Volume 12, Issue 2, 2025
Queer Analog Game Studies
Articles
- A Queer OS Powered by the Apocalypse: Feminist Platforms and TTRPG Engines
In this essay I argue that analog game engines speculate on what is possible for the digital, in a way that concretizes queer visions of the messy relationship between humans, systems, and computation. Drawing on Kara Keeling and Tara McPherson, I analyze the analog game engine Powered by the Apocalypse as an example of Keeling’s notion of a "Queer OS," or an operating system that encodes queer relational structures. In my close analysis of Powered by the Apocalypse’s mechanics and conceptual boundaries, I bring feminist platform studies and analog game studies into dialogue in order to argue for a more expansive definition of "game engine" that accounts for the ways in which analog games imagine forms of computation and human-computer interaction that are not yet possible for digital game engines.
- liches, lampreys, and the moon: an incantation for trans life & lyrical play
In this essay, we seek to intercept the formation of queer analog game studies (QAGS) at the moment of its emergence with a lyrical and trans-informed critique of academic field-building. We ask how we might move from frameworks of analysis that attempt to identify inherent qualities of games and their mechanics and toward those that center play as fundamentally mutable and shifting? Drawing on trans studies, critical game studies, and the experimental poetics of lyric game design, we propose a reimagining of queer analog play that resists disciplinary ossification. Rather than endorsing QAGS as a formal subfield, the paper advocates for an unruly, lyrical approach to queer game scholarship—one that privileges creative play, illegibility, and transformation over coherence or institutional legitimacy. We weave personal narrative, theoretical analysis, and experimental form to argue that trans and queer analog play has always existed beyond the bounds of legible academic structures, and that the push toward subfield status risks narrowing the radical potential of this work. Ultimately, this piece is a spell, a rant, and a poetic invitation: not to name and contain QAGS, but to scatter seeds in the open field beyond the playground, where new queer and trans futures might take root. It offers not a framework, but a mode of inhabiting scholarship—one in which play itself becomes a method of critique, community, and worldmaking.
- Precarity, Porousness, and Queer Subjects: Critical Play of Ecological Solo Journaling Games
In this article, I detail key experiences in my playthroughs of two solo journaling games that engage explicitly with environmental themes and use them to model material interventions into queer theory. In the first game, the Crushing Dark: A Solo Journaling RPG (2021), I explore the fragility of subjecthood and by documenting my player character’s (PC) attempts to maintain the integrity of a bathysphere against an inhospitable, albeit beautiful, submarine world. The second game, Dwelling: A Solo Game for Ghosts (2021), I investigate the erotic possibilities of memory as a ghost floating through rooms, creating memories, and making marks. I explore these vulnerabilities materially through the environmental humanities concepts of precarity and porosity. I argue that, while this intervention is not unique to the format of solo journaling games, this genre is a generative place of study because its format highlights the precarity of the player. To play one of these games is to engage head-on with queer understandings of unruly subjecthood and precarity—it is no wonder, therefore, that the tone of so many of these games is introspective melancholy, and that journeys through these games are so often journeys into oneself at least as much as they are journeys through a game’s world. Yet a self never exists in isolation but is always located in an environment which permeates as much as it shapes. Understanding our entanglements with slippery, sticky, or otherwise fluid media helps us to reconceptualize the fixedness of apparently static social structures and hierarchical relationships.
- Is There Room for Queer Chaos at Yazeba’s?
This article explores the aesthetic and philosophical tensions embedded in Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, a narrative tabletop role-playing game that centers on queer domesticity, found family, and emotional intimacy. Drawing from a personal gameplay experience and broader theoretical frameworks, the essay interrogates how the game’s cozy aesthetic might both invite and constrain queer play. While Yazeba’s champions narrative openness and queergaming practices such as character sharing and metagaming, some of its visual and tonal cues may inadvertently domesticate queerness into normative forms of comfort and stability. Through the lens of aesthetic philosophy and queer theory, the article engages the works of Bachelard, Kant, Adorno, Muñoz, and Halberstam to question whether comfort-centered design can flatten the volatile, messy, and dissonant dimensions of queer experience.