Queering games history
Complexities, chaos and community
I gave this talk at Queerness and Games Conference a couple of weeks ago. You can watch a video of it here, if you can cope with my accent. Do also check out the other talks by people with better diction.
In the past couple of years, through oral histories and open calls for essays, I have come across at least a dozen different accounts of gender play in people’s personal histories of gaming. I never directly asked anybody about game avatars or gender, but it was a topic people raised again and again, suggesting that to people straight or queer or trans or cis alike, cross-gender digital play is often a significant experience in their gaming lives.
This is a significant challenge to the normative performance of gamer culture. Contemporary, public, commercial games culture is strictly gender normative, but it seems that our private histories of gameplay often involve counter-cultural deviations. As a historian, it’s tempting to try to answer the question: have videogames given us permission to be more queer?
I’ve often wondered if I should try to gather more accounts about this, to try and make sense of how games history has affected the social history of gender. However, the historical methodologies I’m comfortable working with would not do justice to the material. If I am not mindful, then my attempt to incorporate marginalised experiences into my histories will colonialise them.
I don’t have any clear answers yet, but I wanted to share some reflections on how and why we might aspire to no history without queer history, and no method without queer methods.
The college where I did my undergraduate degree had two libraries. One was the regular library with ugly metal shelves and paperback books with poorly designed covers from academic publishers. This was the library you would actually use for studying anything from the past 300 years. The other was an ornamental library. Tourists were charged a fee to come and visit it. it had extremely old beautiful books and these marble busts of the colleges esteemed alumni, all of them great white men. They were made extra white by the marble.
When I began studying there, one of the matriculation rituals involved going up to this library on my own, walking down this long corridor, to sign my name in a big book that contained the names of more great men. This ritual is part of the seduction that convinces students to buy into their newly acquired privilege. These were incredible people who knew so much and changed the world, and by signing my name in that book I was to feel like I was destined to be one of them.
But the more I studied, the more I felt that I was not one of them. The world outside that library is not mine to know. I’m not one of those great men who knew lots of things. I don’t have that right.
I was at that college studying something seemingly of little value — Japanese studies. This included Japanese language, history, ethnography and politics. You can’t directly apply Japanese studies to anything productive. You can’t go out and make a Japan.
I used to justify my degree to people by saying that history and culture can reach you things about how we live and work now and how things might change in the future. It was a natural explanation to turn to when surrounded by physicists.
The problem is that your descriptive theories about history easily become prescriptive. Just because people’s lives have gone a certain way on the past, it does not logically follow that our own lives will operate in a similar way. Yes, I could use those testimonies to change our theories about history to account for queer experiences, but queerness is fundamentally about that pushback agains prescriptive assumptions. History is not like physics, I cannot sensibly treat my sources like test subjects. History cannot be known that way.
The way I was taught to do history was, broadly, that you find a source material, find some relevant secondary sources which will include other histories that have been written about that subject and some relevant theories, and then compare the primary sources to those secondary sources. The hinterland of historical knowledge will be updated, and human thought will be enriched.
This is what I thought I might do with all those accounts of gender play in personal histories. But the more I thought about the content of those sources, the more suspicious I felt about the endeavour.
To try and assuage this concern about pushing theories onto other people’s lives, when writing up the interviews for Dreamcast Worlds I sometimes sent drafts to the subjects themselves, so that I wouldn’t publish something that they weren’t comfortable with. This taught me a lot. People don’t necessarily read their past the same way that you do. I might think that someone who is transgender now was therefore transgender as a child, though maybe nobody knew it at the time, but that might not feel the same way. Likewise, reach new account turned my assumptions and models upside down.
Queerness might be described as a resistance against that coercive attempt to claim knowledge of other people’s experiences.
The fact that I even assumed I was in any position to interpret those stories is in retrospect quite troubling. It doesn’t seem terribly different to the Great British Tradition of plundering other countries for artefacts so that Great British Men can study them back home. Often it feels like the purpose of study is to become one of those men, to get the authority to make knowledge about other people’s lives.
I remember my heart swelling as I read in my prospectus that studying at that university would make me an “expert in the field.” Yay! After a lifetime of being nothing more than a child, I get to be an expert in something! Of course, here I am on the other side of that degree course and another on top of that and I’m still not an expert in anything, let alone Japan. Japan isn’t mine, so how can I live off my knowledge of it? Likewise, studying queer histories of gaming would not make me an expert in how people queerly game.
Knowledge is sort of about ways of seeing. I do nobody any favours by trying to teach them how to see their own past.
So now I’m trying to work out what the alternatives are to the historical methodology I’ve been trained in. Since it was oral history that upturned my view of history as practice in the first place, I first looked to other areas where oral history is prominently used. I like the idea of community histories because it recentres authorship in the commnity itself, and this has been particularly well done in parts of the world where history is fragile, poignant, falling outside of the interests of people keeping records.
My hometown is one of those places: a huge part of the language and culture I grew up with was created by the mining industry, which is now almost entirely gone. Kiveton Park and Wales historical society collects photographs and oral histories from the community to record the experiences that created that culture. It is history by the community, for the community, and about the community, and replaces that assumption that someone is coming in and gaining knowledge to become an expert with a sense of responsibility to let people tell their own stories. In some ways I see Memory Insufficient as a similar project to this.
In my search for other community history projects I came across the public history caried out at the Chicago Historical Society since the mid-20th century. Public history is not quite the same as community history, since its primary activity is presenting history to the public, but the CHS is one example of a public history institution that began bringing the public back into the process of creating historical knowledge; objects were collected from the community, and exhibitions such as ‘We the people’ tried to disrupt established ideas about American life, to account for the lived experience of Chicago’s diverse population.
While other forces such as the rise of an academic class of museum directors still pulled the public history project into an authoritarian direction at times, that push to write history with public and not for the public is needed if we’re going to queer histories of gaming. As the historian, I’d rather not know anything because better work is done upturning knowledge than setting it right.
I interned in a somewhat similar institution a few years ago in Japan. It was a public institution in that it was owned and run by the city government and its main remit was to archive items donated by the local community and to support historical education. The castle shown in this image is actually an earthquake-proof concrete reproduction based on shonky guesses about what the original might have looked like.
The English name for this institution was Chiba City Folk Museum, but the Japanese name of kyoudo hakubutsukan is really all about local-ness rather than folk-ness. The museum displays lovely things like swords and samurai armour and religious statues, and the guidance materials tell the story of how the Chiba clan took over the area, how people came to worship gods in the stars, and in a small display in the basement, how Chiba was destroyed through firebombing in WWII.
Hidden in the archives are amazing things that can never be shown to the public, such as a huge collection of WWII propaganda music records. History museums are a great place to witness how knowledge exists in service to our deep-seated fears.
This inclination to domesticate history at the same time as we popularise it was criticised by heritage studies academic David Lowenthal in The Heritage Crusade. I’m not really into the way he gives side-eye to populism, as though the shift of perspective from aristocracy to ordinary people was patronising rather than an empowering reclamation of histories of oppression, but he raises some interesting questions about what heritage is for.
When we collect these objects from the community, only to hide them from view, heritage serves the same authority that traditional history would. Likewise, collecting personal accounts of queer histories of games only to then have them mediated by the priorities of the historian, or of whatever theories happen to be in vogue in the dominant class of thinkers at the time, does not necessarily serve the marginalised stories that I’m trying to recenter. Or at least, it recenters them only in a narrow way.
A community history that includes queerness and other marginalised experiences has to give up on expert authority and reimagine new metaphors for the historian’s goal. Maybe knowledge isn’t the right metaphor for what community histories try to achieve.
This search for a way of writing and creating histories without being the knowledgeable authority on other people’s lives has brought me into contact with the work of a sociologist called John Law. I’m still new to this so forgive me if you’re familiar with this kind of work and I’m messing it up. But, it seems to me that John Law is working with a really interesting set of metaphors to rethink the methodologies we might apply to a complex world.
Games are complex things. The are not stable objects, but processes that come to life as network effects, and queerness further complicates games by challenging how we imagine the actors in that network. How can we even hope to tell a history that is true to this level of complexity? I’ve worked with actor-network theory in the past, and even that seemed too tidy as a metaphor: what we call a network is really just a huge, chaotic mess.
John Law says that events ‘necessarily exceed our capacity to know them’. Queer histories of gaming have taught me that in reality, histories of games cannot really be known.
Knowledge is something that is constantly being constructed, and the action of history contributes to the production and performance of knowledge. Essay writing is a ritualistic craft activity. I think that part of what is required when writing histories of gaming that don’t erase things like queerness is to become interested in knowledge as a thing being crafted in the moment, from the point of view of the interviewee as well as the historian, the game designer, the PR executive etc. Historical knowledge has its own performativity, and maybe it’s possible to play with that creatively, to embrace the fluidity of our role in its constant social construction.
Queering history does not just mean including queer experiences in accounts of gaming histories. It also means challenging the normative structures of history as practice, making it more open and flexible and less authoritarian. It means finding ways to embody the role of the historian in an authentic way, rather than posturing in a way that privileges some voices over others. It means abandoning knowledge. It means not knowing anything.
