Ruva- Historically marginalized groups and mainstream gaming

Bee argued that they did not care if their games penetrated mainstream gaming. What was their rationale for not focusing on the mainstream and what intervention does their approach offer for scholars working on or researching historically marginalized groups?  

Generally, mainstream gaming excludes marginal groups. It does not feature figures or social cues that represent other marginal groups such as queer sexualities and minority communities. Bee’s game “We know the devil” reflects her resistance to pressure from the mainstream culture on queer artists to create games for conventional communities. By not focusing on mainstream gaming interests, Bee and other creators of queer Indie games push gaming towards greater inclusivity. They actively and creatively resist the norm through making available games that accommodate the marginal groups. She uses video games to tell her story as it really happened and at the same time assert agency over their won histories. 

 Queer Indie games are another form of digital scholarship, which successfully extends debates on issues of identity, diversity, and representation in digital scholarship. These games expand ways of articulating struggle and expressing marginalized perspectives within the digital humanities. Bee’s work, for example, brings to question the argument/ logic that the job of interactive digital scholarship is to make a widely accessible representation of life and culture as it is (426). Interactive tools have the potential to allow users to explore alternative ways of being and to purposefully complicate rather than distribute representatives of marginalized people’s lives (426). Bee moves away from presenting marginal societies as victims but rather she articulates them as proud beings who own their struggle and make their own choices. She makes an important intervention in presenting marginal groups with power instead of vulnerability.

My question: To what extent do interaction in and with virtual spaces converge and impact actual life?  

Through Queer Indie games, conventional people are introduced to the life experiences of marginal groups. They are able to interact and maybe embody the identity of a player who has a marginal identity. When gamers embody the player, they get to understand what the player faces in terms of marginality in the virtual space. Which transforms the virtual space into a zone of safety and to some degree acceptability for the marginal groups. To what extent do the experiences of non-marginal groups with marginal groups and the understanding they get translate to actual life encounters? I presume that there is a very detached and asymmetrical relationship between the experiences in virtual spaces and actual life. Indeed, the Queer Indie games bring exposure to struggles and help conventional people maybe understand to some degree the identities and struggles of other people. However, there is a high possibility that for a majority of gamers such experiences are relegated specifically to virtual spaces only and remain, detached to actual everyday life experiences. 

By Ruva