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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
In this presentation, I argue that the representation of printed artifacts in digital games present a kind of post-digital queering of the binaries demarcating print from digital. “Post-digital,” or, the condition of tension in contemporary technocultures between near total ubiquity of digital media and counter-cultural resurgence of interest in analog media, is, for my purposes here a generatively queer concept. With it, we may call into question the rhetoric defining computational techniques and technologies as completely unique markers of unquestioned progress in order to ask what and who gets left out and left behind by this neoliberal narrative of colonialist productivity above all else. I consider queer videogames featuring digital iterations of print and paper media to be the best kinds of art for venturing possible answers to these queries.
Virtually bookish and/or book-adjacent artifacts range from outside of videogames as paratexts and paraphernalia to inside as remediated items, interfaces, and/or aesthetics constructing the play experiences of certain titles. I posit that they provide case studies for understanding videogames as affectively embodied experiences that can take place across print and digital and blur the agencies of reading and playing, thus queering both form and method. I make this argument by drawing post-digital connections between Caper in the Castro (1989), famously billed as “not just a game…it’s a gayme!”, and more contemporary queer games such as Gone Home (2013), OneShot (2016), and If Found… (2020). Scholars I turn to throughout this presentation include Florian Cramer, Aubrey Anable, Bo Ruberg, and more.
Post-Digital Gaymes: The Presence of Print in Queering Digital Play
In this presentation, I argue that the representation of printed artifacts in digital games present a kind of post-digital queering of the binaries demarcating print from digital. “Post-digital,” or, the condition of tension in contemporary technocultures between near total ubiquity of digital media and counter-cultural resurgence of interest in analog media, is, for my purposes here a generatively queer concept. With it, we may call into question the rhetoric defining computational techniques and technologies as completely unique markers of unquestioned progress in order to ask what and who gets left out and left behind by this neoliberal narrative of colonialist productivity above all else. I consider queer videogames featuring digital iterations of print and paper media to be the best kinds of art for venturing possible answers to these queries.
Virtually bookish and/or book-adjacent artifacts range from outside of videogames as paratexts and paraphernalia to inside as remediated items, interfaces, and/or aesthetics constructing the play experiences of certain titles. I posit that they provide case studies for understanding videogames as affectively embodied experiences that can take place across print and digital and blur the agencies of reading and playing, thus queering both form and method. I make this argument by drawing post-digital connections between Caper in the Castro (1989), famously billed as “not just a game…it’s a gayme!”, and more contemporary queer games such as Gone Home (2013), OneShot (2016), and If Found… (2020). Scholars I turn to throughout this presentation include Florian Cramer, Aubrey Anable, Bo Ruberg, and more.
Bio
Chloe Anna Milligan is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Writing and Digital Media Program at Pennsylvania State University, Berks. She teaches, researches, and publishes primarily about topics in electronic literature and game studies, through emphases on affect and queer materiality spanning both analog and digital contexts. Her relevant scholarly work is published in venues such as ROMchip, Press Start, Publije, with more forthcoming in edited collections Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom and Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames.