Dr.Bo Ruberg is an enthusiastic, engaging and fascinating presenter. Their recent presentation on Queer Game Studies, as an overview of their work, was such an interesting insight into the growing field, and how it relates to areas of research within the Digital Democracies Institute that we wanted to share it wider to spread the word.
I fully admit at the start of this that I am not a gamer. The last video game I played was probably Sonic the Hedgehog on my Sega Mega Drive when I was about 10, and while I am aware of how large the industry is, I hadn’t necessarily given a lot of recent thought to how important gaming is in general, and more specifically, how important it can be to queer communities. Dr. Ruberg’s presentation and their deep understanding of this was one of the most compelling arguments I have heard as to why I perhaps should learn more about gaming, as it seemingly reflects and mirrors every aspect of society, both online and off, and has done for generations.
Dr Ruberg’s background in studying game culture started in 2005, around the time that the Family Entertainment Protection Act came into place in the US. This important piece of legislation was used as an example of exactly how political gaming can be, even though many gamers and communities claim that it lies outside the mundanity of such things. According to Dr. Ruberg, this denial of any political angle of gaming does nothing to detract from the fact that games are, like anything that involves people, corporations, power, representation etc etc, exactly political, and it is this that forms the base of much of their work. The image on the right shows Hilary Clinton in 1993, playing a GameBoy, thereby demonstrating one of many ways that video games existed alongside politics.
In terms of queer presence in gaming, there are now hundreds of queer gamemakers, and dozens of researchers studying the field, Dr. Ruberg and the ‘Critical Approaches to Technology and the Social’ Lab at the University of California, Irvine, being one of the leading voices. Dr. Ruberg also referenced a number of books about digital media and culture from Angela Jones, Kishonna L Gray and Soraya Murray to name a few, and gave some information on their own recent works, Queer Game Studies, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, and The Queer Games Avant Garde available here from Duke University Press. 
The sheer number of researchers, and new books being published, serve to demonstrate how present the issues that resonate with queer gaming are, which we will now delve into further.
There has been explicit queer representation for a number of years which has received some attention in the mainstream media. Tracer and Soldier 76 from Overwatch, and a host of characters from Assassin’s Creed for example, as well as The Last of Us II which has a lesbian protagonist in its zombie apocalypse setting. There are also a huge amount of independent queer games, such as those designed by Robert Yang, but there is also an argument for video games themselves to be understood as queer. In their interpretation, the way that video games are played, and in the design, they are often alternative and represent non-normative narratives. Dr. Ruberg described that they are drawn to strange, silly, non-normative games which represent some aspects of their experience such as Octodad, where an octopus is played to try and pass as cis, straight and white in a normative hetero family.
In terms of the collaborations that Dr. Ruberg’s work has with the Digital Democracies Institute, online abuse and harassment features as one of the obvious themes. Since online streaming began back in the 1990s, there have been instances of users and streamers receiving abuse. One of the fascinating aspects of gaming platforms is the moderation, which is often achieved by a combination of the platform, and from within the streamer’s channel itself, as they may employ moderators to monitor abusive comments from viewers. Here, the labour falls to the streamer, and once reported, the platforms are not overtly transparent about how abuse is addressed. There is no doubt that there is both a disproportionate reporting on streamers compared to viewers, and that much of that reporting is fundamentally sexist. It is in trying to increase transparency of moderation by platforms that Dr. Ruberg sees the most potential for improving the amount of abusive language and harassment that continues in gaming, the legalese around what is monitored and how it is addressed. They called for the need for an organising body, but the challenge is in convincing the industry that there is a need for such a thing, and that the people that work within it need to care enough about the millions of users for it to happen.
This call to arms is not just for the Digital Democracies Institute, and Dr. Ruberg’s Lab. In creating opportunities for collaboration, our networks continue to grow and learn. The DDI is an exciting hub to foster this type of learning and information-sharing amongst our affiliates, and other presenters to the Institute will feature here as they arise.