Abstract
Building on Tara McPherson’s work on race, critical code studies, and feminist critiques of DH, which is provocatively condensed in her essay and question “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?,” this non-traditional essay hopes to ask and address, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So Straight?” My essay and project, written as a BASIC program, will use the mediums of code and digital games to challenge the technonormativity of DH. In other words, is code “striaght” and is it possible to create a queer video game? Considering Kurt Squire’s argument that video games are “designed experiences,” this presentation takes up the problematic (im)possibility of queer games. Code and games in many ways are normative, structured, and deeply protocological even as gamers and game developers evince their promises of power, freedom, play, and agency. Alexander Galloway defines protocol as “a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms” in ways that is “not by nature horizontal or vertical, but that protocol is an algorithm, a proscription for structure whose form and appearance may be any number of different diagrams or shapes.” My essay/program explores how the binary, algorithmic, and protocological underpinnings of both game programming and design constrain and recuperate queerness. Readers, coders, and players will be able to enter the BASIC essay/program in a BASIC emulator and run the essay/game.