“Queer Indie Video Games as an Alternative Digital Humanities”
Dr. Bo Ruberg (they/them) is a professor and scholar at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in Queer Studies and Digital Media. They have published several books and articles related to the representation of queerness in video games, including The Queer Games Avant-Garde (2020), which won a Stonewall Book Award for its “exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender experience” from the American Library Association. The abstract to their 2018 article, “Queer Indie Video Games as an Alternative Digital Humanities,” is featured below.
Since 2012 the American video games landscape has seen a rising tide of experimental, independently developed queer digital games. In this essay, I argue that the development of these games can be considered a form of digital humanities practice, and that the game makers who produce them can be seen as performing their own genre of American studies scholarship. Together, these games and their creators offer an alternative vision of the digital humanities, modeling counterstrategies for critical engagement through queer, digital praxis and pushing current conversations around diversity, representation, and social justice in DH in important new directions. To illustrate how these games model an alternative DH, this essay draws from interviews conducted with the queer indie game designers Aevee Bee, Andi McClure, and Nicky Case. Building from work by scholars like Tara McPherson, Kara Keeling, and Moya Bailey, this essay contributes to a larger push from scholars of sexuality, gender, and race within DH to interrogate the methods and meanings of the digital humanities and to continue to expand the field’s engagement with perspectives that have too long been pushed to the margins.
Ruberg, Bonnie. “Queer Indie Video Games as an Alternative Digital Humanities: Counterstrategies for Cultural Critique through Interactive Media.” American Quarterly, vol. 70 no. 3, 2018, p. 417-438. Project MUSE.