A Feminist, Queer Adventure Line: How Digital Games Create Radical Spaces

In A Feminist, Queer Adventure Line, Ashley P. Jones explores how digital games can facilitate acts of political play and initiate change in the empirical world. Online harassment campaigns such as GamerGate expose the frequency with which hate speech is directed toward creators and players who identify with feminism or queerness and their allies. Change enacted specifically through feminist and queer gaming procedures and mechanics, as Jones shows, can offer opportunities for combating the marginalization and toxicity of some gaming experiences.

To expose the embedded ideologies within popular digital games, Jones focuses on the procedures and mechanics of embodiment, failure, queer futurity, and the coziness of feminist games. These interactive elements constitute crucial aspects of the play space and narratives of digital games, within both gaming cultures and the empirical world, as they point toward an acceptance of critical metagaming, a practice that encourages creators and players to think through, around, and within the games themselves. Throughout this process, the personal act of play becomes a political act of engagement via game mechanics and players’ interpretations of them. Digital gaming, then, Jones argues, functions as a form of political action. Topics examined include how games and gaming culture can become more inclusive, the ways games invite participation from diverse groups of players, and the extent to which game design applies to ideological formations outside the digital world. Jones outlines these potentialities via playthroughs and case studies of popular games such as Hue, Life Is Strange 2, A Mortician’s Tale, Outer Wilds, The Stanley Parable, Untitled Goose Game, and What Remains of Edith Finch.

Pushing the subversive potential of gaming in new directions, A Feminist, Queer Adventure Line shows that play can be a vehicle for education and that games have the potential to enact positive acceptance of feminist and queer ways of being.

Ashley P. Jones is an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.