Queering the Game Studies Canon: A Polemical Reading of Roger Caillois’s "Man, Play and Games"

Export Metadata

ONIX 3.1
Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
ONIX 3.0
- Thoth
  Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
- Project MUSE
  Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
- OAPEN
  Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
- JSTOR
  Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
- Google Books
  Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
- OverDrive
  Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
ONIX 2.1
- EBSCO Host
  Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
- ProQuest Ebrary
  Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
CSV
JSON
OCLC KBART
BibTeX
CrossRef DOI deposit
Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
MARC 21 Record
Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
MARC 21 Markup
Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
MARC 21 XML
Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters

Raw

Metadata
Title	Queering the Game Studies Canon
Subtitle	A Polemical Reading of Roger Caillois’s "Man, Play and Games"
Contributor	Bo Ruberg(author)
DOI	https://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.11
Landing page	https://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies-what-it-has-been-what-it-could-be/
License	https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Copyright	Bo Ruberg
Publisher	punctum books
Published on	2025-07-25
Long abstract	Game studies is changing, as many scholars have noted, moving increasingly toward much-needed discussions of identity, culture, and power. Part of this shift has been the rise of queer game studies. However, the presumption that queerness is a relatively new topic for game studies overlooks the fact that, in certain key ways, queerness has been here all along. This chapter addresses one piece of video games’ queer past—namely, queer material that can be unearthed from the seemingly “straight” game studies canon—and explains how overlooking that past has continued to affect the present. A close reading of Roger Caillois’ 1958 Man, Play and Games, a foundational work for formalist game studies, reveals that the text can be read as deeply queer. Scenes of non-normative gender and sexual expression permeate the book, which foregrounds the relationship between play and queer pleasure. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is not to reclaim Man, Play and Games, which is itself marred by racist and colonialist thinking. Instead, it serves as an indictment of game studies for distancing itself from the queerness of the very texts it claims as canon. Game studies has always been queer but the field has been built on disavowing that queerness.
Page range	pp. 251–272
Print length	22 pages
Language	English (Original)

Contributors

Bo Ruberg

(author)

Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Irvine

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2759-7233

Bo Ruberg (they/them) is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the co-editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media and digital cultures. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York University Press, 2019), The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020), and Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022). They are also the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture (MIT Press, 2023).