My research as of late most prominently focuses on videogames and their arguably queer relationships to analog texts and objects in post-digital environs. I posit “post-digital” (for my purposes, the condition of tension in contemporary technocultures between near total ubiquity of digital media and counter-cultural resurgence of interest in analog media) as a generatively queer concept at the heart of my ongoing project combining game studies with approaches from electronic literature, embodied rhetorics, and media archaeology. Post-digital as a concept calls into question the binaries defining computational techniques and technologies as completely unique markers of unquestioned progress in order to ask what and who gets left out and left behind by the neoliberal narrative of colonialist productivity above all else. I consider queer videogames, analyzed alongside the representational technologies that precede and influence them, as the best kinds of art for venturing possible answers to these queries. Arriving at this current articulation of my research agenda took me through forays into several different fields and comparative media forms from print to film to digital and back again that still inform my work today.
I am now working to begin my first major research project, a full-length monograph I am currently calling Our Bodies Are Load Screens: Queer Materialities of Gameplay in Transition. In this book, I will explore the ways in which videogames primarily by trans game designers can post-digitally queer material (dis)connections between virtual and corporeal. I argue that this unconventional linking of the seemingly disconnected is not just a design practice, but is further the living praxis of all trans game designers and trans people in general. So the post-digital “gaymes” we make are therefore representative of our embodied experiences through both forms and methods that blur both. This blurring is a type of trans techne that directs attention to bodies in flux, irreducible to stable categories or static mediations. Just as trans people understand that our bodies are not easily or even ever binarized (according to sex, gender, and the myriad medical and social framings for such designations), neither do the games we create and/or analytical approaches to others’ we take settle into oversimplified perceptions understood as only distinct from one another. Trans bodies are rather in an arguably constant state of becoming, across perceptions of before and after (pre- and post-transition) often articulated as a kind of “betweenness.” This “betweenness” plays out through rhetorical strategies in games such as the digital representation of bookish artifacts, the agential elision of reading/writing/playing practices, and the intentional constraints of “retro” (or “rhetro”) pixelated game design—which yield affects with effects that are neither one thing and both. So as I put it, our bodies are load screens, and my project aims to show how the games made about, for, and by trans people implement what I call trans-actions of play that queer material connections we often assume as separate. I aim to publish the book as part of the Queer/Trans/Digital series at NYU Press and am already in contact with the editors who have expressed interest.
In addition to this research, I have interests in future work on the rhetoric of videogame emulators, itch.io as a games distribution platform, and a case study of game designer Porpentine.
