Cozy, Chromatic, Anti-Capitalist: the queer and thought-provoking art of 2D artist Toto Lin
As an artist, Toto Lin (they/them) has a consistent throughline. “I like bright colors and shiny things,” they say within five minutes of speaking.
A recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz in the game design program, Toto’s approach to art, and cozy, comforting game design is a rarity in an industry more commonly (if at many times unfairly) associated with virtual fighting and violence.
“I looked at the dinosaur hugging game,” I opened with one question — a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever speak aloud. It’s real. A 2D game called dinosaurily, the game was selected to showcase at Playdate Popup at the LA Zine Fest in 2019.
“dinosaurily was one of my favorite projects! It was for a class called speculative futures [and the prompt] was to design a game in a future that you want to see.” Toto and their classmate collaborator, Fen Swanson, landed on queerness as the theme they wanted to explore. More specifically, they chose to explore the idea of found family.
“In the game, when you hug a dinosaur it begins to follow you around,” Toto explains. The game uses the aesthetic phenomenon of chromatic aberration, something that Toto admits seeing through their own glasses on occasion. “When I discovered that it was something I could put into the game using effects,” they said, “I thought it was really cool.” As an aesthetic, dinosaurily is part-Teletubbies, part-Tumblr-aesthetic-wave version of an adult swim short. It’s a very earnest collage of different feelings that work perfectly together; to Toto’s aims, the game does nothing but make you smile.
Toto’s ability to spotlight and expand upon flickering, ephemeral instances of unexamined queer life sets their work apart. Hearing them discuss their work and the inspiration behind it, I found myself thinking of physicists toiling to find the God Particle in an underground laboratory: if you uncover it, it’d flicker brightly, and then, it’s gone. Similarly, if one sees queerness in public spaces, it can be just as fleeting.
Speaking of the nexus between theoretical physics and queer life, Toto also has that covered: a tabletop card game — part role playing, part conversation starter — called Queering Spacetime. Profiled in the New York Times as part of Game Devs of Color Expo, and nominated at IndieCade, Spacetime has players constructing character stories based on predetermined stats: extroversion, height, openness, buffness, and short descriptors. An example of these descriptors includes:
Native American, futch lesbian:
- Enjoys sarcasm and dad jokes
- Will protect you
- A bit cynical
- Makes a mean burger
A roll of the die determines if you and your conversation partner can continue speaking, or if the wheels of time move forward, forcing players to don a different persona.
“I got really into reading about queer games theory, and [queer] space and time,” Toto laughs. “The idea of liminal spaces was interesting to me. Those are sort of spaces where there’s a lot of people, and then, suddenly there aren’t — because it’s like late at night or something. Sort of disorienting, I guess. But if you hang out there, if you try to create dates there, it then becomes interesting. [It’s] injecting joy into that space. […] Some of the locations [in the game] are rest stops, or gas stations at 1 a.m., or an IKEA parking lot.”
I admit: even though the game isn’t designed for me per se, the thought of unexpectedly meeting a soulmate at a gas station at 1 a.m., while picking up gummy bears and sugar free Red Bull, is indeed very comforting. Although Queering Spacetime features female and nonbinary characters, the entire premise is equally male cis gay to its core. The salaciousness of those (male cis gay) stories can make them mature — and definitely funny to those of us in the know — but the underlying theme in both Toto’s work and my resonance with it is that in Spacetime, queer encounters in quiet spaces are outsized, impactful; once in a lifetime moments. Or in the case of Spacetime: once-in-a-parallel universe moment.
“Sometimes, it’s not enough to see characters that look like you,” Toto wrote for Color Bloq last year.
They go on:
“To remedy this, queer and trans game designers are changing the interactive media landscape, innovating experiences that uplift the queer community.
So how do you design a game “queerly”? One way is to think of queering as subverting norms of capitalistic, linear gameplay, by exploring a values-based, futurist perspective instead.”
This brings us to tiny rainbow rebels. rebels tells the story of a tiny gay frog living in a tiny gay commune with their friends… “after having defeated the rich with motorcycle tricks”.
The game is cozy to its core and considered throughout. In-game typography is set in all lowercase, materializing to the player like a script being written/read in real time. The prose reads like poetry, slightly unvarnished in its simplicity, but warm and cozy.
Toto further expands on their itch.io page, intentionally using lowercase text: “tiny rainbow rebels was originally my undergrad capstone pitch but now its less tricks and fashion and more rest and cozy and hanging out with friends”.
Coziness is a word Toto used a lot, and it is a recurring theme and feeling in all their major work. Toto tells me that coziness is a defining aspect of queer games. After our time together, I tried to imagine how games could be uncozy. By this, I do not mean games in the horror genre, or games that are extremely violent and gory, since these games are usually transparent about the feelings they want to evoke. Instead, how has uncoziness became so pervasive that the opposite becomes queer by definition?
Consider Square Enix’s Final Fantasy X-2. Square Enix is a notable company, possessing the tenth highest revenue for a games-only studio, and FFX-2 was a notable first for them in a variety of ways. As it relates to this piece though: FFX-2 is without a doubt the queerest of the Final Fantasies in terms of tone and aesthetic (and, lovingly so I might add).
When I think about what Toto taught me during our time together, I am reminded of FFX-2’s overarching premise, which goes something like this:
After betraying her life’s vocation, besting a quasi-immortal death harbinging whale, exposing a 1,000 year old religious conspiracy, and realizing that her boyfriend never existed in the first place, the game’s protagonist goes off to contend with new (!) problems, including: local politics, sapient doomsday mecha, archiving lost history, and pop music.
In Toto’s world, in the virtual utopia, when the work is done, it’s finished. Time for rest. Even if there is still work to be done, I imagine that’s where community, where family chosen or otherwise, can step in.
“Take time for things.” Toto states in their article. “Heteronormativity, capitalistic society, and even Sonic the Hedgehog will try to tell you that you gotta go fast. But you don’t have to. Stop and smell the roses because you need to.”
Published as part of Queer Design Club’s Stories collection.
