On Difficult Queer Games
When I changed my name to Elia in 2021, the first game I ever played using my new name was Christine Love’s visual novel Ladykiller in a Bind. Knowing very little about the game, and given my lifelong affinity for my fellow effeminate brunettes, I gave my new name to this character:
I assumed he’d be a sweet, queer character and I’d be able to relate to his storyline. As it turns out, minimising spoilers, The Boy is actually a manipulative, pathetic object of contempt with precious few humanising moments. So, now that’s my guy. Go figure.
But my relationship to The Boy – and my dislike of how he’s written – has made me think a lot about complicated queer games, representation, and what queer people want from queer media.
Queer people are an essential part of gaming culture, both as players and as creators, but our position in popular gaming culture is still precarious. Games that give us any leeway to be gay whatsoever still feel like a gift. (I am doubtless not the only mid-2010s teenager who came to gayness through making entire cities of lesbians in The Sims Freeplay.) So, whenever we encounter a bad gay – a gay who is just a real piece of shit, and sometimes not even in a Lady Dimitrescu crush-my-neck-mommy kind of way – or a queer game that intends to make us feel uncomfortable and unsettled, there tend to be a lot of mixed feelings about it. And that makes sense! We’re a little starved for game representation; it can feel frustrating to yearn for a character into which to pour your empathy and sorrows, and to instead be presented with an exasperating dickhead.
But I’m increasingly drawn to tricky and dark queer games more than the fluffy, wholesome kind. I’m not a tentative beginner gay anymore; my desire to feel hugged by a game is less than my desire for it to recognise me and fuck with me. I want pain and transgression in a controlled environment. To put it bluntly: I want the final boss to forcefemme me, and if they won’t, I will make them. (Please don’t Google that.) Basically, when queerness is divorced from ethical action and moral representation, you get to explore queerness as sexy and insurgent, and also as co-optable by authoritarian and fascist causes.
