“The Commies Need To Learn How to Code”: Queering Video Games
While I loved the abstract ideas in “Rise of the Video Game Zinesters” that push us, novice game designers, towards exploring a sequential process for beginning to create video games, the introduction left me in rapture. The closed-circuit of video game culture excludes me and many of the people who form my closest friends. Stories spun and shared across my time at Stanford always involve folks with a striking way of weaving their unique experiences with a profound desire to understand the world around them.
During my time abroad, my roommate and I would pass the closest Líder on our way home, toast bread and cheese and wander the city talking about the intersections of hyper-capitalism and neoliberalism at Stanford. Maya Angelou once said that “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” All my love to the late Dr. Angelou (shout out to NC), but sometimes there are words that inspire great reflection. “The Commies need to learn how to code,” is definitively one of them.
Oxymoronic at first blush, her words cut to the crux of the complex feelings around tech. To sell out your community, which was most certainly marginalized by the growth and implementation of capitalism, by subscribing to it, or to fight from the outside. Anna Anthropy repositions the lens of marginalization towards the creation of art and resistance through control of the means of production (controlling who writes video games and what kind of narratives they tell), which brought my roommate’s prescient words to the forefront of my processing. Can there be art in productivity, in storytelling, in the curation of empathy, in the weaving of narrative, in the character that represents the queerer side of our world, should we dare to believe it?
Optimism underscores her words with vision and anger, smoothed with love. Of course, this message would come from a queer person. There are parallel movements in other disciplines: queering medicine, engineering, etc. Some represent the push for the basic need for more queer folks in those disciplines, but I prefer to think of them as movements that chip away at the need to perform in binaries to succeed in the modern world. Only those who can see beyond the constraints of the binary can pursue liberation. Anthropy exemplifies this in her exhortation for video games to be “free” in their expression of space and narrative. To read this introduction as a call for non-majority representation in the video game industry is a gross understatement of the kick-ass invitation of liberation that she delivers. She’s inviting us to reimagine the overwhelming power of video games, and she’s asking the queer, creative, liminal ones of us to engage with this meaningful work. It’s a fuck-the-system, take-your-space rebellion and she’s throwing her hand down to give us a leg-up. Isn’t that what queerness is? Creating space because there is no space for you, finding community in complexity and nuance from the ones who made it before you. Queerness is the rejection of cognitive leaps, of simplicity.
If queerness is transcendence, is there a better medium than video games to express it?
