Our Bodies Are Hyperlinks: Trans-Actions of Play for "Gayme"-ing Material Connection
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 4:45 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
18-7-2024 5:45 PM
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Abstract
The earliest known queer videogame Caper in the Castro (1989), an adventure title created in Hypercard by transgender game designer C.M. Ralph, famously billed itself as “not just a game…it’s a Gayme!” Released as charityware through proto-Web Bulletin Board Systems, the game asked users who downloaded it to donate money toward AIDS epidemic relief. In this way, Ralph and their game modeled from the start ways in which queer videogames further queer material (dis)connections between digital and physical, virtual and corporeal, and Internet and “IRL.”
This unconventional linking of the seemingly disconnected is not just a design practice, but the living praxis of all trans game designers like Ralph and trans people in general. Trans bodies connect male to female (“MTF”), female to male (“FTM”), and the gender binary itself to a greater realm of play with identity and embodiment. So as I put it, our bodies are hyperlinks, and this presentation aims to show how the games made about, for, and by trans people implement what I call trans-actions of play that “gayme” material connections we often assume as separate.
For example, Dontnod’s adventure title Tell Me Why (2020), a game featuring a trans man protagonist, connects digital and print through the in-game representation of books, trans woman Aevee Bee’s visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) blurs the practices of reading and playing, and fellow trans woman Maddy Thorson’s Celeste (2018-19) works with and against contemporary graphical fidelity through an intentionally “retro” pixelated design constraint. I argue that each of these games demonstrate through these trans-actions different facets of queer materiality to combine the (never actually all that) bifurcated, especially as textual artifacts widely accessed through the internet where trans community often virtually connect and oftentimes over queer games like these. Scholars I turn to throughout this presentation include Micha Cárdenas, Bo Ruberg, Aubrey Anable, and Gregory Ulmer.
Recommended Citation
Milligan, Chloe, "Our Bodies Are Hyperlinks: Trans-Actions of Play for "Gayme"-ing Material Connection" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 7.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/7
Our Bodies Are Hyperlinks: Trans-Actions of Play for "Gayme"-ing Material Connection
Hypertexts & Fictions
The earliest known queer videogame Caper in the Castro (1989), an adventure title created in Hypercard by transgender game designer C.M. Ralph, famously billed itself as “not just a game…it’s a Gayme!” Released as charityware through proto-Web Bulletin Board Systems, the game asked users who downloaded it to donate money toward AIDS epidemic relief. In this way, Ralph and their game modeled from the start ways in which queer videogames further queer material (dis)connections between digital and physical, virtual and corporeal, and Internet and “IRL.”
This unconventional linking of the seemingly disconnected is not just a design practice, but the living praxis of all trans game designers like Ralph and trans people in general. Trans bodies connect male to female (“MTF”), female to male (“FTM”), and the gender binary itself to a greater realm of play with identity and embodiment. So as I put it, our bodies are hyperlinks, and this presentation aims to show how the games made about, for, and by trans people implement what I call trans-actions of play that “gayme” material connections we often assume as separate.
For example, Dontnod’s adventure title Tell Me Why (2020), a game featuring a trans man protagonist, connects digital and print through the in-game representation of books, trans woman Aevee Bee’s visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) blurs the practices of reading and playing, and fellow trans woman Maddy Thorson’s Celeste (2018-19) works with and against contemporary graphical fidelity through an intentionally “retro” pixelated design constraint. I argue that each of these games demonstrate through these trans-actions different facets of queer materiality to combine the (never actually all that) bifurcated, especially as textual artifacts widely accessed through the internet where trans community often virtually connect and oftentimes over queer games like these. Scholars I turn to throughout this presentation include Micha Cárdenas, Bo Ruberg, Aubrey Anable, and Gregory Ulmer.
Bio
Chloe Anna Milligan is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Writing and Digital Media Program at Pennsylvania State University, Berks, where she specializes in comparative media studies, multimodal composition, and embodied rhetorics. She teaches, researches, and publishes primarily about topics in electronic literature and queer game studies, through emphases on affect and subversive materiality spanning both analog and digital contexts. Her relevant articles are available in journals such as Press Start, Computers and Composition, Hyperrhiz, and Paradoxa. She is currently at work on her first book project about trans games and queer materiality and aims to publish it with NYU Press's Queer/Trans/Digital series.