[-empyre-] Queer Digital Gaming: Anna Anthropy

Sun Jun 3 18:25:05 EST 2012

Greetings, empyre!

Thanks to Zach and Micha for putting together and hosting this exciting
month of discussions, and to Margaret for kicking it off in style. I'll
jump in here on Micha's third question, about artists doing queer work, and
start off with a little bit about my own research with some specific
examples I thought might be good to kick off a discussion.

My work is focused on issues of difference in and around video game
culture, using "traditional" humanities methodologies like close
readings/playing alongside digital humanities experiments like avatar
deformations, image compositing and manipulation, and mapping. I haven't
delved into game development itself yet, though that is one of the avenues
I hope to pursue as I continue developing my career. There are many
theorist-practitioners in game studies and digital media (Zach and Micha
stellar examples among them!) - so to open up discussion I'll share one of
my favorite independent queer game designers - Anna Anthropy.

Anthropy, who develops under the name Auntie Pixelante, is a trans "art
dyke" who develops short-form games with a social justice (and usually
quite queer) bent. She is also an outspoken critic of the video game
industry and gamer culture on her blog and Twitter, and recently released a
book called *Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals,
Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like
You Are Taking Back an Art Form*. On the whole, she has an irreverent,
kitschy style that frequently incorporates bondage and softcore porn
aesthetic. Her most famous game, Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars, was
released on [adult swim] in 2011 and garnered a lot of attention for its
outrageous title and retro mechanics. A self-styled "pixel provocateur,"
Anthropy's works and politics are aggressive and unapologetic - and in
particular, they are aggressively, unapologetically queer.

Some of her more recent projects have taken a more serious and abstract
turn. I'd encourage everyone on the list to read about and play dys4ia
(blog - http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1515, game -
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565), Anthropy's autobiographical
game about the 6 months of her life after beginning hormone replacement
therapy. It takes only a few minutes to complete and is well worth the time
invested.

There's a lot to discuss in dys4ia about what it means to simulate the
process of transition, and I'm particularly interested in the different
forms that the avatar takes and the wide range of tasks performed over the
course of the game - both of which violate the "good" game design principle
of not disorienting the gamer too often once she's learned how things in
the game world work. Of course, this plays out beautifully in the context
of Anthropy's autobiographical tale. How might we compare the conventions
of digital games to other digital explorations of trans embodiment, like
Micha's Becoming Transreal (http://vimeo.com/16869351)?

dys4ia is a great place to start with Anthropy, but I would also love to
hear everyone's thoughts on the other Auntie Pixelante works.

For a bonus discussion, try out the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab's project, A Closed
World (http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/aclosedworld.php, perhaps half an
hour time commitment) and Anthropy's biting parody, A Closed Mind (
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1276, not very long at all to understand
the point).

All best,
Amanda

On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 10:10 AM, micha cárdenas <mmcarden at usc.edu> wrote:

> For week 1, Zach and I have invited two digital humanities scholars to
> get the month's discussion started with us.
>
> The term new media is clearly problematic, and we wish to further
> problematize and think through this. Cathy Davidson writes in Now You
> See It that the paperback novel was once seen as new media, carrying
> with it the same accusations that digital technologies today receive:
> distracting, corrupting, pulling users into another world. Perhaps a
> better term is queer digital media, as we are interested in the
> intersections of queerness with digital technologies, networked
> technologies and forms we may see as post-network or post-digital,
> like alternate reality gaming. But digital media also seems to be
> inadequate today, given developments in bio and nanotechnologies.
>
> To say that Queer New Media is emerging is not to deny that it exists.
> It is crucial to acknowledge important inspirations such as Shu Lea
> Cheang, VNS Matrix, Subrosa, Cyberfeminist and new media artists and
> theorists who have considered the emerging possibilities for
> embodiment resulting from new technologies.
>
> To start some discussion, here are a few questions:
>
> What are the relations you see and understand today between queerness
> and new media? What is it that makes you desire (or not desire)
> engaging this topic?
>
> Do you agree that queer new media or queer media art is an emerging
> art movement? Or art/theory/political movement?
>
> What current artists do you think are doing or have done queer new
> media? Are you? Who are your inspirations?
>
> This week's guests are:
>
> Guests:
>
> Amanda Phillips (US) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English
> with an emphasis in Feminist Studies at the University of California,
> Santa Barbara. Her dissertation takes a vertical slice of the video
> games industry to look at how difference is produced and policed on
> multiple levels of the gamic system: discourse, hardware, software,
> representation, and corporate practice. Her interests more broadly are
> in queer, feminist, and antiracist discourses in and around
> technoculture, popular media, and the digital humanities. In addition
> to participating in the 2010 NEH-sponsored Humanities Gaming
> Institute, Amanda has been a HASTAC Scholar since 2009 and hosted, in
> conjunction with Margaret Rhee, an online HASTAC Forum on Queer and
> Feminist New Media Spaces, the organization’s most-commented forum to
> date. She has presented at the conferences for UCLA Queer Studies, the
> American Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association, and the
> Conference on College Composition and Communication, and has
> participated in unconferences such as HASTAC’s Peer-to-Peer Pedagogies
> Workshop, THATCamp SoCal, and the Transcriptions Research Slam. Most
> recently, she has been involved with the #transformDH Collective's
> efforts to encourage and highlight critical cultural studies work in
> digital humanities projects.
>
> Margaret Rhee (US/Korea) is a doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies
> with a designated emphasis in New Media Studies at the University of
> California, Berkeley. She is conceptualist and co-lead of From the
> Center, a feminist collective that aims to provide digital media
> access and education for women inside and outside the jail setting as
> authors, directors, and storytellers of their own lives. website:
> http://ourstorysf.org/ She co-curated HASTAC Scholars "Queer and
> Feminist New Media Spaces" with Amanda Phillips in 2010. Her interests
> include posthumanism and race, Asian American cultural critique, and
> queer theory.
>
> Weclome! And let’s start discussing!
>
>
> --
> micha cárdenas
> PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
> Provost Fellow, University of Southern California
>
> New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research
>
> MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
>
> Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
> http://amzn.to/x8iJcY
>
> blog: http://transreal.org
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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