News/Research

The Queer Games Avant-Garde Reviewed in Information, Communications, and Society

14 Feb, 2021

The Queer Games Avant-Garde Reviewed in Information, Communications, and Society

Bo Ruberg's book The Queer Games Avant-Garde was recently reviewed by Information Communication & Society, a journal that publishes current work on the social, economic and cultural impact of information and communication technologies.

The Queer Games Avant-Garde presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experiment, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. These conversations provide insight beyond typical talks about LGBTQ representation in video games and instead explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, the influence of feminist art on their work, and more!

From the review:

Ruberg situates "The Queer Games Avant-Garde" as a 'snapshot' of this fluid and ever-changing movement, meant to offer a sense of what the queer games avant-garde looked like from certain vantage points at about half a decade into its history: what Ruberg's afterword calls 'a tipping point' during which the moveemnt was 'spreading, picking up speed, and breaking free from the cultural narratives that described queer indie game-making as 'niche'(p.234). As a temporal snapshot in this sense, "The Queer Games Avant-Garde" is not presented as a definitive statement about what queer indie games are or what their creation means, but more as a starting point of further exploration, celebration, and complication. In fact, Ruberg outright cautions that even terms such as 'queer indie games' are meant to provide more of a descriptive framework than a prescriptive one (p.25).

Check out the full review here!

Check out the book here!