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Introduction: The Queer Games Avant-Garde : Reimagining the Medium of Video Games -- Queer People, Queer Desires, Queer Games. Dietrich Squinkifer : Nonbinary Characters, Asexuality, and Game Design as Joyful Resistance -- Robert Yang : The Politics and Pleasures of Representing Sex between Men -- Aevee Bee : On Designing for Queer Players and Re-making Autobiographical Truth -- Queerness as a Mode of Game-Making. Llaura McGee : Leaving Space for Messiness, Complexity, and Chance -- Andi McClure : Algorithms, Accidents, and the Queerness of Abstraction -- Liz Ryerson : Resisting Empathy and Rewriting the Rules of Game Design -- Designing Queer Intimacy in Games. Jimmy Andrews and Loren Schmidt : Queer Body Physics, Awkwardness as Emotional Realism, and the Challenge of Designing Consent -- Naomi Clark : Disrupting Norms and Critiquing Systems through "Good, Nice Sex with Tentacle Monsters" -- Elizabeth Sampat : Safe Spaces for Queerness and Games against Suffering -- The Legacy of Feminist Performance Art in Queer Games. Kara Stone : Softness, Strength, and Danger in Games about Mental Health and Healing -- Mattie Brice : Radical Play through Vulnerability -- Seanna Musgrave : "Touch-Feely" Virtual Reality and Reclaiming the Trans Body -- Intersectional Perspectives in/on Queer Games. Tonia B***** and Emilia Yang : Making Games about Queer Women of Color, by Queer Women of Color -- Nicky Case : Playable Politics and Interactivity for Understanding -- Nina Freeman : More Than Just the "Woman Who Makes Sex Games" -- Analog Games: Exploring Queerness through Non-Digital Play. Avery Alder : Queer Storytelling and the Mechanics of Desire -- Kat Jones : Bisexuality, Latina Identity, and the Power of Physical Presence -- Making Queer Games, Queer Change, and Queer Community. Mo Cohen : On Self-Care, Funding, and Other Advice for Aspiring Queer Indie Game-Makers -- Jerome Hagan : Are Queer Games Bringing "Diversity" to the Mainstream Industry? -- Sarah Schoemann : The Power of Community Organizing -- Afterword: The Future of the Queer Games Avant-Garde.

This article articulates and critiques the ways that Twitch, currently the most popular platform for video game live streaming, defines sexual content through its community guidelines, terms of service, and other policy documents. On Twitch, both streamers and viewers are prohibited from posting sexually explicit or suggestive content. This includes images that appear in games as well as on-camera performances. Twitch presents defining sexual content as a matter of common sense and community protection; however, what counts as "sexual content" is far from objective. This analysis reveals that Twitch's definition of sexual content is in fact vague, subjective, and contradictory and enables discrimination. These policy documents reflect problematic social biases, such as those against women in gaming spaces. Twitch's policies also reflect anxieties about the relationship between live streaming and webcam-based sex work. This article challenges the sexist cultural logics that shape these policy documents and, by extension, Twitch's platform politics.

A widely beloved video game, Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015) has proven popular with players, reviewers, and commentators from across sectors of games culture that often hold conflicting views. What makes Undertale's broad appeal particularly surprising is its queer content, which can be found in both the game's representational and interactive elements. As many have observed, homophobic attitudes have long characterized reactionary gamer subcultures, which are often explicitly hostile toward diversity. Yet these subcultures are also among those most vocal in their appreciation of Undertale. What explains this seeming contradiction? While it is tempting to interpret this phenomenon as a sign that gamer culture is becoming more inclusive, a critique of the discourse surrounding the game's reception reveals that Undertale has in fact been straight-washed by many writers and fans. This straightwashing entails both an erasure of the queerness found in Undertale and a recasting of the game as one that jibes with the interests of heterosexual male gamers, such as innovative design, player mastery, nostalgia, and humor. At a moment when diversity has become central to academic and popular discussions of video games, increased LGBTQ representation is often presented as the ready-made fix to antiqueer discrimination. Yet the straightwashing of Undertale serves as a cautionary tale. It suggests that the cultural impact of LGBTQ representation in video games has its own limitations, and that a game with queer characters may not only fail to change the mindsets of straight players; it may itself be stripped of its queer potential by its reception.

The history of online security questions demonstrates how hegemonic beliefs about gender and sexuality have come to dictate the terms of "authentic" selfhood in contemporary digital spaces. Best known for their role in web-based information management, security questions have a history in North America that stretches back more than a hundred and fifty years—from Irish immigrant banking in New York in the mid-nineteenth century, to the rise of personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s, to today. Across this history, security questions have been structured around heteronormative expectations about users' lives and relationships. This is nowhere more evident than in the canonical security question, "What is your mother's maiden name?" To trace the evolution of the security question, this article surveys industry writings on authentication protocols from the 1850s to the present. It argues for a reevaluation of the often-unquestioned logics that perpetuate discrimination through technologies of data.

23 pages ; At a moment when technological participation seems to promise to bring innovation and democratic access to the contemporary museum, the results from one community-curated exhibit suggest that conservative cultural biases continue to shape the American public's taste in art. In 2013, the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania collected more than 10,000 online votes for their People's Choice exhibit. Voters were invited to choose their 'top' three artworks from among 125, and the twenty-five artworks that received the most votes were then displayed, while those that didn't make the cut stayed tucked away behind closed doors. Rather than promoting diversity by making curatorial practices interactive and accessible however, the People's Choice voting process rendered difference invisible. The result was an exhibit that appealed to the largest number of voters, yet excluded artwork that challenged dominant norms of gendered or racial privilege. Voters consistently chose realistic paintings of landscapes and white female subjects over abstract works, pieces by women, and images of people of color. The People's Choice exhibit serves as a valuable lesson about the use of participatory media in museums, and about the potential pitfalls of crowdsourcing in new media cultures more broadly, demonstrating the importance of self-reflection as a key component of participatory cultural programming. ; University of Oregon Libraries

Abstract
The practice of live streaming video games is becoming increasingly popular worldwide (Taylor 2018). Live streaming represents more than entertainment; it is expanding the practice of turning play into work. Though it is commonly misconstrued as "just playing video games," live streaming requires a great deal of behind-the-scenes labor, especially for women, who often face additional challenges as professionals within video game culture (AnyKey 2015). In this article, we shed light on one important aspect of the gendered work of video game live streaming: emotional labor. To do so, we present observations and insights drawn from our analysis of instructional videos created by women live streamers and posted to YouTube. These videos focus on "tips and tricks" for how aspiring streamers can become successful on Twitch. Building from these videos, we articulate the various forms that emotional labor takes for video game live streamers and the gendered implications of this labor. Within these videos, we identify key recurring topics, such as how streamers work to cultivate feelings in viewers, perform feelings, manage their own feelings, and use feelings to build personal brands and communities for their streams. Drawing from existing work on video games and labor, we move this scholarly conversation in important new directions by highlighting the role of emotional labor as a key facet of video game live streaming and insisting on the importance of attending to how the intersection of play and work is tied to identity.