Queers in Love, Having it All: a Glitch in the System.

Jack Halberstam's "Gaming, Hacking and Going Turbo" doesn't really cover much about games. It is far more focused on animation, but in doing so he fails to really get across his message about queer recoding. His discussion of play in Thomas was Alone and Monument Valley is sparse, focusing on the fact that failure allows the player to come to the central messages of exploration and companionship. Whereas his analysis of Wreck-It-Ralph focuses on the idea of glitches and the way they demonstrate failure within conventional systems of thought. Anna Anthropy's Queers in Love at the End of the World bridges the gap between the two concepts perfectly, explained in the afterword as: "When we have each other, we have everything."

Queers in Love doesn't have animation, it doesn't have snazzy graphics, it simply has text which takes you through a journey. The "glitch" in the system that the game represents is having it all. You, as an outsider, come in and break apart the in-universe rules. You are the glitch. You give yourself, the protagonist, more than ten seconds to experience the world. And in doing so, if you feel as in love as the protagonist, can have everything. Antithetical to the traditional "ball-and-chain" mode of love, this game represents something all encompassing. Something where, in the last seconds, you can go back and focus in on every touch, every fleeting though, every last moment you wish you could have with your loved one. You form a glitch in the record of history, and a glitch in a dominant narrative surrounding love.

The act of play creates the glitch. There is no glitchy narrative to speak of, neither AI breaking free as in Thomas was Alone, nor off the roads video games as in Wreck-It-Ralph. Through play you break the systems of our reality.