| 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) |
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).