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Rewriting the Game: Queer Trans Strategies of Survival, Resistance, and Relationality in Twine Games

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Rewriting the Game: Queer Trans Strategies of Survival, Resistance, and Relationality in Twine Games

Hunter-Loubert, Hunter (2019) Rewriting the Game: Queer Trans Strategies of Survival, Resistance, and Relationality in Twine Games. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores how a selection of video games, created by transgender people using the free software Twine, create space for the survival and flourishing of queer and trans subjects through visions of transformative relationships. It deploys the lenses of queer theories of failure (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure), disidentification (Muñoz, Disidentifications), and utopianism (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia) to perform close readings of the techniques of narrative and game mechanics used as strategies for survival, resistance, and relationality in anna anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree and Queers in Love at the End of the World, Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s With Those We Love Alive, and ira prince’s Queer Trans Mentally Ill Power Fantasy. The analysis focuses on games produced in and around the moment of the “Twine revolution” (Harvey) that aimed in the early 2010s to radically re-envision video games as spaces for minoritized subjects to thrive. Even as the transformation of video games culture as a whole remains an unrealized ideal, this paper argues for the importance of revisiting the under-examined queer strategies these games depict and enact in order to imagine possibilities for “rewrit[ing] the game” (Halberstam in Halberstam and Juul), and through this for “rewrit[ing] the map of everyday life” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 25), possibilities which can allow for the flourishing of queer and trans modes of relationality within and against toxic and exclusive norms in game play and design.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Communication Studies
Item Type:Thesis (Masters)
Authors:Hunter-Loubert, Hunter
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:M.A.
Program:Media Studies
Date:August 2019
Thesis Supervisor(s):Lynes, Krista
Keywords:twine; transgender; transsexual; queer; lesbian; video games; utopia; utopianism; failure; disidentification; relationships; relationality; community; single-player; text-based; hypertext fiction
ID Code:985834
Deposited By: Hunter Hunter-Loubert
Deposited On:05 Feb 2020 02:54
Last Modified:05 Feb 2020 02:54

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