Abstract
This article argues that queer playfulness sets up a utopian relationality based on desire and vulnerability between human players and their nonhuman Others. Specifically, using the indie games Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer and Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love as case studies, the article reconfigures the notion of queer playfulness from its more familiar conceptualizations in queer game studies as residing less in willful resistance and agentive subversion than in the willing subjection of the playing self to the play and pleasure of the nonhuman Other—in the case of these games, plants and computers. Thus, queerness manifests as a precarious form of desire that does not seek to and cannot master its object. Ultimately, the article posits queer playfulness as a radical decentering of the human subject and the playing ego in favor of a humble, vulnerable, and contingent form of relationality between humans and their unassimilable Others.
Highlights
Queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s (2011) notion of the queer art of failure has raised failure, both voluntary and involuntary, into the center of scholars’ understanding of how queer players refuse the operative logics of domination and mastery. Such scholarship has productively opened up the notion of playfulness to queer, often utopian, dimensions; yet it has done little to interrogate the centrality of the human subject in play, even as some queer game scholars have begun the work of conceptualizing playfulness as a willing submission of the self to the desires of another (Brice 2017, p. 78)
Examining two queer indie games, Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly (2017) by Jess Marcotte and Dietrich Squinkifer and Digital: A Love Story (2010) by Christine Love, the article shows how relationships between the player and nonhuman game characters— plants and computers—enable players to playfully subject themselves to desires they cannot contain and Others they cannot control, and in so doing experience queer, ambiguous forms of pleasure somewhere between Jesper Juul’s “pleasure spiked with pain” (2013, p. 9) and the poststructuralist notion of jouissance
How should people engage in play without competition, mastery, and optimization? How can games animate desire without subordinating its object to the self? And how can queer forms of playfulness move beyond the centrality of the human? Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly and Digital: A Love Story provide grounds where these questions can be tested out through play
Summary
Play is an ambivalent concept—radical, exploratory, yet violent and exploitative. On the one hand, for critical thinkers in the second half of the 20th century, play promised liberation from seemingly firm ideological frameworks and master narratives, including, importantly, the very notion of the human subject. This article builds on existing queer game studies scholarship to articulate how queer forms of playfulness can displace the human and the subject from their privileged positions in relation to the nonhuman and the object It argues that such playfulness dreams into being an alternative mode of sociality founded on queer notions of love without mastery and without the assimilation of Otherness into the self. As my analysis of Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly and Digital: A Love Story shows, such a posthuman approach to queer playfulness embraces a dialectical understanding of the pain- and pleasure-suffused relationships between fundamentally alien subjects (queer, plant, and computer); it foregrounds the pleasure of an unassimilable Other, decentering the playing subject and their own pleasure.1 These games invite a queer playfulness that makes possible the dream of loving relationships between humans and nonhumans without assimilating Otherness into frameworks of the known As my analysis of Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly and Digital: A Love Story shows, such a posthuman approach to queer playfulness embraces a dialectical understanding of the pain- and pleasure-suffused relationships between fundamentally alien subjects (queer, plant, and computer); it foregrounds the pleasure of an unassimilable Other, decentering the playing subject and their own pleasure. these games invite a queer playfulness that makes possible the dream of loving relationships between humans and nonhumans without assimilating Otherness into frameworks of the known
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