Andy: Queer Indie Video Games and Alternative Conceptions of the Digital Humanities

Andy King

Prof. Whaley’s question: Why did Ruberg focus on Bee, Case, and McClure and how do their video games and methods differ? What makes their games “queer games avant-grade?”

Ruberg’s overt justification for focusing on Bee, Case, and McClure is based on the belief that “the differences in their work speak to the wide range of queer indie game making that is taking place today” (419), with an eye to the ways that queer indie games might be understood as “a form of digital humanities and American studies scholarship,” as sites where their creators can “model counterstrategies for cultural critique that can point us toward an alternative version of the digital humanities that is political, personal, playful, and deeply queer…” (419). Bee’s games employ surrealistic strategies to resist heteronormativity and the expectations of mainstream (and straight) gaming communities; despite Bee’s own literary and creative writing background, her games resist employing literary references as demarcations of “seriousness,” just as they push against a tendency for work about queer experience to be valued for its confessional qualities, substituting for confession the opportunity for players to consciously make “branching narrative choices” (425). Like Bee, Case is interested in structure, but this manifests as a concern with systems--digital as well as social and political, theoretical as well as lived. In Parable of the Polygons, Case offers the opportunity for players to simulate different social outcomes based on varying levels of bias. McClure’s work, Ruberg notes, “rarely includes representations of human subjects,” choosing instead to engage with queerness “on a more conceptual register, challenging heteronormative notions of aesthetics and identity through disruptive play and abstraction” (429); this “conceptual” register includes McClure’s generative practices of pursuing accidental discoveries via modifications of code and algorithms. Ruberg, via other theorists, connects this kind of practice to a conception of queerness as a “messiness,” as a counterpoint to a conception of the digital humanities where the latter’s primary function is to “take large amounts of information, order them, and make them clean…” (429).

As for what makes these creators’ games--and the works of the twenty-five other queer indie game designers who Ruberg interviewed but did not predominantly focus on in this article—“avant-garde,” one thing to note about the rhetoric of Ruberg’s article itself is that it transitions immediately from situating queer indie video games as constituting a new, innovative form of digital humanities praxis into describing all of the interviewed game designers as forming part of what Ruberg calls the “queer games avant-garde” (419). The labeling of these makers, and their creations, as “avant-garde” appears to be a move that Ruberg is committed to making at the outset of the paper’s argument; it occurs immediately following the discussion of the methodology by which the “data” pertaining to this set of queer indie game makers was obtained (in this case, interviews understood as oral histories that centered the thoughts and experiences of the game makers themselves). That the conception of these makers as “avant-garde” is built into the premises to which Ruberg is committed--although to say that they are premises and that Ruberg is committed to them does not preclude their being argued for, as they are later on--is borne out by Ruberg’s comments endorsing a broad, non-normative conception of the digital humanities as “what brings together the digital and the human in order to understand one, the other, or both in new ways…,” as “ a set of meaning-making practices in which culture and its products stand in intimate relation to technology” (421).

Against the backdrop of such an understanding of the digital humanities, it makes sense that Ruberg were describe these queer indie game designers as also being “critically engaged thinkers who perform their own genre of cultural studies, queer studies, and often American studies scholarship”; these game designers, their processes, and their works all seem examples of a practice that is both intellectual in a broad sense and concerned with aesthetic and cultural making (421).

One question I had about Ruberg’s article pertained to the summary and evaluation of current debates in the digital humanities about what DH is, should be, and how certain concepts of either what it is or should be are variously exclusionary, limited, and policed (this takes place primarily on pp. 420-421). Although Ruberg believes a “looser” conception of DH is “more productive” for the purposes of considering queer indie game makers, does this mean that we should always, or even often, think about DH along these lines? In employing the metaphor of the constellation as a way to understand this looser conception of DH, Ruberg says that “the downside and the upside of this approach… are the same: ...the parameters of the digital humanities become potentially endless and intentionally unclear” (421). To what extent might such intentional obscurity be counterproductive for scholarship? Why might scholars be interested in a conception of DH as “traditional scholarship with a digital hand” (Ruberg quoting from Kim and Stommel, 418)? Ruberg claims that, “[t]raditionally, the work that has been deemed most definitively digital humanities is that which is also least critical of the status quo, whether that status quo be cultural or intellectual…” Does good DH scholarship, or scholarship of any sort, need always to preoccupy itself with attempts to intervene or resist a part of the cultural or intellectual status quo, or is it possible that scholarship might provide useful insights into cultural objects, patterns, texts, histories, etc. that are not situated by their authors as interventions of this sort?