Digital: A Love Story; Bully; Grand Theft Auto IV; Portal; Dys4ia (review)

Theatre and videogaming share important, although often unacknowledged, similarities. Both employ constructions of identification and representation that inform and are informed by codes of racialization, gender, and sexuality; both rely upon live audiences for immediate feedback, input, and engagement; both stage narrative and action into scenes and mise en scène; and both offer characters that can improvise within a dynamic script. Even character itself is similarly constructed in theatre and gaming. In gaming, the “protagonist” refers to both the character role within the game and, by extension, the gamer. Likewise, in theatre, the character is both scripted within the text and is an embodied instantiation; the actor is a version of the character. While gaming action is not embodied in the traditional sense, the software capabilities of choreography and gesture represent the embodied; further, they encourage experiential relations through affect and desire, integrating the user’s bodily responses into the game design. As in theatre, games stage identity reconfigurations through character and events that sometimes infer and sometimes overdetermine identifying processes concerning codes of gender and sexuality. Insofar as games can provide alternative/trans-/subcultural formations of identity, they invite both queer players and queer theorists to participate in their virtual worlds.

Questions of identity occupy the discursive core of “cyber” selves and videogames. Where does the gamer end and the game’s script begin? To what degree do the actions of the gamer influence the identity of the avatar or character? What might it mean for a male gamer to “play” a female avatar, when the conflated “I” signifies both? For more than a decade, queer performance artists have explored the relations between gaming and performance to probe techno-mediated formations of identity as found in works like Kate Bornstein’s Virtually Yours (1994) and Micha Cárdenas’s recent Becoming Dragon and Becoming Transreal (2010). These particular performances, among others, enact the interplay of reconstructed bodies in relation to virtual technologies and digital archives; in so doing, they relay social processes and potentialities of identification within given frameworks. Because of their potential for creating alternative versions of gender and sexual practice, a “gayming” subculture has emerged, organized around queer themes in games, complete with its own convention in San Francisco (GaymerCon). At present, however, much queer performance theory has neglected to fully consider this new medium. Queer performance theories consider nonnormative identifications, experiences, and embodiments, yet persist as underutilized perspectives on gaming and related social trajectories. The following examples illustrate what gayming offers to the field.

Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story (2010) exemplifies how game scripts can problematize notions of identity, a modality typically reserved for live performance. The story never alludes to the protagonist’s gender, sexual, or racial affiliation: its protagonist is marked only by English literacy, having access to a computer in the “first five minutes of 1988,” and a knack for hacking into different servers. Hacking involves receiving stolen long-distance calling-card codes to connect to message boards of a different area code, and using a “dictionary hacker” algorithm to test possible passwords to gain full access (reading and posting privileges). Digital employs bulletin-board-system (BBS) forums as the primary sites of action, which take place against the backdrop of a now antiquated computer desktop. The narrative depends on the sending and receiving of e-mail; while the gamer never knows what she sends, received messages accumulate into an archive. To approximate historical accuracy, the protagonist dials via modem each time she wishes to connect to various online forums. The “Lake City Local” board is one of the first destinations, where the protagonist reads a stanza of a love poem posted by “*Emilia.” “You” reply and begin an e-mail correspondence with her, but, just after the online relationship develops to the point of verbally expressed romantic affection, *Emilia disappears. The protagonist hacks into other fictitious forums, where she learns about two real-life computer viruses that first emerged...