failure in queer gaming

When playing Queers in love at the end of the world, I was initially a little confused. As simple as the game concept is (just click any of the options highlighted in blue), the fact that there was a timer, made it all feel very high stakes. My first thoughts were that if the game really wanted the player to be able to sit and read the text and actually follow the plot, it was actually quite frustrating– I found it something that could have been improved on the game makers part. But when I thought about the title of the game, it made more sense that the entire plot lasted 10 seconds. The name suggests that the situation is dire and your decisions will be the last you ever make, and the only chance you will get to express your love. While I personally would have liked some kind of feature that allowed you to pause the game and actually read the text (a part of my personal need to analyze everything at length), but I do appreciate that the game mechanics made it feel like you were in a high stress, high stakes situation. So in that way, I thought that the game, sans reading the text, strongly portrayed what I interpreted the title, and therefore meaning, of the game to be. Now considering the first half of the game title, “Queers in love, the paper “ Queer Gaming by Halberstam, specified that when he is discussing “queer gaming”, he means that there needs to be a “shift in terms of characters–not simply adding gay, lesbian, or trans characters– it is change at the level of codes or algorithms”. He continues that “rather than just hunting for LGBT characters in the worlds of gaming, we want to seek out queer forms, queer beings, queer modes of play”. The paper offered some concepts that I haven’t really ever seen associating with gaming, like “queer theory, queer code, and gay bombs”. A “gay bomb” can be understood to be “an activist weapon”, or something that is included to “create explosive reactions” and “hinge on hacking into heater-normative code to rewire realities”. In terms of the game I played, I think the gamemaker included these concepts really well for being only 10 seconds long– when playing, I wasn’t able to read all the text, but there were random words that always stood out, whether they were profane or just words that had a shock factor. One final point brought up in this paper was failure, and how “failure is indeed an art” and how that may work in a queer game/code– “if hetero-normaticity sets up a code for blending into ones society that will be offset by a number of non-norms who fail to achieve those norms, then queer codes represent strategies to rewrite the notion of achievement altogether and to exploit the normative code in order to produce transformative possibilities”. This was surprising for me, because my initial thoughts were that “queer gaming” was giong to be about inclusitivioty in games, but after reading this paper, it was more about going against norms and bending the rules. Its more about remaking the code that is expected, “often through the act of failing”.