Naiara- Queer games and algorithm messiness

AVATARS (archetypes) EXPANDING IDENTITY AND CYBERTYPES

Ruberg’s oral histories of 25 Alternative Indie Game Makers shapes liberating processes as methods and moments of meeting Queer where one is in response to inherited identities and critical/creative next moves. Anna Anthropy cites a “growing movement of video game ‘zinesters,’ intermedia artists operating outside traditional game production structures who are creating often deeply personal work that resists the norms of the medium.” This shift recognizes experiences in empathetic and deeper listening of trauma informed wounds of ego from forced fits into structural and institutional heteronormativity. Emerging experiences, expands identities allowing for self-validation in mirroring and reflecting being “seen” in open virtual spaces that are shaped and informed by queer realities. These spaces reflecting queer identities supports “niche” choices and resources. From new lexicons identifying and naming experiences more proximal to lived experiences, the cybertypes allow for a social imaginary in co-creation at the edge or avant-garde.

Ruberg’s Queer within DH is multi-factorial including the system, tools, algorithms, funding, “messiness” and immigration. In questions concerning identities and subjecthood from one’s existence or “being” to what resists “being” used as departure points for “cleaving” open spaces for cybertypes. Jagoda says, “Tools for building our own worlds and ways of meaning making inventing for ourselves, inhabit a space together that is our own alternative digital humanities.” It holds space for an emergence of queer identities in Cis- and Trans- gendered knowability and alternative visions of what’s transparent or accurate, from traditional assumptions. McClure likes the “looser and less formal taxonomy of selfhood.” Messiness or “glitchiness” become opportunities for meaning making and beautiful. Messy and interconnected or intersectional identities dealing with immigrant experiences, include race, socioeconomics, mental health, and marginalization in queer, trans self-hood in Case’s Coming Out Simulator.  

In Jackson and Neal’s Black Scholarship “Black Code Studies” non-institutionalized identity expansions, beyond systemic critical discourses; academic disciplines; structures of legitimacy challenge subjecthood; and modes of thought “blur edges of DH in celebrating frictions in theory and praxis and funding models flattening hierarchial communities.” McClure’s abstraction of identities, meaning not having a body, where physical and external aren’t places liked and offer escape also uses algorithms in revealing stereotypes and choices to reflect polarizing biases. Here cybertypes invite virtual expansion in trying on spaces and places like “trying on clothes” in inviting “queer, feminists, antiracist, personal, cultural aware a digital alternative reality” experiences in “recognized” play where the deeply personal avatar is universal. 

jiyun park, April 3, 2020