Although there is increasing interest in talking about queerness in games and analyzing contemporary examples of queer game content, to date there has been no comprehensive analysis of LGBTQ game content. The project that will be presented in this talk represents a first attempt at correcting this lack. In this talk, researchers from Temple University and University of California-Davis will talk about a collaborative process involving collecting evidence of and analyzing nearly two decades worth of LGBTQ video game content. We will address the challenges of this endeavor, methods employed, and present some preliminary findings of our analysis.
About the presenters
Adrienne Shaw is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University and a Media and Communications PhD program faculty member. Her primary areas of research are video games, gaming culture, the politics of representation, gender and sexuality, and qualitative research. She is author of the book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Evan W. Lauteria is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California-Davis, where he works in the UC-Davis “ModLab,” an interdisciplinary digital humanities and video games research lab. His primary research interests include production of culture, formal organizations, video games, gender and sexuality, and comparative-historical methods. He is the co-editor of Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), and his current research is a comparative-historical analysis of Nintendo and Sega’s business practices in the 1980s and 90s.
Emma Leigh Waldron is a PhD student in the Performance Studies Graduate Group at the University of California – Davis, and Co-Editor-in-Chief at the online journal, Analog Game Studies (analoggamestudies.org). Emma’s work lies at the intersection of performance studies and media studies, and focuses on affective communities that coalesce around intimate performances of touch. She is currently researching the mediated intimacy of ASMR videos on YouTube, and how sex is represented in larp (live-action role-playing games).
Additional resources
http://sociology.ucdavis.edu/people/ewlauter/