Making Monsters: Conference Reflections 2024-25

Staring into the maw of my second year as a postgraduate researcher, I felt like it was a good time to look back at the opportunities I’ve had in the last year to share my early research with different academic communities, reflecting on what I’ve gained from each experience.

Firstly, every opportunity to present my work has been an opportunity to introduce, and re-introduce, my project, so it seems only right to do that again, here:

My research project “Making Monsters: Exploring the Potential of Queer Game Design Methodologies in the Creation of Non-Human Avatars” centres queer modes of game making, focusing on the player-versus-monster paradigm as the site of that queering. In brief, ‘player-versus-monster’ refers to the common design convention that sees the player in direct conflict with an embodied other (the monster), representative of, and part of, a larger hostile game environment. This project seeks to firstly explore the queer possibilities of occupying the space of the monster, and secondly to warp the boundaries between what is and is not monstrous. This work is conducted through game-making as research practice, creating experimental prototypes, with an explicit focus on queering the game making process.

I had the opportunity to present and discuss the contexts, aims and methods of my project at: the BCMCR events series, the British Digital Games Research Association (British DiGRA) Conference 2025, as well as the Transgressive Identities and Subjectivities Conference 2025.

BCMCR PRESENTATION – TRAVERSAL & EROSION

Following on from an early pilot of my practical research methods, I had the opportunity to speak at the Early PGR Showcase. This event provided a valuable opportunity to articulate something that had emerged almost immediately in the work, which was the difference between crossing and eroding the barrier between the monster and non-monster, and the value in pursuing the former in support of the latter.

The instincts and biases that come from my commercial game design background led me to focus initially on structures and systems that are well established, with the primary focus of the pilot being an exploration of the repositioning of the player, in the attempt to destabilise their perspective. I spoke about this, alongside the desire to work towards the warping of the systems themselves to create a greater sense of ambiguity and a fundamental shift in the relationship between player and ‘other’, with the challenges of doing so. Having the opportunity to share this complexity with a broader academic audience generated valuable ideas that I may not have otherwise considered.

BRITISH DIGRA – POSITIONALITY & COMMUNITY

In response to the theme of British DiGRA 2025, ‘What is British Games Research?’, I chose to focus on my position as a queer game studies researcher operating in the UK, looking towards the importance of reflecting upon, and integrating, regional specifics into the work. By way of example, I discussed the legacy of Section 28 and the ways in which this had been integrated into my early reflective work, considering my own position within the research project. This was followed with a call for British DiGRA to explicitly support UK queer game studies, particularly in light of the so called ‘gender critical’ movement and its impact on the climate in which research takes place in the UK.

I gained a lot from this experience, particularly in the opportunity to discuss queer game studies work with peers, where we were able to talk about the impact our surroundings have on our projects and how this is brought out in the work. I am currently working on a collaborative submission for the edited collection for the conference, which will expand on some of these ideas.

TRANSGRESSIVE IDENTITIES – QUEER PLAY VS DESIGN

I responded to the themes of the conference by focusing on the transgressive element of ‘playing queer’ as highlighted by Ruberg (2020), where games that are not explicitly queer coded (i.e., they do not include direct representations of LGBTQ people), are experienced by queer people as structurally queer, or are actively queered by playing in emergent ways that were not explicitly designed by the game makers.

Following on from this, I spoke about my own work, which focuses on queer game making more so than queer emergent play. The main point here was the tensions I feel in acts of queering aimed at the creation of an artifact that will have a life of its own. The commercial context of game production is unavoidable, even when individual works are created with no direct commercial intent as such; there is always a question of what happens once it’s out there, how will it be integrated into broader design practices, and the act of queering be lost? Discussing these tensions, and the benefits of designing with strategic queer intent, which is hard to entirely erase, was incredibly valuable ahead of the beginning of my practical work, which will always be touched by these concerns.

Each of these experiences provided a valuable moment to reflect on the work and see the value in elements that otherwise felt trivial to me while working on them in relative isolation. I will definitely continue to look for opportunities to re-articulate and present my work throughout my research project following on from these positive experiences!