Queering Stories and Selves: Gamer Poop and Subversive Narrative Emergence

Abstract

Video games such as Mass Effect 3 (Electronic Arts, 2012), Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks, 2011) and Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks, 2008) have been praised for offering highly customisable and personalised ingame avatars, experiences and narrative flexibility. The humour in popular YouTube machinima series Gamer Poop playfully rejects the heteronormative and hypermasculine expectations that still appear inevitable and intractable in these seemingly open and inclusive gameworlds. Across Gamer Poop’s 49 videos stable identifiers of race, gender, and sexuality are radically rewritten using post-production video editing and game modification to allow for intersexual character models, bisexual orgies, and breakdancing heroes - content not programmed into the original games. We discuss the potential for machinima videos to act as tools for negotiating emergent queer narratives. These emergent experiences are generated by players and re-inscribed onto the broader video game ‘text’, demonstrating the limitations of video game texts for identity-building activity. Gamer Poop takes advantage of emergence as the “primordial structure” of games (Juul, 2005, p.73) and presents to the audience moments of emergent, queer narrative - what Jenkins describes as stories that are “not pre-structured or pre-programmed, [instead] taking shape through the game play” (Jenkins, 2004, p.128). These vulgar and sometimes puerile videos are a critical and playful intervention into the embedded textual meaning of Gamer Poop’s chosen video games, and demonstrate that a latent representative potential exists in video game systems, rulesets, and game engines for emergent storytelling and identity-building activities. We describe this creative practice as subversive narrative emergence.