No matter if the game is a poverty simulator, a meditation about wholeness and nothingness, or a walking simulator that explores memories and despair, most games are either controlled by fancy typewriters or impersonal pieces of plastic with protruding sticks and more buttons than one has fingers. While games mature into the future of creative expression, we still control them with technologies developed decades ago. Building on the work of Naomi Clark, merrit kopas, Todd Harper, Jaakko Stenros, Kaho Abe, Bonnie Ruberg, and many of the others in the queer games movement who constantly challenge game scholars to think harder about the many heteronormative frames that guide the games industry, let me try to convince you that as video games develop new vocabularies of expression, they are weighed down by the conservative modes of control that we still use to design, develop, and play them. Let me argue that video game controllers have a very limited expression palette and that there’s very little that controllers make us feel. Emotions such as desire, longing and arousal are always expressed through game mechanics and narrative; they are not embodied and felt viscerally, and this is a problem.
- 7 views