Digital Symposium: Queering Game Studies  

Game Studies and LGBTQIA+ Analysis, Authorship and Activism

Feb 16th 2022 Online, 09:30-16:30 GMT

Game Studies is a broad field of inquiry into not just games themselves, but their communities of players and creators, and the technical platforms which facilitate play. More recently, titles like Queer Game Studies (Ruberg and Shaw, eds. 2017) and The Queer Games Avant-Garde (Ruberg, 2020) have explored the role of queer creativity within games production and queer perspectives on games and play. This symposium aims to bring together a diverse array of voices to continue discussions around LGBTQIA+ analysis, authorship and activism occurring in games as a creative and academic field.

The symposium will feature a pre-recorded keynote talk from Bo Ruberg, author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019) and The Queer Games Avant-Garde (2020) and co-author of Queer Game Studies (Ruberg & Shaw, 2017). Ruberg is also the author of the upcoming Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (forthcoming, MIT Press).

Topics include but are not limited to:

Queer Representation in Games

Intersections of Game Analysis and Queer Theory

Ludic Representations of LGBTQIA+ History

Communities and Platforms

Oppression and Resistance  

Exploring Work of LGBTQIA+ Game Devs

Queerness and Non-Digital Games

Games Education, Inclusion and Intersectionality

If you are interested in presenting at the symposium, please provide an abstract of around 300 words, as well as a short biographical description including your field and level of studies and your pronouns. We welcome contributions from early-career researchers and graduate students. Please email your expressions of interest to joe.baxter-webb@canterbury.ac.uk before the 17th of December 2021 (previously 26th November 2021).  

Symposium Organiser: Dr. Joe Baxter-Webb

Committee Members:

Dr. Katja Hallenberg

Dr. Andrew M. Butler

Dr. Joe Baxter-Webb