Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Game Novels
Date
2020-08-27
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Abstract
Considering the important process of using queer theory as a mode of resisting the ableist white cisheteropatriarchy of mainstream video games, Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Games Novels seeks to bring this work into the literary sphere. I use the theoretical frame of queer failure to examine a quickly expanding subgenre of fiction, the video game novel, where video games serve as key elements of a novel’s plot and setting. Each chapter examines a phenomenon of real-life video games and compares how these phenomena have manifested themselves or been challenged in literature. Chapter One challenges the persisting heteronormativity of classic video game culture to queer Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game by proving that there is reparative queer content in these otherwise heteronormative texts. Chapter Two examines the heteronormative impulse of e-sports through the example of Riot Games’ League of Legends and how Marie Lu’s Warcross queers this gaming genre. Finally, Chapter Three examines the racism embedded in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre and explores how Brittney Morris’s SLAY responds to this tradition by creating a gaming space for only Black players which begins to empower Black transgender gamers. Ultimately, my thesis demonstrates that not only have video games always been queer, as games scholar Bonnie Ruberg suggests, but so have video game novels. I assert that video game novels and the practice of reading video game novels queerly should become part of the conversation surrounding queer game studies. Further, I argue that these literary works have the potential to provide direction to real-life video games as the genre begins to imagine answers to the issues of the dominant gaming community and the development process to create alternative worlds and futures for video games.
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video games, young adult literature, queer, failure, queer game studies, queer theory
Citation
Brooks, L. (2020). Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Game Novels (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.