[Commlist] Call for Papers: Trans Game Studies

“Trans Game Studies”

Special issue of Communication, Culture and Critique (Vol. 16, No. 1, 
March 2023)
Editors: Bo Ruberg (University of California, Irvine) and Whit Pow (New 
York University)
Contribution length: 6,000 to 7,000 words, inclusive of all notes and 
references
Abstracts due December 15, 2021

Trans studies and game studies—the academic study of video games, analog 
games, and play—have many productive points of resonance. Transgender 
people have long made and played games, despite the misconception that 
trans inclusion is a recent addition to the medium. Trans representation 
in games has had its own long-standing yet rocky history, while trans 
players themselves have for years used game spaces for their own radical 
purposes: exploring gender identity and alternate modes of embodiment in 
ludic and often digital spaces. Even in the face of transphobia, trans 
designers, programmers, artists, and fans have worked to trans games 
themselves: repurposing games and reimagining them in ways that resist 
and refuse the dominant cis-normativity of games culture. These are only 
some of the myriad ways that trans issues have come to intertwine with 
games.

The intersection of trans experience and games is not yet as codified an 
area of study as queer game studies, which allows for a great deal of 
potential and possibility as work on the intersection of trans lives and 
games continues to grow. We take this special issue as an opportunity to 
turn toward community imaginings of the past, present, and future of 
trans game studies. While an imagined trans game studies has much to 
draw from the established sub-field of queer game studies, trans game 
studies (like trans studies more broadly) must be understood as distinct 
from the study of queerness. Addressing trans experiences and trans 
lives in games may necessitate its own set of approaches, methodologies, 
theories, and archives. It may also raise its own array of rich new 
perspectives and productive contradictions between this widely 
influential media form and the realities of trans life.

This special issue of Communication, Culture & Critique calls for the 
envisioning of—and a critical self-reflection on—a trans game studies. 
We understand this issue to be exploratory in spirit, driven by an 
interest in speculative futures, reimagined histories, and alternate 
presents. What is trans game studies? What has it been, what is it now, 
and what would we like to see it become? We are particularly interested 
in contributions from authors who themselves identify as part of trans 
(game) communities—as well as those who are similarly invested in the 
importance of positioning trans life, and Black and Indigenous trans 
lives and trans lives of color, as inseparable from the study and the 
design of games and computational media.

With this special issue, we aim to explore the following questions:

- What is trans game design and/or what are trans games? How might trans 
perspectives shift the creation of games, their temporalities and 
spaces, or the politics of their labor and design?

- What is the place of trans people or trans issues in video game 
history? What might it mean to re-tell the history of games through 
trans perspectives or trans lives, or to use trans game studies to 
question existing modes of writing and thinking about history?

- What is the relationship between trans studies and game studies? What 
might it mean to trans the field of game studies or to bring a focus on 
games and play to the field of trans studies?

  Building from these questions, potential article topics may include 
but are not limited to:
- Games (digital or analog) with trans representational content
- Games interpreted through trans lenses
- Trans game creators and/or design
  - Trans lives in game history and/or trans approaches to game history
- Perspectives, experiences, and politics of Black and Indigenous trans 
people and trans people of color and games
- Trans embodiment in or through games
- Digital trans aesthetics in games
- Tensions between the representational and the deliberately 
non-representational and their relation to trans life and experience 
(e.g. the glitch, the pixelated, or the deliberately opaque)
- Trans issues in game culture
- Experiences of trans players
- Trans video game live streamers
- Trans game fandoms
- The place of trans topics within game studies and vice versa
- The relationship between trans game studies and queer game studies

Submission Instructions:

Please submit an abstract of approximately 500 words, not inclusive of 
references, to the special issue editors Bo Ruberg ((bruberg /at/ uci.edu)) and 
Whit Pow ((wpow /at/ nyu.edu)) by December 15, 2021.
No payment is required from authors.

  Based on the relevance and strength of the proposed work, the special 
issue editors will choose a selection of the submitted abstracts and 
invite their authors to submit full drafts of their articles for peer 
review. Because all articles undergo a full anonymous peer review 
process, an invitation from the editors to submit does not guarantee 
acceptance in the issue. Notifications regarding abstract selection will 
be sent out by January 15, 2022. For those authors invited to submit, 
full articles will be due May 1, 2022. These will be submitted directly 
to Communication, Culture, and Critique via ScholarOne 
(https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cccr)

  If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact 
the co-editors, Bo Ruberg ((bruberg /at/ uci.edu)) and Whit Pow ((wpow /at/ nyu.edu)).

Special Issue Editors:

Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. (they/them) is an associate professor in the Department 
of Film and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the 
Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. They 
are the author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are 
Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020) and 
Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York University Press, 2019) as 
well as the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota 
Press, 2017).

Whit Pow, Ph.D. (they/them) is an assistant professor in the Department 
of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Their work 
has been published in Feminist Media Histories, ROMchip: A Journal of 
Game Histories, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and The 
Velvet Light Trap.




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