Opening the Horse: an approach to queer game design
Abstract
The aim of this project is the development of a new approach to queer formalism in games.
To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, unpolitical art is only that which espouses accepted ideologies. Art which aims to challenge these ideologies risks dismissal from audiences who regard it as political. There is a potential remedy in formalism. Formalist art communicates ideology foremost through the formal elements of a medium. For games, these formal elements include data and procedure. Formalism brings obfuscation, as understanding data and procedure requires extended interaction. Because of this, formalist games can function as ideological Trojan Horses. But this advantage is also a flaw, as the Greeks inside must wait for the audience to open the horse's door. If this never happens, the work fails as a piece of rhetoric. Queer formalist games, for example, risk being misread as participating in heteronormativity.
Two things are proposed. The first is a framework for understanding ideology in art. Ideology can inscribed through formalism, as well as represented through imaging. These are orthogonal approaches. Failing both, it is absent; succeeding both, it is present.
The second proposal is an approach to queer formalism in games called Opening the Horse. This approach seeks to maintain the qualities of formalist work while mitigating misreadings. A game enacting this method at first only inscribes ideology, adding representation at a later stage of interaction. This collapses the distance of metaphor as a kind of failsafe to make clear what the game is speaking to. A series of tabletop games created by the author serve to illustrate this design approach.