The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games

In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game-makers tell stories about their lives, inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways that they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve diversity in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center. Interviewees very Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Aevee Bee, Tonia Belgari, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagan, Kat Jones, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang