The Queer Games Avant-Garde—Bo Ruberg (University of Irvine, USA)

The queer games avant-garde is a vibrant network of independent video game developers whose radical, experimental, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games.

This talk draws from interviews with these innovative game-makers, tracing patterns and tensions across networks of contemporary queer and trans game development. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games, however. What emerges from these conversations is an exploration of queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, queer aesthetics, and the future of queer video games and technology.

Even as they wrestle with these topics, LGBTQ game makers subvert and redefine the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center.

Bo Ruberg will be joined by Johanna Pirker (TU Graz).

Access

Registration and participation are free and open to the public.

About the Lecture Series

Technologies invade our everyday lives, take part in constructing our identity, classify (often violently) bodies, and, pushed by recent regulations on social distancing, play an expanding role in connecting families and friends. The effects of this rapid increase of technological dependency, though, further exacerbate existing inequalities, introduce new ones, and lead to previously less apparent pockets of freedom.

In the series “Critical Perspectives on Technology”, the project “Exceptional Norms,” part of the research unit Human Computer Interaction at TU Wien Informatics, invites interested audiences to participate in biweekly talks and critically engage with recent research on technology assessment.

Our speakers are trailblazing scholars and internationally renowned experts from a range of (inter)disciplinary standpoints in conversation with Austrian researchers as hosts.

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