Category: Uncategorized

Announcing the QGJam 2023 Speakers!

We are so excited to present our invited speakers for the first-ever Queerness and Games Jam

On October 14th at 12:30 PM EST, we will bring these eight incredible scholars, designers and thinkers-about-games together for a remote, livestreamed symposium that will serve as the theme and inspiration for our game jam. Whether you’re planning to participate in the jam or not, you are absolutely welcome to attend. It’s gearing up to be an excellent conversation!

Speakers

Caro Asercion

Caro Asercion is an interdisciplinary artist working in theatre, visual art, and analog games. Their practice centers on dramaturgical theory, collaborative processes, and small worlds crafted with intention.

Sharang Biswas

Sharang Biswas is an interactive artist, game designer, and writer. He has taught game design at Dartmouth, Fordham University, NYU Game Center, and Parsons. From 2020-2022, Sharang was Game Design Artist in Residence

Continue reading

Announcing the Queerness and Games Jam, coming October 2023

QGJAM logo

After three years of planning, organizational development and hibernation, we are so excited to announce our next event: 

✨🌈 QGJam 🌈✨

October 14-28, 2023

QGJam is a rad virtual game jam where LGBTQ+ game scholars and makers will come together to make games based on queer theories & ideas. Join us for two weeks of fun conversations, queer games, and sustainable jamming. 

Fill out our interest form to be kept in the loop: https://forms.gle/WTymFXUVcFTa7gLa8

What is a game jam?

A game jam is an event where participants make a game within a short period of time, often based on a theme. Jammers may work alone, but they usually form groups and collaborate on a game together. Game jams are great ways to try your hand at game development, make new friends, and commit to a small, finishable project. 

How can I participate? 

Whether or not you’ve made a game before, and whether you consider yourself a game developer, a scholar, a student or something else, we would love for you to be involved! Here are some ways you can do that:

  1. Make a game: you can join as a group or alone and make a

Continue reading

QGCon’s Next Steps

Hey folks! We’ve heard your questions about what the next QGCon will look like — whether we’re planning an in-person, hybrid or virtual conference. We are in the early stages of planning the next QGCon activities. We do not plan to hold the main conference until 2023 at earliest.

As soon as we have more concrete plans, we will share them with you. Thank you so much for your support and for thinking of us. Whatever QGCon looks like in the future, we’re excited to see you there!

QGCon 2020: Sin Sol and Oceanic

micha cárdenas

Transcript:

That I’m giving this talk from the original land of the Owossos people of the Ohlone tribe, which is now maintained by the Amah Mutsun people of the Ohlone tribe of indigenous people which we know is Santa Cruz. So. I am acknowledging that now.

QGcon: This is my talk, that is maybe a little chaotic but It seems to me like the easiest and most expedient way to make this video and talk to you today. My name is micha cárdenas, Dr. micha cárdenas. I am a professor at University of California Santa Cruz and I am an artist and theorist. I teach Digital Arts and New Media, I teach in the games and playable media program. And I teach critical reason ethnic studies. And I’m so happy to be talking to you today about my game Sin Soul and my new game which is little more than a spark in my eye: Oceanic. I’m so honored to be invited here

Continue reading

QGCon 2020: tiny rainbow rebels

Toto Lin

Transcript:

Hi, this is Toto! My pronouns are they/them. You’re about to see a playthrough by EnbyKaiju of Tiny Rainbow Rebels, which is about being a tiny frog in a leather jacket vest. And you think it makes you look cool… and you would be correct! It’s about hanging out with your friends in your treehouse commune after having defeated the rich with motorcycle tricks. It’s also about 

intending to cute-ify communism in the way that sometimes Animal Crossing sometimes cute-ifies capitalism. …Enjoy! I’ll be in the comments to answer any questions.

Ay! There we go. Congrats tiny frog! You stole food from the rich. Press done to continue. You’ve unlocked new outfit, Cowboy! Frickin. You’ve won. I like that. I like that it records the OBS recording of you closing it down. That’s so good. You’ve won. The rich are shaking in their shambles, then poof – they’re gone. You gaze in awe, eyes shining… wet with tears. You’ve made it finally, and it’s time

Continue reading

QGCon 2020: That’s GAY

Virginia Wilkerson

Transcript:

Virginia>> Hi everyone my name’s Virginia Wilkerson. Thank you for coming to my presentation, um. Before we get started I’d like to thank a few people. Um, first of all to my play testers, Chris Kindred, Brianna Shuttleworth and Connor Carson. To the NYU Game Center a Eric Zimmerman, Naomi Clark, Charles Pratt and Jesse Fuchs were all very helpful advisors and teachers on this project. I want to thank QGCon for having me. To Bo Ruberg whose book Videogames Have Always Been Queer was very helpful with the philosophy of this project. And also to Jess Marcotte who was very patient while I put together this video.
A little bit about this project. That’s Gay started out as sort of a response to games like Cards Against Humanity which, um, tend to punch down against minorities. I wanted a game that was for queer people by queer people where being queer was more of the impetus for humor rather than the punchline. Everyone across

Continue reading

QGCon 2020: Gaming Reborn: Queer Play and Pleasure in Pokemon Fan Mods

David Kocik

Transcript:

Hi, everyone. Thanks for listening to my presentation and thank you to everyone at QGCON for giving me the chance to share my work. So today I’m going to be talking about a game called Pokémon Reborn, which is a Pokémon fan game. So it’s not a mainline Pokémon title, but a fan title. And I’ll talk about it in the context of queer modding. So Pokémon Reborn is a Pokémon fan game that was created by a trans woman named Amethyst, and it’s helmed by a queer development team. Amethyst who identifies as trans on her online platforms, including the development blog for Pokémon Reborn, developed the game starting in 2012 and slowly a development team full of all queer people have come together to create this game. That’s come out in episodes since 2012 and the final episode is supposed to come out sometime in 2021. Here’s hoping!

And Pokémon to Reborn uses original game play mechanics and assets. So there’s

Continue reading

QGCon 2020: Queer Zine Games: Integrating Zine Culture into the Queer Games Community, and Vice Versa

Olivia Montoya

Transcript:

So first of all who the hell am I and why am I qualified to talk about this? Hello, my name is Olivia Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die — obligatory Princess Bride reference, I know. I’ve been into zine culture since 2014 and I make up for the relatively short length of time spent with depth. I’ve self-published over 25 mostly personal zines I’ve taught queer zine workshops and other zine workshops at a variety of conferences and other locations around the northeast. I’ve spoken about asexual history and self-published zines and LGBT publications at the World Pride Ace and Aro conference. I’ve mostly solo organized the Zine fest for two years and I got serious about my hobby of making queer narrative video games in 2017 and queer narrative tabletop role-playing games in 2018-2019. I’ve released a large demo of a queer visual novel slash dating sim and a small finished queer visual novel and have a variety

Continue reading

QGCon 2020: How to Fail at Caper in the Castro: Gaming, Young Adult Literature, and HIV/AIDS

Derritt Mason

Transcript:

Hi everyone, my name is Derritt Mason and I’m an associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. I want to acknowledge that I’m putting this presentation together on Treaty 7 territory in southern Alberta, which is the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy and is also home to the Metis nation of Alberta region 3. My talk today is entitled How to Fail at Caper in the Castro: Gaming, Young Adult Literature, and HIV/AIDS, and this talk is essentially an abbreviated version of a chapter I have in my forthcoming book which is coming out next year from the University Press of Mississippi called Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, and what I do in this book is offer something of a critical history of the young adult genre when it comes to queer representation. Each chapter looks at a different site of anxiety, that is a particular theme that has caused critics no small amount of anxiety over the years, and

Continue reading

QGCon 2020: Loving Games, Loving Machines: Queer Desire and the Human/Object Distinction in the Games of Christine Love

Gabriel Guedes

Transcript:

So the title of my presentation is Loving Games, Loving Machines. This question of what does it mean to love a text is one that is essential for this presentation. One way of thinking about love for a text is through admiring how it uses language to cause the reader to feel an emotion. Videogames, for example, medium that is able to cause emotions that might lead a player to express love. But what happens if we conceptualize this love from the player has something erotic or romantic? And even more than that, we imagine the text as something capable of reciprocating that love. Is there something inherently queer in this idea of feeling love toward a videogame? So the goal of my presentation is to explore how reader text relationships can be used to explore how digital and queer subjectivity intersect. So I want to start with Roland Barthes, who talks about how text can function as erotic objects that can autonomously express their

Continue reading