Only two links this month, I guess I just didn’t spend as much time collecting them.

Bo Ruberg | Keywords in Play (Podcast, 22 min) – An interview with Bo Ruberg, author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer and The Queer Games Avant-Garde.  She talks about the queer theory perspective on video games, degamification, regamification, speed running, and walking sims.

As I share this podcast, I’m thinking back to my own initial reaction, when I started hearing about queer theory in relation to video games back in 2013.  I initially found it offputting how little relation it had to conventional discussions of queer media, spending very little time on queer characters, and much more time on whatever they considered to be queer themes, the queerness of which is often quite tenuous.  Well, the discussion has grown upon me a bit.  The more I read and talk about queer representation, the more I desire different perspectives on what that even means.

OTF (One True Fandom) | osteophage – Coyote discusses a certain view of fandom, which emphasizes transformative works, especially fanfiction, as uniquely progressive and the most essential expression of fandom.

While I have been a fan of many things, I rarely participate in fandoms because that just seems like an awful lot of commitment to one thing.  Nonetheless, I’m presently part of two fandoms: for the card game Dominion, and for xenharmonic music.  Neither of these lend themselves to fanfiction at all, which suits me just fine.  In my few interactions with more prototypical fandoms, I’ve definitely encountered many of the attitudes Coyote describes, and it’s such a narrow understanding of fanning.