News/Research

Alum Bonnie Ruberg's Queer Games Studies Reviewed in Creative Applications

13 Nov, 2017

Alum Bonnie Ruberg's Queer Games Studies Reviewed in Creative Applications

Greg J. Smith for Creative Applications reviews Queer Game Studies, an anthology edited by BCNM alumna Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw discussing video games from an LGBTQ+ approach. As Smith writes: "In their introduction to the anthology, editors Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw note that queer gaming is “a paradigm not a subfield” and that it is not so much the intersection of queer studies and videogame scholarship, but the spectrum of approaches that are generated by that intersection."

Smith provides a brief overview of the many contributions within the anthology, from Edmond Y. Chang's discussion of countergaming to Amanda Phillips and Todd Harper's close reading of Bayonetta and Mass Effect. Editor Adrienne Shaw covers "the barriers (intentional or otherwise) put up within LGBTQ gamer communities." However, Smith also mentions a few critiques of the anthology, including the piecemeal nature of its writing as a result of multiple contributors, but ultimately provides a resoundingly positive review of the book. He closes:

A moment toward the end of editor Bonnie Ruberg’s final chapter “Forty-Eight Hour Utopia: On Hope and the Future of Queerness in Games” sums up the experience of the book nicely; she relates how some peers asked her about how a conference (that brought together many folks from this very text together) went and half burnt-out, but still totally elated about the forum she’d just created, she replied: “It was short … but it was wonderful.”

Read the full review on Creative Applications here.