Review of the Queer Games Avant Garde in Journal of Play
Bo Ruberg's The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games featured in the American Journal of Play's Fall 2020 Book Review. Referred to as The Queer Games Avant-Garde, the book includes the interviews of over twenty queer video game developers challenging what it means for a video game to be queer.
From the review:
Framed by the cultural and political backdrop of the 2016 election in the United States, the #GamerGate backlash beginning in 2014, and the nascent indie games movement (queer and otherwise), Bonnie Ruberg’s The Queer Games Avant-Garde offers a well-curated, thoughtful, playful, behind-the-sequined-curtain look at the “rising tide of indie games being developed by, about and often for LGBTQ people” (p. 3). Ruberg weaves together working definitions of “queer” and “games” and “avant-garde” and makes astute connections across past, present, and future that leans into the messiness of a diversity of perspectives and lived experiences of the featured artists, writers, organizers, and creators and that emphasizes the powerful idea that “making video games as queer people is a political act” (p. 6).
Read the entire review here!