Yet, like an obscure power-up revitalizing the hero on their journey, a new collection of essays titled Queer Games Studies has come to address the intersection of gender, sexuality, and video games. At such moments, I am confronted with the fact that my enjoyment of games might come at the cost of enduring consistent forms of intolerance and violence, no matter how much I might want my experience playing games to be separate from such things. It is easy to feel exasperated when incidents like #Gamergate go viral, making the prejudice bubbling just beneath the surface burst into full view. That bitter episode also illustrates the convergence of contemporary concerns about access and inclusion for marginalized people with an erupting tension between discrete consumer demographics and their respective market segments. The 2014 Gamergate controversy - a harassment campaign targeting female gamers and those who support them that was followed by an organized movement of angry anonymous gamers and conservative critics bent on preventing what they saw as the feminization of their favorite platforms and games - makes clear the anxiety that those who are not white, male, and cis-gendered can feel when playing video games. This sense of being misrepresented - if my identities as a queer person of color are even represented at all - is only exacerbated by the misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic culture that continues to permeate the video game industry and many gamer communities.
These absences further alienate me as a gamer the older I get, as I wish to see some representation or acknowledgment of the various identities I occupy. These feelings occur when I am forced to embody the straight, white, cis-gendered plumber Mario on a journey to save a disempowered princess, or traversing an expansive world with 13 years of sustained development support that has yielded the realistic texture of dragon scales, but no serious effort to present a single queer or trans character.
While popular game franchises like Super Mario 64 and World of Warcraft are nostalgic hallmarks of my childhood (and the source of personal accomplishments I continue to brag about to this day), they have also been a source of alienation and exclusion.
AS SOMEONE WHO has always turned to video games to take a break from everyday tedium and intense stress alike, I’ve often struggled to find myself represented as a queer person of color within the digital world.
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