Hello! All this week Eurogamer is celebrating Pride with a series of stories examining the confluence of LGBT+ communities and play in its many different forms, from video games and tabletop games through to live-action role-play. Next up, Sharang examines the way players are using video games to explore the potential of a queerer future.
When we talk about videogames as “escapism”, we tend to focus on provenance: we’re escaping from the humdrum of our jobs, our obligations, the petty horrors that fill modern life. Seldom do we focus on destination. Where are we escaping to? Is it actually a better world than the one we’re attempting to leave behind? Videogames can offer us worlds we might like to live in; can they offer us worlds we can live in? And particularly for queer people, what does that world look like?
In Tracing Utopia, a documentary that premiered in the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021, filmmakers Nick Tyson and Catarina de Sousa question a group of queer teenagers about their vision of a queer utopia. The responses are varied. Better access to mental healthcare, queer history in schools, desegregated bathrooms… “My idea of a perfect world is a forest,” chimes in one teen.
The teens’ sentiments strike a particular chord since Tyson and de Sousa set much of the film within Minecraft, a game famed for allowing players to build, well, a “perfect” world of their own, block by block. The filmmakers superimpose videoconference footage directly onto the teens’ private game server, juxtaposing the meatspace-the real, the tangible, the present-alongside the digital space-the potential, the virtual, the possible future.
“Queerness exists for us as an ideality,” writes José Esteban Muñoz in his seminal book Cruising Utopía, “that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future…Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” And what a potentiality, what a possibility the teens imagine! Within the videogame, the teenagers can express whatever style, whatever gendered or non-gendered presentation of themselves they like (“Online, it’s easier to be yourself,” one of them states). They are free from the judgement and misunderstandings they face from their family and acquaintances. Displays that might not be safe outside of their real-world rooms (“Here’s my ‘tranny flaggy’,” one trans teen proudly states, pointing their camera to their bedroom wall) are imbued into the very architecture of their Minecraft utopia, pride flags, banners, and rainbows ubiquitously built into their voxelated world. There are cats everywhere. In some sense, Tyson and Catarina tell us, the teens have built in Minecraft the queer paradise they envision for the future.