land and culture. Although it never fully detaches
itself from the settler’s point of view, the game highlights some of the principal con-
flicts that will occur during the hostile cohabitation of different people on the same
territory and invites us to think about current and past conflicts of human history.
The last tale of this introduction is a story of love. A boy awakens in a forgotten
ruin with a gigantic, winged cat-like creature called Trico. While the latter is hos-
tile at first, a bond starts to form between the two as they attempt to escape the lab-
yrinth in which they are both trapped. They discover that other winged creatures
exist, but these are more violent, and controlled by a mysterious force who orders
them to kidnap children from which they gain energy. All of this is framed as a
flashback from the boy’s perspective. One of the last scenes shows the creature
with a severed tail, bringing the boy back to his home village. Unfortunately, the
villagers attack Trico, thinking that he has come to kidnap more children. Barely
conscious, the boy/player orders the creature to fly away just before credits roll.
This rushed summary doesn’t do justice to The Last Guardian’s (genDESIGN,
Japan Studio 2016) poetry, subtlety, and depth. Playing this tale of companionship
and affection is necessary to understand its emotional impact.
Often thought to be the symbol of mass entertainment and neoliberal simula-
tion, video games should be approached as a primary platform for deconstructing
our reality. They are first and foremost about us, telling stories of worlds we per-
ceive and relate to. From their standardised and hypermarketed AAA, to their most
obscure independent titles, they are eclectic enough to touch upon most aspects of
humanity. This enables us to find pieces of ourselves and in turn appropriate the
pixels presented before our eyes. Just like folk tales, video games merge the impos-
sible with the everyday. It is no wonder games are now scrutinised as sites where
contemporary racial and gender discourses emerge through coding and game
design (Russworm and Malkowski 2017). Ludic transgressions become means of
resistance, and, as the topic of this book indicates, queerness manifests itself. As
Introduction ix
Bonnie Ruberg writes, video games ‘have always been queer’ (2019, 1), a state-
ment that needs to be reiterated time and time again beyond academic circles.
The primary aim of this book is to advocate for a broader understanding of
queerness through video games and promote them as a rich, political, and literary
medium that provides us with tools to navigate the decades ahead. Since queer
gaming is anchored in, and influenced by, queer realities, it enables us to bet-
ter understand, translate, and disseminate them. We play and decode games, but
games in turn play and decode us. Making the claim that video games might be
the queerest medium today, this book provides an organic, self-reflexive and, ulti-
mately, thought-provoking journey in which both games and gamers are queered.
Increasingly accessible, games are springs of queer awakenings. They give
birth to new orientations, drives, and embodiments. Mostly effervescent and yet
so potent, queer manifestations guide this book. As lust for an alternative that is
not yet fully materialised, queerness operates as a mode that is often conveyed
through dissident expressions of gender and sexuality, and applies beyond these
identity markers. It provides scaringly eye-opening interpretations and frustrat-
ingly abstract material. Temporary yet transformative, queer is a catalyst for
change which, as this book argues, keeps on challenging common perceptions
about games, gaming culture, and gamers.
LGBTQ Presence in Video Games – Rare, But Everywhere
Both video games and queerness are difficult terms to define. Most people recog-
nise the presence of video games and the activity of gaming, and everyone knows
what to expect from a video game store. However, there doesn’t always seem to
be an awareness of the rapid transformation and exponential array of implementa-
tions made with gaming. The diversification of platforms, shapes, forms, and play
practices render video games an evident medium with blurry semantics.
As Whalen and Taylor (2008) indicate, the term itself has been questioned
relentlessly in game studies, and competed with ‘videogames,’ ‘computer games,’
or even ‘digital games’ to generally mean the same object, with nuances. These
all come with their own issues: the term ‘digital’ risks overlooking the first forms
of video games, ‘computer’ often implies a difference between consoles and PC
games, while ‘video’ is a lot more restrictive than it used to be, but remains the
most common form of reference to this interactive object (Juul 2005). For these
reasons, but also because it maintains a convenient transparency between English
and French, my native language, I will refer to video games as ‘video games’.
While crafting, perfecting, and challenging definitions is a necessary, healthy,
and critical process in most academic disciplines, this book seeks to move beyond
this debate, at least temporarily, in order to tackle the already fleeting realm
of queerness in games. In the following chapters, video games are understood
as an interactive medium that operates on a wide variety of platforms: ‘arcade
machines, home consoles, personal computers, handheld gaming systems, mobile
devices, web browsers, the backseat entertainment systems of certain Chrysler
minivans, and beyond’ (Morrissette 2020). Most importantly, video games can