It’s been a few years since I have contributed to In Media Res, but when “Queerness in Games” week (May 24-May 31, 2020) came up, I knew I had to do something. I decided to blend some of the recent ideas that I have been working on with some of the things I have been teaching into a short provocation about the radical potential for dystopias, queergaming, and a wonderfully elegant Twine game by Anna Anthropy called Queers in Love at the End of the World.
It was really fun to write a bit of flash scholarship (at just a little over three hundred words). Thank you to the week’s editor Ashley Jones for including me. Here’s the first paragraph of the piece:
Anna Anthropy’s game Queers in Love at the End of the World (2016) plays with the evanescence and ambivalence of queerness, time, erotics, and choice. One the surface, this Twine game is a quick series of hyperlinks narrating the last moments, parting words, and the final kisses and embraces of two lovers at the titular end of the world where and when “everything is wiped away.” However, what makes Queers in Love a queergame par excellence is its integration of a ten-second timer—a mechanic and temporality made queer—which transform both game and dystopian narrative into a critical queer dystopia.