Jack Halberstam, a University of Southern California professor studying the relationship of gender with media, spoke to a full crowd in the River Building on March 4 in a lecture titled “Queer Gaming: Gaming, Glitches and Going Turbo.”
The sixth annual Paul Attallah Lecture was part of the Communication Graduate Caucus Annual Student Conference. It explored the way gender and sexuality are represented in games and animation.
Halberstam, whose recent books “The Queer Art of Failure” and “Gaga Feminism” consider the changing perceptions of gender and binary societal roles, spoke about “heteronormative narratives” present in most video games and animated films.
“How much free space is there in a game?” he asked. “What are the possibilities for extending our understanding of queerness through games? What are the relationships between the queer, the wild, and the ludic?”
“If you think I’m going to answer any of these questions, you are sorely mistaken,” he said.
Halberstam invited the audience to join him in exploring the algorithms and codes behind games, and their roles in creating norms around which the games revolve.
“You cannot just change the surface of a game. You actually would have to change its entire core, its coded core, to make it different,” Halberstam said. “Adding a couple of gay men doesn’t make it any better.”
Halberstam used a recent animated film called “Wreck-It Ralph” as an example of breaking the “binary roles” which game characters are often placed in. In the movie, a character created to play the “evil” role befriends a character seen as a “glitch,” and together they turn the organization of the game upside-down.
Halberstam explored the idea of glitches in technology as more than just system failures and errors.
Having extensively studied the idea of failure as a social construct, he explained that video games are set up for the player to fail, and this could be what attracts us to them.
“We presume that we play to win,” Halberstam said. “The game requires you to fail in order for it to be a worthwhile game. The moment you win it, it’s over.”
Failure, according to Halberstam, is something we should get used to, and even embrace. It’s “the failed element in the game that makes it worthwhile,” he explained.
Both good and evil must be present in order for the game to work, and this is the binary code that the majority of games are based on, he said.
“In a world that’s only interested in profits and normativity,” Halberstam said, “one should learn to be a loser.”
The idea of “going turbo” is Ralph’s term for when “you leave the logic of the game that produced you,” Halberstam said. “While we can’t make binary oppositions disappear, we can make community dependent on the recognition of all the different parts of the matrix.”
“Queer theory and queer gaming are easily connected,” Halberstam said. “We can also embrace the glitch, tear down as much as we build up, and every once in a while go well and truly turbo.”
