Malkowski and Russworm 2017 and Ruberg and Shaw 2017, for example, provide critical overviews of the state of feminist and queer game studies. This section focuses on works that offer an important starting point for scholars entering these fields. Moreover, queer game scholarship has come to represent a new paradigm through which queerness as a lens is used to question norms of design, play, and representation. The emergence of queer game studies communities, however, also corresponded with queer game design communities taking a queer approach to games beyond literal forms of representation.

Similar to the trajectory of earlier feminist game studies, early work in this area focused on analyses of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) game content, players, and the game industry. Moreover, an increase in mainstream representations and discussions of sexuality, a critical mass of game studies work on gender and sexuality, the rise of a queer indie game movement (due in part to new distribution channels and free design software), and academic conferences such as Different Games and the Queerness and Games Conference, all helped lead to a proliferation of queer game studies work. As feminist game scholarship became more intersectional, moreover, queer game studies (which has many overlaps with feminist game studies) coalesced in the early 2010s, owning in part to a slow but increasing acceptance of game analysis in departments more traditionally associated with queer theory (such as comparative literature and film studies departments). However, it took several years for feminist game scholarship on the whole to adopt an intersectional approach that could account for how gender presentation, sex, sexuality, race, age, embodiment, and so on shape game play experiences, the game industry, and textual representation. Importantly, feminist game studies has existed for as long as game studies has been around (being formally named as such around the year 2000), questioning essentialist and hegemonic approaches to gender differences in game play and production.

A related but separate thread of this work includes feminist analyses of game texts, as well as feminist critical game making praxis. Research on masculinity in games comprises a much smaller subcategory of research. Much of feminist game studies might more rightly be called women’s game studies, as the feminist goals of the work were largely focused on ethnographic and qualitative scholarship on women and girls who play and make games.

To date, there are no general overviews of feminist and queer game studies, though there are several core texts, edited collections, and special journal issues.

Queer Game Studies by Bonnie Ruberg