[Commlist] New book: Video Games Have Always Been Queer

New publication from New York University Press

*Video Games Have Always Been Queer***

*Bonnie Ruberg***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/video-games-have-always-been-queer_*

“Bonnie Ruberg is one of the most innovative and original thinkers in 
the field of game studies.Ruberg’s latest work gives us a nuanced and 
insightful approach to thinking about gamesthrough a queer lens. It’s 
essential reading for anyone interested in the cutting edge 
oftheorization about digital games.” *- Mia Consalvo, author of 
Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames*

“Offers an innovative and critical contribution to not just the study of 
games, but media more broadly. /Video Games Have Always Been Queer/ asks 
us to take not simply representation, but play itself, seriously and 
provides powerful ways for thinking about queerness and games. It’s an 
exciting contribution to the field and a must-read for all media 
scholars.” *- T. L. Taylor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology***

Argues for the queer potential of video games. While popular discussions 
about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games 
that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie 
Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of 
representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, 
and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. 
/Video Games Have Always Been Queer/ argues that the medium of video 
games itself can—and should—be read queerly.

In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, 
Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now 
becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to 
the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, 
Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to 
explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 
'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: 
Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that 
has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer 
people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in 
fact, always been queer.

*Bonnie Ruberg*is Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics 
at the University of California, Irvine and is the co-editor (with 
Adrienne Shaw) of /Queer Games Studies/ (2017).


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