How To Queer The World: Radical Worldbuilding Through Video Games
Bo Ruberg Guest Lecture at SFU Harbour Centre
Abstract: Today more than ever, we need the power to build new worlds. Video games are exceptional tools for worldbuilding because every video game itself is a world. Yet, in video games and other media forms, worldbuilding is still commonly understood as an expression of storytelling. A queer reading of video games shows us that worldbuilding means something much deeper and more radical than narrative elements that sit on the surface of the world. In video games, worlds are built on the foundation of interaction design, software simulations, graphical dimensions, and other elements often overlooked as too technical to hold cultural meaning. By analyzing these elements of game development as acts of worldbuilding, we can reimagine worldbuilding itself: as a process of challenging firmly held beliefs about the fundamental structures, conventions, and irreducible truths that give shape to the world around us. Video games also powerfully model the concept of queer worldbuilding--a practice of building worlds that destabilizes the fundamental logics of our universe and builds new worlds founded on alternate expressions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, intimacy, and desire.
Bio: Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, as well as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media with a focus on LGBTQ topics in video games. They are the author of four books: Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019), The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020), Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022), and How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games (NYU Press, 2025). They have also co-edited two volumes, Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture (MIT Press, 2023). In 2021, they received the Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Library Association. In 2022, they received the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. They are also the recipient of a 2023-2025 Dangers & Opportunities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.n!
Thu, 13 March · 4:30pm
SFU Harbour Centre
515 W Hastings Street Room 7000 Vancouver,
