Blog Post #5

 Heteronormative: a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the standard or preferred sexual orientation - additionally, an accepted and common way of viewing the world and how its structures work.

In Ruberg and Phillips's piece "Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games", the authors mostly use "heteronormative" as a description for underlying structures and assumptions about video games that queerness in video games strives to subvert. I found the article fascinating as well as exciting for a number of reasons, one being they way they describe "queering" video games just sounds like damn good gaming to me. 

Ruberg and Phillips describe queerness in video games as "aslant, askew, out of line" to the heteronormative standard (Ruberg, et al 2), which already points to more interesting kinds of games than the same old junk that is made over and over again that doesn't challenge the status quo or evoke any airs of mystery or difference from the "standard". The article also talks about queer resistance in video games as a resistance to cultural and political norms, and this excites me as well given my general ideas that many political norms these days are not good enough and should be challenged. They mention a few games, but I'd love to see more AAA/mainstream games challenge existing power structures by just doing away with them entirely and showing people that there are alternative options.

Much of the article resonates with me as I recall many of the games I've enjoyed the most have followed Ruberg and Phillips's general notion of queerness in video games as resisting normal structures and existing outside the standard. One of my favorite games I've played recently was The Last Of Us Part 2, which caused a big hullabaloo for a variety of reasons, but one of which was its inclusion of LGBT+ characters. Ruberg and Phillips stress the importance of not just being inclusive or using LGBT+ characters as "easter eggs" but genuinely a part of a game, and I think TLOU2 somewhat fulfills that. A large chunk of the game follows its lesbian main character and her growing relationship with her partner as she traverses Seattle in search of revenge. Much of the controversy surrounding the game was due to people not expecting that character to be the main character, leading to many early reviews as "boring" or "unrelatable", but I think this can relate to Ruberg and Phillip's definition of queerness in video games in how it forces people to stay with this character and feel her feelings, as well as grow in her relationship with a woman (which I suspect many detractors of the game had issues with). 

The game is not a perfect representation of Ruberg and Phillip's ideas, as it was ultimately written by a cishet male, and the company exploited workers in ways that don't exactly challenge industry power structures like how the authors describe in their article. However, I appreciate the fact that it used its representation in the main characters as a significant emotional beat of the game, which in turn forced many players of the game to step in the shoes of relationships they may not have had much contact with previously, even for a little bit.