Queer Games as Haptic Media

CAMPUS COMMUNITY ONLY | With social interactions becoming increasingly digital, many of us may feel “touch starved,” looking to mediated forms of remote intimacy and community. Studying the sense of touch in media, or haptic technologies and haptic aesthetics, may help analyze the multiple contrasting ways physical tactility, and interpersonal intimacy, can be mediated, from the force feedback "haptics" we feel in our phones and game controllers every day, to contemporary game installations using conductive fabric and thread to explore emotional labor and otherness. In media studies, a focus on touch has been a challenge to the dominance of oppressive forms of visual culture, but current-day haptic technologies are not inherently liberating, and can participate in unjust representational systems and exploitative labor relationships of their own. The artistic movement of "queerness and games"-- encompassing the work of LGBTQIA+ designers in digital and tabletop game industries, and game design philosophy influenced by queer theory-- has used haptic mediation to instead create aesthetic systems with healing and community-building potential. What can queer games teach us about mediating the sense of touch, and what opportunities can the rise of haptics offer to queer artistry?

Teddy Pozo, PhD is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Media Arts and Culture Scholar in Computer Science at Occidental College who previously taught at Brown University and UC Santa Barbara. Their research focuses on the sense of touch in media history and media production, from early moving pictures and penny arcades, to feminist and queer haptic aesthetics, to the rule-based intimacies of virtual worlds. Their love for LGBTQIA+ artistry in digital and tabletop games began through their work co-organizing the Queerness and Games Conference from 2015-2018. Pozo's writing can be found in journals such as Game Studies and Camera Obscura, and in their current book project, Queer Games as Haptic Media. Pozo's earliest favorite games were Glider, Splat!, and Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3.