When life gets complicated, we seek refuge in a departure from reality. We may absorb ourselves in the comfort of “cozy games,” where the affairs of our days are prompted by an anonymous authority and occupied by simple tasks. In class, we discussed the gameplay of Stardew Valley as an experience that is directed by suggestions prompted by the game. As we become immersed in the space of Pelican Town, we are provided tools and instructed to use them in particular ways. We are told that we can use our ax to clear land, our fishing pole to acquire food to be sold, and our seeds to plant crops to be harvested. We are told to give gifts to the townspeople to befriend them, and to travel to certain parts of town to complete certain tasks. It seems that if you want to progress along the decidedly successful path of the gameplay, you are to follow the suggestions provided. Of course, there is nothing forcing you to follow these suggestions. Perhaps you don’t care to interact with the townspeople, and wish to focus on planting, cultivating, and harvesting your crops for your own possession. Perhaps your game play consists of opening the game, giving a townsperson a rock, to which they reply with disdain, and do nothing more for the day. Who’s to stop you? I wish to pose this decision to ignore the game’s suggestions as an act of queerness, rebelling against an existing “normal” construct.
In Edmond Chang’s “Queergaming,” he defines queergaming as a refusal of the idea that digital games and gaming communities are the sole provenance of adolescent, straight, white cisgender, masculine, able, male, and ‘hardcore’ bodies and desires and the articulation of and investment in alternative modes of play and ways of being” (15). This definition aligns with a standard perception of queerness, in the sense of a disruption of what is deemed to be a “normal” gender identity or sexual orientation. However, Chang continues to describe queergaming as a kind of countergaming, “inflecting and infecting it with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the ‘open mesh of possibilities,’ a challenge to normative structures, narratives, and technologies – a wholly different kind of adventure.” Deciding to abandon the guidance of Stardew Valley’s standard gameplay constitutes this kind of skewing of the normal of operating in this world, independent of any particular association to a sexual or gendered definition of queerness.
Chang additionally cites the role of game mods as an example of an instrument of queergaming. I turned to our discord channel to view some of the mods we have been experimenting with: Jude mentioned a multiple marriages mod and Amory proposed using one that would allow 30 people to live on one farm. The feasibility of playing a version of Stardew so different from other players, I would argue, reinforces the gameplay experience as an example of queergaming.
I would also draw attention to Aubrey Anable’s “Rhythms of Work and Play,” in which she frames casual gaming in the context of its gendered division: “The way casual games both represent the working woman and connote an activity done in order to escape work compels us to understand them as more culturally significant than they are usually made out to be. Rather than being equivalent to motivational posters— static media that simply adorn and reinforce the status quo of class, gender, and labor conditions— casual games are affective processes with the potential to animate changes in these same conditions.” (100-101) To pair Anable’s work with Chang’s, I would argue that all casual gameplay could be categorized as queergaming. The act of occupying any amount of our day’s time with casual gaming as opposed to working is an act of rebellion against the status quo. It is a queer act.
In a world where we are absorbed in varying forms of digital media for a majority of the hours in a day, it is easy to get caught up in what we are used to. Gaming allows for a uniquely interactive experience in which we are able to defy the constructed norms to create a gameplay that is unique and, in a sense, rebellious. Perhaps this could even provide players with a real catharsis driven by the wish to break free from the status quo in their routines, careers, and relationships.
