CGF Higher Seminar
Josephine Baird
”Playing with Gender: Exploring, Expressing and Embodying (Trans) Gender in Games”
In the cutesy life-simulator game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you get to create your own character, who you can dress up and style any way you want, and can wander around an idyllic little island, which you can also invite your online friends to. Despite not intentionally being designed for it, this game became a hub for queer social connections, creative expression, and even political organisation during the pandemic. This was because the game provided a safer space to meet and be ourselves, when so many of us were isolated from our usual queer venues – and some of us had to move (back) into home environments in which we could not be out.
Even in the most restrictive places, games can provide the alibi to play with or express a non-normative way of being – because, after all, “it’s only a game,” Drawing from gender, queer, and game design theory – and with plenty of fun examples – this seminar will show why games can provide a safer container of play for exploring, expressing, and embodying (trans) gender in a way that might not be as possible anywhere else. I will also present the game, Euphoria, that we intentionally designed based on theory and game design practice for just such a purpose and forms part of my PhD research.
Josephine Baird is a Lecturer at the Uppsala University Department of Game Design and a Ph.D. student at the University of Vienna. Her work spans the intersection of games, identity, trans, gender, and sexualities. She is a game designer/consultant, digital artist, writer, actor, public-speaker, and co-host of the podcast It Is Complicated. More information can be found at josephinebaird.com and she can be contacted at josephine.baird@speldesign.uu.se
No registration needed / Ingen registrering nödvändig.