Chasing Wild Space: Narrative Outsides and World-Building Frontiers in Knights of the Old Republic and The Old Republic

As introduced in the iconic line that precedes the first film’s opening crawl, Star Wars’s galaxy far, far away is the foundation for the franchise’s worldbuilding efforts. It is the backdrop and context for the story told by any Star Wars film, novel, game, or other text,1 and as such it functions as a narrative world or storyworld. David Herman describes a storyworld as the “mental model” of the larger world of a text, one that audiences construct from “textual cues and the inferences that they make possible.”2 In other words, the Star Wars galaxy is only partially represented by any particular text, and audiences use that partial representation to imagine how the rest of the galaxy works. However, it seems strange to call the Star Wars galaxy, itself an agglomeration of inconsistent and contested narratives, characters, and worlds, a singular storyworld. Marie-Laure Ryan’s recent conception of the narrative universe as an accumulation of storyworlds seems more apt. This chapter therefore explores the space of the Star Wars galaxy as a narrative universe, arguing that it renews itself and its transmedial franchise through the mystery of outside spaces. The use of these outside spaces in Star Wars suggests a new modification or addition to existing theories of narrative world-building, and draws critical attention to the ethical and political dimensions of world-building processes

Neuroqueer: Contextualizing Narrative through Embodied Experience

As Sue Kim noted at the Narrative 2018 conference, the field of narrative theory is long overdue for a reckoning with its lack of diversity and its frequent silence on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in favor of supposedly neutral, universal qualities of narrative (Hogan 2010). To be sure, the recent works by scholars such as Warhol, Lanser, Donahue, Ho, and Morgan that structure the questions of this panel have provided rich sites for that reckoning to begin. However the various narratologies present in such work, such as queer, feminist, and cognitive narrative theories, rarely speak to one another, and when they do they do so on the level of cultural narratives or affective stances, such as Kim’s work with narrative and anger (2013). This paper contributes to efforts to bridge and contextualize narrative theories by proposing that focusing on narrative as an embodied experience can reveal new ways of accounting for difference in narrative––ways to bring different narratives theories together, and to understand how we all use and understand narrative differently based on our embodied positions within systems of power. As an example, this paper uses neuroqueer (as recently theorized by Jigna Desai) as a narrative of a particular embodiment—being neurodivergent and queer—in order to examine how cognitive, queer, and rhetorical narrative theories can (and must) meet in understanding how we make meaning in and tell stories about the world differently based on our lived experiences. Neuroqueer’s implications for contextualizing narrative become particularly apparent in SOMA, a video game set in a post-apocalyptic world where human consciousness is transferred to android bodies. In SOMA, the player’s perspective on the world shifts based on the bodies they experience it through, and in multiple instances the game’s narrative upends their normative expectations of embodiment and interaction in ways that are distinctly neuroqueer

“‘Look At Me, Boy!’: Carnivalesque, Masks, and Queer Performativity in BioShock”

Book chapter exploring the queering of identity in Bioshock, including analysis of masks and carnivalesque culture in the game. The chapter argues that Bioshock presents an opportunity to queer identity and cultural systems, but forecloses on that possibility and instead reinscribes violence. Finally, the chapter uses its close analysis of the game to suggest both promises and warnings for the study of queerness

Gamers, gender, and cruel optimism: the limits of social identity constructs in The Guild

Video game culture has a long, ongoing history of problems with representation and inclusivity, as a wide variety of forces have constructed video games and gaming as masculine. Against this background, the popular gamer-oriented web series The Guild (2007–2013) appears to offer a unique counterperspective, presenting a gender-diverse cast and focusing primarily on female protagonist Cyd “Codex” Sherman. As such, the show could potentially diversify popular conceptions of gamers. Through a close reading of The Guild, however, we demonstrate that it fails to do so. More specifically, the show’s portrayal of gamer identity serves as a form of cruel optimism, presenting it as an ideal that promises game players a consistent subculture and a sense of belonging, but ultimately traps them in narrow roles and identity constructs. Furthermore, the show’s gamer ideal also reproduces particular forms of gendered inequalities that posit aggressive, competitive masculinity as superior to both more passive masculinities and all forms of femininity. Overall, this leads The Guild to reinforce gaming culture’s existing problems with sexism and regressive stereotypes. Because of this, the show presents a relation of cruel optimism, assuming the appearance of positive change while failing to deliver on it

Drawing Queer Intersections Through Video Game Archives

This presentation brings together and builds on previous studies of queer representation using the LGBTQ Video Game Archive and the Represent Me games database (Cole et al. 2017) in order to investigate unexplored trends and invisible queer intersections in video games. Specifically, we draw on Queer Intersections in Video Games (Mejeur 2018), a collection of visualizations of the Archive, and expand our scope on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class in queer representation. By zooming out and overlaying many representations at once, rather than focusing in on specific games, characters, or narratives, these visualizations reveal patterns that are often unexpected and difficult to see otherwise, such as the increasing Whiteness of queer representation or the shrinking proportion of lesbian characters compared to bisexual women characters. Further, this collection of visualizations aims to center intersectional perspectives on queerness in order to de-center the Whiteness of queer games and queer game studies (Russworm 2018; Russworm 2019; Ruberg & Phillips 2018). In the process of highlighting trends and patterns in queer representation in video games, this presentation will also reflect on the difficulties inherent in queer visualization, which relies on information and elements that are often ambiguous, subtle, or incomplete. Indeed, it is problematic to draw clear lines and boundaries around queer identities, as defining, categorizing, and ordering queerness seems antithetical to its ability to “disturb the order of things” (Ahmed 2006, 161). Instead, we embrace the ambiguity as a generative tension and challenge to not just apply visualization methods to queer game studies, but further to play with and reimagine what queer visualizations can become. This presentation presents visualizations that are more fluid and adaptable, capable of addressing the queer ambiguities, growths, and movements across the spectra of gender and sexuality

Ludonarrative: Queer Experiences, Embodied Stories, and Playful Realities in Video Games

Narrative has been a central topic in game studies since the beginnings of the field, particularly in the foundational debates between narratology and ludology over whether or not games are narrative. Yet in the aftermath of those debates narrative has remained significantly limited to being a linear or at best multilinear form, and studies of narrative form in games rarely consider how its form is always affected by race, gender, sexuality, and other intersectional identities. This dissertation pushes these understandings further by proposing a new theory of narrative based on video games, play, and the lived, embodied experience of difference. Specifically, I argue that narrative is the variable and emergent process of organizing signs into sequences and patterns, in the process constructing unique (and possibly queer) realities

A Narrative of One’s Own: Twine and Community in the Classroom (Panel D)

One of the best aspects of the Digital Humanities is their strong emphasis on praxis, especially the making of digital tools and archives that serve our scholarly and public communities. In this spirit, the Digital Humanities can challenge educators to reconfigure learning around making and doing, and furthermore to find new ways to create in a digital world. My presentation will focus on a recent course I taught at MSU on video games, narrative, and culture, in which I tasked my students with learning through creating their own games and stories with Twine. Twine is a free, web-based software for authoring interactive fictions and games, and by using it I encouraged my students to build their own understanding of narrative through hands-on experience, rather than just reading what scholars and authors say about it (though we did some of that too). With Twine my students could see that narrative is more than abstract theory for humanities scholars–it can be an incredible personal tool for making meaning and shaping understanding. As Twine games such as Squinky’s Quing’s Quest VII (created in response to GamerGate two years ago) demonstrate, a crucial aspect of this personal meaning making is navigating one’s relationship to larger communities and social structures, including building senses of belonging, critique, and even rejection. Furthermore, through the shared act of creating students become part of a new community of their own in the classroom, and it is up to the instructor to ensure that that community is inclusive and supportive of individual voices and narratives. Building on my experience in teaching with Twine, I argue that educators in the humanities should ground their teaching in practices of making and doing that go beyond traditional activities of reflection and critique (important, and indeed creative, as those often are). Doing so foregrounds the question of why humanities work matters, and answers that challenge head on by demonstrating how humanities concepts can be put into action. A renewed focus on praxis can even transform our understandings of our theories in generative ways, opening new perspectives and possibilities for our scholarship

Who Gets to Be in The Guild? Race, Gender and Intersecting Stereotypes in Gaming Cultures

While media studies have frequently assessed the importance of representation, research in this area has often been siloed by institutional and methodological norms that define academics as “gender”, “race”, or “class” scholars, rather than inclusive scholars of all these and more. This paper thus responds to recent calls for more intersectional work by simultaneously addressing the overlapping representations of race, gender, and gamer identity, and their relation to Lorde’s concept of the mythical norm, in the popular webseries, The Guild (YouTube, 2007-2013). Via a detailed, inductive thematic analysis of the show’s two characters of color, Zaboo and Tinkerballa, we find a doubly problematic intersection between standard “gamer identity” tropes and gendered Asian/American stereotypes. The show forecloses on its potential to be truly diverse and reinforces the oppressive, marginalizing practices it tries to mock, suggesting that gaming culture will not change until we address its intersecting axes of power and exclusion. This research also demonstrates how the constructed identity of media audiences-- in this case, stereotypical “gamer” identity-- can exacerbate and reaffirm existing power disparities in representation. We suggest that media scholars remain attentive to the intersecting articulations of media consumer and individual identities in considering how representation can influence systems of inclusion and exclusion, as well as viewers’ lived outcomes

[[Enter Twine\u27d]]: Linking Teaching and Learning through Hypertext

Relating their own experiences with the hypertext platform Twine within and outside of classroom spaces, this roundtable builds on the call for greater multiliteracy learning. Twine promotes digital composition activities for students as part of a larger commitment to how games-based learning can speak to and enable student voices