Julia Rose Camus - Additional Post 4

I had to get a little bit into gaming for this one. When thinking about identity formations through algorithmic processing, I think my mind tends to default to social media platforms, but one of the key sites of queer identification that I feel has largely shaped our current generation is gaming. I am certainly not the first person to muse about my own queerness by kissing a female character in the Sims, and I will not be the last. There is a sense of safety afforded by gaming platforms in terms of queer identification that I think is uniquely important, and also considers the way we "code queerness" in a particular way. Is queerness a deviance from code, does it operate on a binary system, is queerness a glitch? This also brings up one of my favourite scholarly works by Jenny Sundèn On Trans: Glitch and Gender as Machinery Failure. 

I have recently encountered two great video essays that engage with the idea of queer identification through gaming, attached below: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZGkxUTbDqw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQNKEkrPEfI

This second video includes a comment by user askapaskn, which I have been thinking about a lot: "The history behind gay sims is hilarious (and a little aggravating). You don't code in heterosexuality without excluding homosexuality, so the earlier code included same-sex relationships by default, which was updated to exclude them when it was decided it was too controversial. One (gay, I might add) programmer by the name of Patrick J. Barrett III was given old code to work on the social interactions, and as he was unaware of the decision to exclude it, the same-sex interactions stayed. Everyone thought EA would axe it so no one did anything about it. Then for the E3 demo, most of it would be scripted, but with the amount of sims in the game some of them ended up just running on their own, and so 2 women sims fell in love during the live simulation and started making out on-screen."