Abstract
This chapter explores and unpacks the affordances and limitations of ludological concepts and approaches in studying queer game content. It identifies one major point of oversight in ludology—the messy construction of the player-subject position—that has been of primary interest to much of queer game scholarship since the early 2000s. In adopting this focal point to expand ludological frames, the author conducts a content analysis of a sample of 17 transgender characters in 91 commercial mainstream games from 1987 to 2015. This chapter suggests the hailing and interpellation processes of play are central to understanding how transgender identities circulate in gamic spaces, how these relations have changed over time, and how the representational and simulative facets of queer game content relate intimately.
The author wishes to express a special thanks and gratitude to his research assistant, Ben Snow Sipes, who collected a majority of the quantitative data for this study.
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Notes
- 1.
Garcia, Theresa. 2015. “A Brief History of Transgender Characters in Video Games [Updated].” Accessed online at https://transgamersociologist.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/a-brief-history-of-transgender-characters-in-video-games/.
- 2.
Villagomez, Andrew. 2013. “7 Trans-Friendly Video Game Characters.” Accessed online at http://www.out.com/entertainment/popnography/2013/11/03/7-trans-friendly-video-game-characters.
- 3.
The term “trans*” is employed to denote various identity markers and categories under the transgender umbrella, including transgender, transsexual, transman, transwoman, genderqueer, bigender, etc. While some characters openly discuss their identity in their respective games or are granted identities by paratextual documents such as instruction manuals, in many cases the real “identity” of the character is largely unknown, left largely to conjecture based on textual and paratextual evidence. As such, “trans*” is used as a unifying umbrella term for these characters, though their identities or gender categories may vary widely.
- 4.
In the English-language localization of Street Fighter II, Capcom referred to the fighting styles of the Street Fighter characters Ryu and Ken as “Shotokan” (sic), which has since come to refer to a standard special moveset of a fireball-like projectile (hadōken), a rising uppercut (shōryuken), and a roundhouse spinning kick (tatsumaki). These three moves have become a genre standard, with fans, players, critics, and designers referring to characters with similar movesets, both in the Street Fighter franchise and in other games, as “shotoclones.” This “Shōtōkan” bears little resemblance to the real-world style of karate by the same name developed in Japan in the twentieth century, and thus the current fighting style nomenclature is assumed to be a result of localization error.
- 5.
Original text: 「ヨッシーの彼女に見えて実は彼氏!?」(“MARIO KART—Double Dash”).
- 6.
I write “perceived” here both to note that these are all simulated persons and creatures and to simultaneously draw attention to Yoshi’s ability to “pass” as male, and presumably cis, despite producing eggs, a gendered act Birdo attempts to emulate by shooting eggs from her mouth.
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Lauteria, E.W. (2018). Envisioning Queer Game Studies: Ludology and the Study of Queer Game Content. In: Harper, T., Adams, M., Taylor, N. (eds) Queerness in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90542-6_3
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