Trans Game Studies

Video games are a rich site for exploring the place of trans identities and experiences in digital media. As a widely influential popular media form, video games simultaneously overlap, resonate, and clash with trans issues and the contemporary digital lives of trans people. Yet scholarship addressing the intersections of video games and transness remains comparatively limited. Here, I propose a vision of what we might call a trans game studies at the intersection of trans studies and game studies.

Rather than offer definitive answers, my goal is to pose questions that provoke thought and spark resistance. What should the relationship be between trans game studies and queer game studies? What might it mean to trans game studies itself? These questions recall other, equally pressing concerns about topics such as race and disability in games, subjects that similarly draw attention to identity and the body as key sites of cultural meaningmaking. When I call on game studies scholars to engage more meaningfully with trans studies, I am admonishing myself as much as anyone else. I am a non-binary person with a complicated relationship to my own transgender identity whose scholarship has not yet sufficiently foregrounded trans issues. Game studies needs more trans studies, destabilizing the default centrality of normatively gendered people. And trans studies needs more game studies, drawing out the value of ludic spaces for identity exploration and trans worldmaking. Envisioning a trans game studies is only the beginning.

WHY GAME STUDIES NEEDS TRANS STUDIES

The relationship between video games and transgender experiences is complex. Many trans folks have described how playing video games has allowed them to explore their gender identities.¹ Trans characters have appeared in video games for decades, though they have admittedly been scarce. When new trans characters are included in mainstream video games, such as The Last of Us: Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020), they are often celebrated for their rarity.² Dozens if not hundreds of trans creators use video games to tell trans stories or draw from their own trans experiences to challenge norms of game design.³ At the same time, transphobia remains rampant in gaming spaces, such as multiplayer online games and game-related forums and platforms.⁴ For better or for worse, many of the ways that trans lives and digital lives intersect today is through video games, illustrating the growing need for a trans game studies.

Early game studies work on gender from the 1990s and early 2000s focused on cisgender women and girls. Examples include feminist critiques of in-game characters drawing on Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze, writing by pioneering designers of "girl games," and reflections on gendered play.⁵ Consideration of trans folks' identities was mostly missing from these early works, with the problematic exception of research on so-called cross-dressing or gender swapping: individuals of one gender choosing to play as characters of another, a practice that was often framed as sexual fetish or expression of male players' misogynistic control over women.⁶ These scholars contrast accounts by transgender gamers of their own experiences playing video games. Thus, early writers on gender and games often assumed that "gender issues" in games were synonymous with "cisgender issues" and framed arguably trans forms of play as problematic curiosities.

More recently, conversations around gender in games have diversified, particularly through scholarship on games and queerness.⁷ Feminist scholars have increasingly turned their attention to men and gaming masculinities, including "toxic gamer culture."⁸ Despite these changes, certain strands of feminist and queer game studies continue to marginalize transgender people. I state this less as a critique than as an invitation—most importantly to trans and non-binary scholars themselves. While queer game studies has been home to much of the existing research about transness and games, it is valuable to create additional spaces that explore and affirm trans experience, respecting it as both related to and yet distinct from queerness more broadly and resisting the assumption that trans studies must form within (or against) the constructs of queer studies.⁹

Scholars have already begun addressing the interplays between video games and...