Masturbating Gay Cars Queer Desire Networks in the Mainstream

Gaming Culture

Introduction:

Digital gaming is a new form of mass media, having no more than 30

years commercial existence. Despite being recent, its quite visible the
technological, graphical and narrative influence of digital gaming in more
traditional media (as TV, cinema, comic books and even literature). The rise of
digital gaming as an important media landmark in last years is due to its
innovative design. This innovative design of the digital gaming constitutes an
innovative cultural network, closely linked to pop culture, technological
advancements, cyberculture (mainly the web 2.0) and other games (mainly
boardgames and tabletop RPGs).

However, even being a vast and billionaire industry, since the late 1980s 1
the target audience of the video game industry has been directed mostly to the
white, heterosexual, male population. In fact, the social representation of
videogames itself is always linked to this public, and to aggressive games
about violence, domination and misogyny (De Miguel and Boix, 2013).
Although these prerogatives dont reflect the whole industry, in the digital
gaming context, violence, prejudice and the constant harassment of women and
LGBT (players, industry workers and critics alike) are still a reality. In 2014, the
event now called GamerGate demonstrated that misogyny and
trans/homophobia are still common place in digital game culture. GamerGate is
in theory a movement that requires a review in game journalism ethics. It
started after a complaint that the indie game designer Zoe Quinn had used
intimate relationship with video game critics to improve the reviews of her game,
Depression Quest. After this, Quinn and other women of the industry as the

Initially, the American video game industry was mostly aimed towards a family audience.
However, with the video game crash of 83, Japanese corporations (as Nintendo and Sega) arrived in the
U.S. and European markets. Different from its predecessors, these companies marketed mostly for the
young (children and teenagers), male public, being influenced by other media cultures also aimed
towards this public as comic books and action movies, for example. These tendencies advanced all the
way through the 1990s, with the mature games movement.
feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, the game designer Brianna Wu and the
game critic Leigh Alexander, among others were public harassed, threated,
and/or exposed online. More recently, GamerGaters (as the supporters of this
movement are called) were called responsible by the defamation of the gaming
critic Veerender Jubbal, who initiated the thread #stopgamergate2014. Jubal
had a selfie picture photoshopped to look like he was holding a Quran and
wearing a suicide bomb vest, and was linked to the November 2015 terrorist
attacks in Paris2. Also, Allison Rapp, Nintendos public relation, was fired from
her position in Nintendos marketing after a huge campaign of harassment from
GamerGaters, for her connection to the decrease and censorship of some
sexual themes in the translation of Japanese games to western audiences 3.

Its possible to say that theres a major part of gamer community working
actively for the maintenance of this culture to be as exclusive as possible,
keeping its oppressing structures. To a large part of the community, the
diversification of themes far from the classic straight-male-action-based
experience (or male domination fantasy) is made by what they call the SJW
an acronym for Social Justice Warriors. This anti-diversity (mostly) straight-
white-male gamers repeatedly post message boards, articles and forums on the
internet that SJW gamers are "spoiling" games, killing gamer identity and
poisoning gaming culture. Although they represent a clearly extremist part of
video game culture, it is a rather common thought that bringing real problems
and political agendas to gaming culture is inadequate. The arguments of this
criticism varies from a) bringing reality to the virtual world would make
something that is intended only for pure fun too serious; and b) to the idea that
political correctness restricts the creative freedom of developers and
designers (a discussion present in other so called geek/nerd cultures, most
visible for example in science fiction fandom and the Hugo Sad Puppies
incident4).

http://www.vice.com/read/gamergate-members-are-responsible-for-the-terrorist-photograph-
of-journalist-veerender-jubbal-503
3

http://kotaku.com/the-ugly-new-front-in-the-neverending-video-game-cultur-1762942381
4
 In spite of this cultural context or, maybe, because of it - different
approaches to gender/sexuality issues in gaming continue to rise since the
Girls Games Movement of the early 1990s 5. Most recently, we had seen the
ascension of somewhat organized Queer Gaming scenes. Although the
specific definition of queer gaming is dubious (on purpose), it focus in designing
games by and for the LGBT people, making a critical representation of queer
life experience and its intersections (race, gender, generation, etc), creating a
more sensitive safe space for a queer gaming community and be a potent
device for cisheteronormativys critique (Fatone, 2014). There is an explicit
interest of establishing it as part of the digital game culture, and of being
perceived as a resistance/alternative to the straight, cis-male gamer
mainstream culture and also to the male domination fantasies that composes
the hegemonic masculine in this media, limiting the possibilities of gaming
experience and performances. This new rising of themes and scenes of
different gender/sexuality approaches demonstrate the political possibilities of
gaming, not only as resistance to toxic heterocentric/male exclusive gaming
culture, but as a different tactic to fight, debate and react to heteronormativity,
late capitalism, racism and patriarchy.

This context also relates to the Brazilian digital gaming culture. The
GamerGate has been broadly noticed in Brazilian media not only in the
specialized one, but also in mainstream media, in a way that no other gaming-
related topic was before. As an effect of this popularization (and also because of
the strong influence that American digital gaming culture has in the Brazilian
one), more women in gaming culture (and also in other related cultures, such as
Cosplay and tabletop gaming cultures) were able to talk about the harassment

The Sad Puppies were a voting campaign movement of science fiction fans for the 2014 and
2015 Hugo Awards - one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction and fantasy literature. The Sad
Pupies Campaing propose the fans to support and vote for what they called unabashed pulp action that
isnt heavy handed message fic", over to mostly intellectual, progressive themes of most Hugo
nominees. The campaign was constantly linked to homophobia, misogyny, white supremacy and right
wing conservative politics.
5

The Girl Games Movement was a collective of game designers, feminist militants and academics
that had the objective of designing games for girls and young women, resisting what was they called
pink games the initiative to include the female gamer public with gender stereotypical games that, in
the opinion of the collective, didnt reflected the potentialities and experiences of those women (Cassell
and Jenkins, 1997)
and bigotry they suffered in mainstream gaming spaces. These experiences
started (or made visible) a series of organized groups of women, LGBT and
more critical-oriented gaming sites, dedicated not only to the denouncing these
problems, but also to provide secure places to non-white, non-male, and/or
LGBT gamers to interact6. However, this reaction had a strong backlash by
organized GamerGate-like movements. After the release of a short college
documentary about female harassment in the video game community, women
present in the video were harassed, threatened (on and offline), have their
personal information spread on the web and the documentary was taken out of
air. Leaked content from forums, chans 7 and message boards shows an
organized effort to make a so called brazilian GamerGate

We should also consider that, even when not officially part of the
GamerGate8, Brazilian players are known for being troublesome and rude while
playing online, and for having a highly toxic community. These assertions are
highlighted by expressions like zoeira and HUE BR, which are used to
identify Brazilian troublesome behavior in games (which are proudly exhibited
by some players). To avoid prejudice, some Brazilian gamers even lie about
their nationality or play in non-Brazilian servers due to community issues
especially towards women and LGBT gamers.

Considering this context, it initially seems that theres a dualism

established within the contemporary gaming culture: in one side, we have the
SJW and its political agendas, struggling for representation and safety of
non-cis-straight, non-male players within gaming ambient. In the other side, the
GamerGaters, with the need to reassure, define and delimitate these spaces,
defending the real gaming for real gamers and maintaining mainstream

Chans are open, unmoderated, anonymous foruns, being 4chan the most popular. The
chan culture is closely linked to the gaming culture, and its considered a fundamental tool for the
propagation of leaking personal information data, so being central in the making of the GamerGate
8

Although Mateus Prado Souza a Brazilian blogger is considered one of the top harassers of
Anita Sarkeesian (http://kotaku.com/the-anita-sarkeesian-hater-that-everyone-hates-1658494441)
gaming (at all costs). Although the material dimensions of these groups and the
position of privilege of the (mostly) white, male cis-heterosexual GamerGaters
are quite obvious. The classical ideas of Power and Resistance in Michel
Foucault (1985) help us understand how these subject positions strategically
maintain themselves. To the author, power is not a fixed position occupied by a
class or collective a priori, neither something holded by someone. There is not
a complete power dominance of one group over the other, but contingent power
positions within an open structure of power/knowledge arrangements. Power is,
then, a force that constitutes different ways of perceiving and producing the
reality itself, within certain historical conditions of possibility in association
games of truth (the procedures that legitimate truth) that can be perceived in the
discursive formations. So, the modern subject is not an independent construct
from whom power emanates, but is, at the same time, an effect and agent of
these power relations. These contingent historical power arrangements
compose different subject positions, giving major visibility, truthfulness and
legitimacy to some discourses and subjects in detriment of others. The
resistance in Foucaults work is not an opposition to power relations, but a part
of it. Power relations arent fixed, but a series of historical contingent positions.
So, the re-articulation of major, more legit and visible discourses, aiming
different political objectives may result in different effects.

Therefore, we couldnt consider these two positions the queer and the
mainstream - as opposite movements, but as part of processes of subjectivation
that, despite its differences, share symbols, meanings and strategies. If these
processes arent exclusive for different subjects, we could perceive power lines
that pervade both positions and also nodes that hold these lines together.
These networks arent only semiotic we could also think about desire
networks. If we think of games as an expansion of our social realities (as
classically proposed by Huizinga [2000]), games serve social purposes, and
elaborate certain dynamics and fantasies necessary to the maintenance of
social structures. These networks could reflect how (and why) games produced
and designed with queer public in mind may access the mainstream. This
article, them, will examine which are the conditions of possibility for it, and also
the role of some queer games within the mainstream culture.
 Well take as our object of analysis a game called Stick Shift. Acording to
its developer, Stick Shift is a game about an autoerotic night-driving game
about pleasuring a gay car (Yang, 2015) a game where you embody a white
male avatar driving a manual car and making shifts, where the hand
movements on the car stick shift resembles penis masturbation(handjob).
Making the shifts correctly makes the car go faster and, at the same time,
makes the avatar that represents the player look (possibly sexually) excited.
The game creator is Robert Yang, a well-known game designer and professor at
NYU, which most games depict themes as homosexuality, homosociality, sex,
BDSM, consent culture, and sexual vigilance. His games draw heavily in male
homoerotic imagery most of times, naked, hairy muscular male bodies and
penises or objects with clear phallic connotation. Although being designed after
queer experiences (and, as we will soon explain, impossible to be read in any
other that way), Stick Shift was reviewed and played by a huge number of
youtubers (like PewDiePie9) and mainstream game journalists. Even being
labeled as weird and bizarre, the game was still played, even migrating (with
two other sexual Yang games) to Steam, the bigger online distribution platform
of PC games. Being so, how could these obviously queer games, with strong
homoerotic content and dynamics, access mainstream players and, more
than that, amuse them?

With these questions in mind, this article will be organized in three

different sections. In the first section, Ill discuss how the mainstream video-
game culture constitutes itself as an hegemonic fantasy of a) male domination
and straight masculinity which is embodied/interpellated by a set of
hegemonic masculinity symbols, signs and relations, and b) as a cybercultural
fantasy of disembodiment an ideology of a post-materialist space that
creates distance between the experiences of the game and the player. In the
second session, Ill describe how Stick Shift is designed as a game about
desire, sex and vigilance that is impossible to be reading in a non-queer way

PewDiePie is a youtuber, considered the most successful icon of the gameplay phenomenon
(players that broadcast themselves playing the game, screening at the same time the game and their
reactions). PewDiePie has the most followed channel on Youtube, with more than 41 million followers.
Being so, hes considered a reference to mainstream gaming.
but, at the same time, the pleasure of playing it is based in heavy masculine
hegemonic imagery and themes. The third part analyzes Brazilian gameplay
videos about the game, and how the zoeira/HUE BR culture and homophobic
stances may, at the same time, maintain an abject view of the game (and
homosexual arousal) and provide the access of straight male identified to queer
affect networks. In conclusion, Ill analyze how these arrangements of a heavily
sexualized queer game in a hegemonic masculine culture produce a state of
heterotopia Michel Foucaults idea of different power-line spaces for the
straight gamer to negotiate queer desires in a different way with, as well with
the idea of gender/sexuality abjection.

Its just a game a guys game: The mainstream gaming culture as a

liberal, post-material male fantasy

As part of the cyberculture, the digital gaming culture is a dynamic and

differentiated media space, but far from being the techno-utopic network,
based on the bodiless flux of the information that some authors theorized in the
1990s (Levy, XXXX; Gee, XXXX, XXXX). This non-material status is promoted
as the pinnacle of a (neo)liberal humanistic utopia a colorblind, sexual-gender
equalitarian society, in which all possibility of access and agency are related to
individual rights of a market logic (if you dont like it, dont buy it). This status
also enforces a logic that the problem isnt what people are because, online,
everybody would have the same rights and accesses but what they do.
However, Katherine Hayles (1999) advocates that information even digital
information - isnt a free flux state, and that the (illusory) dematerialization of it
has a history and a context. This free flux ideology is closely linked to ideals of
universality and eternity, and also to neoliberal logics. According to the author:

Indeed, one could argue that the erasure of embodiment is a

feature common to both the liberal humanist subject and the
cybernmetic posthuman. () Only because the body is not
identified with the self is it possible to claim for the liberal
subject its notorious universality, a claim that depends on
erasing markers of bodily difference, including sex, race and
ethnicity (HAYLES, 1999, pg. 4-5).
 In fact, these arrangements are closer to what Donna Haraway defined
as "Informatics of Domination". To Haraway, computer based cultures has new
dynamics of power that are organized beyond the pre-established binaries
structures sustained by modern critical movements (such as nature / culture,
female / male, bourgeoisie / proletariat, etc.). The dynamics of domination,
control and subjectivation become contextual and fluid, promoted by liberal
logics of max production. However, far from eradicating the classical structures
of oppression, these were simply reassigned - the possibilities of action are still
more potent for some subject positions than for others. According to Haraway:

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on

boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across
boundaries and not on the integrity of natural objects.
(Haraway, 1992, pg. 302)

Its widely known that the video game culture has historically been and
still is designed and marketed to cis-hetero males (fonte). This context is what
Derek Burrill calls "Boyhood". Boyhood is, at the same time, a subject position,
an access technology and an arrangement that favors cisgender men (white
and heterosexual majority) at its intersection with the digital game culture.
Digital games are constituted within meaning structures of male (infant)
socialization (which also includes certain movies, series, literature and comics).
This juvenile male sociability reenacts the so-called "rites of passage" for a boy
to become a man to grow strong, to grow angry, to conquest, to dominate
(other men and especially women) and to be violent. However, in the post-
industrial and late-capitalist era, these rites of passage are only a manhood
fantasy, a model of masculinity that cant be reached anymore. Being so, in this
context, Boyhood becomes an important symbolic instrument for western men:
a place where you can "prove" your manhood, reenacting "classic" male
centered activities (war, conquest, sacrifice, saving of women and children)
without having to deal with the failures of those idealizations (pain, death,
failure, otherness). In this way, it seems appropriate to establish a link between
digital games, their languages and experiences, and the constitution of
masculinity and straightness. (Burrill, 2008).
 Thus, the proximity between the hegemonic male power-fantasy (that is
central to the gaming culture) and the structuration of the straight male identity
itself become evident. To some theorists, the heterosexual identity is produced
not by the identification with straightness, but mainly by the abjection of
homosexual desires and identities. Abjection is originally a concept by
psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1982), in which she reworked the psychic
structuration of the lacanian unconscious in which the experience of the
relationship between mother and son happens before the Law of the Father
that founds the symbolic axis. Being out of the symbolic law, these mother-child
experiences should be foreclosed (not only repressed), becoming a drive that
the subject cant identify as part of himself - but that, at the same time,
fascinates him. Judith Butler expands and rearranges these ideas to think about
the political institutionalization of abject and non-abject bodies lives that count
as livable and understandable and the ones who dont (Butler, 2003). The
central argument of this dynamic is what the author calls the heterosexual
matrix: the illusion that cisgenderism and heterosexuality and conservative,
traditional masculine and feminine subject positions and performances are the
only possible/intelligible/legitimate gender expressions, and that this
characteristics are personal, innate and natural. Within this social matrix,
gender and sexuality are maintained as stable individual characteristics by in
a Freudian sense a melancholic position: the neurotic negation of the sole
possibility of a homosexual psychic investiture. Being so, the straight subject
(most notably the male one) can never recognize its pre-edipical, polymorphic,
possible homosexual desires. The subject considers this drives, at the same
time, as something that was never there (as sexuality was something you born
with), and as something that, secretly, can destroy him. The straight desire isnt
identification its a negation of this abject position (Butler, 1999). According to
Calvin Thomas (2000):

The terror of being mistaken as a queer dominates the straight

mind because this terror constitutes the straight mind: it is
precisely that culturally produced and reinforced horror
of/fascination with the abject homosexuality that produces and
maintains the straight mind as such, governing not so much
specific practices between man and women (after all, these
 things happens) as the institution (arguably antisexual) or the
heteronormativity itself. (Thomas, 2000, pg. 27)

However, the psychic conception of this terror isnt automatically

perpetuated, but maintained, reproduced and internalized as a fantasy. In its
theorization about the production and reproduction of the psychic-symbolic
order and ideologies that preserves capitalist modes of production 10, Kaja
Silverman (1992) conceptualizes what she calls a dominant fantasy of
masculinity in our culture. To Silverman, theres a difference between the
constitution of the symbolic self (which comes from the experience of castration,
therefore linked to the symbolic axis) and the hegemonic ideology of the society
(which comes from the recognition of the mirror stage, therefore linked to the
imaginary axis). This view diverges from the classic perspective of Jacques
Lacan (ano), to whom the lack is the egoic search for the symbolic phallus
symbol of the return to the wholeness. In relation to masculinity, Silverman says
that this lack would be the space between the symbolic (the self) and the
imaginary (the ideology). The author recognizes as representatives of these
instances the penis (as the mark of masculinity) and the phallus (as the
patriarchal power owned by men / penis-holders). This dominant fiction would
be the most accessible meaning / affective network to resolve the traumatic
relation between symbolic and imaginary, resolution that remains in the
maintenance of the fantasy of denial of the lack between penis and phallus.

Being this constitution of masculinity more than the simply

identification/dis-identification, some behaviors, symbols and themes are also
constructed as abject for referring to certain subject positions. Rosemary Rizq
(2013) points to what she calls states of abjection". Rizq shows that the
abjection, more than the impossibility of identification with some subject
position, also delineate certain logic or behaviors as useless, ridiculous or
inappropriate. The author noted, for example, in an environment of mental
health care, patterns seen as feminine (expressing feeling, intimacy, empathy,
etc.), the recognition of weaknesses (by the professional staff), or the denial of
10

In this case, the modes of production arent only referring to labor conditions, but also to the
sexual distinction that maintains different subject positions to men and women, and the family as an
institution oriented to the reproduction of labor force, as classically upheld by Frederic Engels (2009)
a coherent and rational subject (linked to the liberal rationalism) are
considered abject, out of place, immature. The abjection doesnt maintain only a
dis-identification within the male/female, homo/hetero and/or cis/trans binomial
axis, but also disdain certain behaviors denoting this subject positions (sissy
or girly behavior, for example). Jaqueline Rose (2014) recognizes that
misogyny and violence against women arent only acts of dis-identification, but
a dominant fantasys project of abjecting the womens voice. To the author, this
women voice emanates the aspect of the difference and the other, enacting
a destabilizing potency of the establishment. This voice would force to the
surface the everyday part of the inner lives its visceral reality, its stubborn
unruliness (Rose, 2014, pg. 5), conflicting with the liberal rationalism illusion of
the rational and dominant fantasies male-centered performances. With this in
mind, its understandable the existence of a straightforward project of
aggression/abjection of women (and even the possibility of a feminine
perspective) in gaming culture.

Being so, the dominant fantasy that sustained by the so called

mainstream video game culture is managed as a post-materialist ideology and
as a straight-masculine privilege. Thus, discussions of representation, sexuality
and gender in online gaming forums, for example, are always permeated by
idealizing these spaces as somewhere to "escape" reality, or questioning what
these questions "matter in terms of gameplay. The gaming culture should
remain free of discussions about politics (mainly of gender, sexuality and race),
representativeness and violence, because these should take place in the real
world" the world were these discussions (and the otherness) really makes a
difference (Alexander, McKoy And Velez, 2007; Condis 2014; Goulart 2012;
Nakamura 2009). This technoutopic idea of digital environments as "post-
material" is brought to this discussions to reinforce the exclusiveness of the
male fantasies, in favor of an "hegemony of experience" - that is, as something
that should not be discussed, since it isnt perceived as a legitimate "gaming
experience". However, the high use of violence, military symbols, misogynistic
themes and extreme sexualization of women are rarely seen as agenda at all.
These positions are delineated in such a manner that reflects what Donna
Haraway called "The Modest Witness" effect. For the author, this effect erases
the masculinity traces (associations with domination, military structure, strength
and violence) in techno-scientific networks. That effect, at the same time,
hides the presence of the masculinity in technoscience qualifying it as a
passive "witness" of these phenomenon - but still retains these masculine
values as fundamental. Thus, this effect hinder the possibilities of a gendered
critique about the tools, developers, languages, dynamics and target audiences
that forms these networks. (Haraway, 1997).

An autoerotic night-driving game about pleasuring a gay car The

Aesthetic, Narrative and Mechanic Structures of Stick Shift:

Even though the mainstream gaming culture is conceived in and by this

liberal-masculine dominant fantasy, we consider that this context is far from
being monolithic. According to Judith Butler (1993, 2013) the maintenance of
social structures from gender to economy is performative, considering the
necessity to repeat the norms (and constructing those outside it as abject) as a
condition for the materialization of this reality. However, being these normative
realities a fiction, they need a specific context to exist as such . The repetition of
symbols that maintain the norm can fail when evocated in different contexts,
creating spaces for differential agencies, accesses and negotiation of other
ways of living.

Some effects of these performative fails are visible in gaming culture,

especially in studies about the reception of mainstream games by audiences
that arent the intended. Jo Bryce and Jason Ruther (2002), and also Henry
Jenkins (1997) discussed how some players that identified themselves as
women organized all-feminine teams in competitive games to challenge male
gamers, as part of the Riot Grrl movement. Adrienne Shawn (2014) studied
how some non-males, non-whites and/or non-straight players interacted with
mainstream games, questioning the whole representation issues presented by
traditional video games critic of gender and sexuality, saying that it could
recreate the classic dichotomy of good and bad queer/women representation
a moral statement that is exclusionary and, many times, reiterate hegemonic
discourses about racial, class, gender and sexuality. Carol Stabile (2013),
researching on non-straight women playing male avatars in World of Warcraft,
acknowledged that these players designed their characters making narrative
negotiations between violence, the high fantasy genre and non-hegemonic
masculinities. My own work about the Proudmoore Pride Parade in World of
Warcraft shows that there are structural, graphical and social negotiations
between the cis-heteronormative setting in which the game is constituted and
the possibility to reference queer icons, sub-cultures and historical movements
(Goulart, 2015). However, its still unclear the how the opposite would work
how games considered queer impact mainstream audiences? How these
audiences access queer gaming content?

The game Stick Shift presents itself as a potent game to analyze the
relationship between queer gaming and mainstream gaming networks.
According to the author, Stick Shift is an autoerotic night-driving game about
pleasuring a gay car (Yang, 2015). The games main screen consists in an
avatars face (a white male), the car panel (in which you can see the car keys
and the speedometer), and also the hand of the avatar on the stick shift. The
game mechanics demands the player to perform, at the same time, stick shift
driving (only the gears, no steering needed) while making movements that
resemble penis masturbation. While the avatars hand masturbates the stick
shift, the stick grows larger. These movements are made by the avatar in the
game, and by the player, which must move the mouse repeatedly to gain speed,
masturbating the car stick shift. The movement of the mouse (up and down)
as the avatars hand makes the car accelerate (as is show on the
speedometer), and the player needs to reach a certain speed and then click and
drag the mouse to do the shift change. If the shift is incorrectly done, the car will
suddenly stop, the avatar will look surprised (and a bit frustrated), and the
player need to start the game all over again. When done correctly (with the
correct speed and shift movement), a characteristic engine acceleration sound
is heard, and the avatar makes a facial expression of (allegedly) sexual arousal.
This sexual arousal grows as the gears advance (and the car goes faster), as
the modifications on the background and the volume and pacing of the game
music: in the starting gears, the avatar only opens his mouth and makes a
satisfactory face. In third gear, the avatar eyes glow as flashlights. In the fourth
and fifth gears, the background of the car starts to blur and the music sounds
muffled. When in fifth gear, a sixth gear appears, and, when the player
advances to that, the avatar makes an orgasmic face, accelerating the car and
fading away. After that gear the game ends, showing the human avatar smoking
a cigarette while the cars exhaust pipe is showed leaking. The player must wait
15 minutes, which is characterized by Yang as the first videogame to simulate a
refractory period. However, sometimes your ride can be interrupted by the
police a mechanic Ill discuss later.

Stick Shifts main screen

Despite being considered a queer game, some characteristics make

Stick Shift a rather unique game within the scene. First of all, Stick Shift, is
highly sexualized and focus in male beings pleasuring other males beings (not
necessarily human, but still male, if we consider that the author defines it as
your car boyfriend)11. This makes Stick Shift a game that is virtually impossible
to unqueer. As Alexander Doty (1998) implies, even when some media
products have clear queer implications or even when they are made by openly
queer people theres a clear mainstream tendency to unqueer it turning
manifest homosexual romances in friendships, gay/lesbian communities in

11

Stick Shift is considered by the author as part of a trilogy of games, all of them highly sexualized
and centered in male figures. The other games are Hurt me Plenty (a sadomasochistic game about
spanking a mans butt) and Succulent (a game about sucking a popsicle). These games were re-
released together in the Steam platform under the name of Radiator 2.
exotic or flamboyant lifestyle, etc. According to the author, the view of
queerness in popular media is almost always taken as connotative - an
alternative, non-canon view, opposed by the true, heteronormative denotative
view of the material. Being the pleasure of the human avatar readable through
his face, as his connection corporeal/affective to the car (his eyes flash as
headlights, his arousal grows as the speed goes up), and so the pleasure of the
car (as the speed goes up the stick shift gets bigger, and the exhaust pipe
leaking as a sign/metaphor of ejaculation), It gets impossible to deny its
homoerotic narrative.

Also, theres a dynamic in the game that is closely linked to the queer
community. In 48% of the games played the police will stop your car. Thats a
fixed chance the police appear in almost half games despite anything the
player does. When that happens, the screen changes to the human avatar
inside the car looking at two heavily armed police officers. Theres a timer
counting 10 minutes thats the time you have to wait to play the game again.
According to Yang, this chance is there to reflect the problems with the sexual
policing violence against queer people 48% is the percentage of LGBTQ
people relates having experienced police misconduct according to the Willians
Institute Report (Willians Institute, 2015). However, the player can protest
against this situation, making the avatar blow kisses in direction of the
policeman. For every kiss blown to the officers, the time the player must wait
one10 minutes more to play again. Yang recognizes this resistance as anti-
gaming, and relates this experience with the protesters of Stonewall where
they resisted the police even knowing that this would result in violent measures.
By diminishing the agency of the player for political means, Stick Shift can be
seen as part of a gaming movement that aim affective purposes, not being
necessarily fun or enjoyable - being the necessity to be fun closely linked to
a diminished potency of video games affective possibilities (Ruberg, 2015).
 Human avatar blowing kisses to police officers (and adding to the timer)

Even though Stick Shift is openly conceived as a game based on gay

desire, it also resorts to strong hegemonic masculine cultural symbols, mainly
about car culture. The relationship between men and cars in our culture has a
strong link to competitiveness, power, control, performance, technique/skill an
aggression, referred by Lynley Walker as hydraulic masculinity (Walker, 1999).
This metaphor is especially interesting to define car cultures in North American
cultures, where driving manual cars is considered a manlike, phallic attribute 12.
However, the relationship of men and cars in our culture is also clearly
emotional. Although cars as technology are marketed as masculine, the car-
space is conceived as a place of male pleasure and passion, and also of taking
care of the car (which is mostly depicted as a woman or a child) (Landstrm,
2006). This relationship of skill/technique, speed, performance, but also an
affective, amorous relationship is translated, in Stick Shift, as sexual (being
this the queer turn of the game).

Also, despite the police mechanic which is based on a solid percentage

(not affected by player performance) - the games structure is rather traditional.
The peace is linear, there are clear objectives and the player must achieve a
12

This experience doesnt have a correlate in Brazilian car culture, being manual cars the standard
in the country, where manualautomatic cars are much more expensive.
regular performance in a task that gets more difficult, requiring an ascending
skill. Also, theres a clear, explicit objective, and the game ends when this
objective is reached. Being so, one of the main critiques about Queer Games
made by mainstream gamers that they are much more close to an artistic
experience than to a video game cant be made to Stick Shift. This makes the
mainstream players closer to the usual dynamics of play (and the bodyless /
post-material hegemonic fantasy of gaming), facilitating the access of Stick
Shift to these players.

Robert Yang declares that his main inspiration the games dynamic is the
classic Andy Warhol movie Blowjob (1963/1964). Blowjob is a movie where the
only take is of a young white male actor (which is the actor DeVeren
Bookwalter, but is uncredited on the movie) making pleasure faces. The sexual
act is never showed (or even the person who could be performing it). To Roy
Grundmann (2013), Blowjob maintained an ambiguous relation to
homosexuality, resorting at the same time heteronormative symbols of
masculinity, and reflected the creation of a white, urban, middle class gay
image. This characteristic made Blowjob to easily accessed by straight
intellectuals and LGBTQ communities alike. Also, Blowjob blurred the lines
between pornographic cinema and avant-garde art, re-issuing political and anti-
establishment uses of pornography that were lost after the constitution of
American mass-media pornography (Williams, 2004). Also, the idea of
wharholian real time is central to the experiences of Stick Shift and Blowjob,
which we will further analyze.

However, the take also relates to other cultural products. In car culture
TV shows like Top Gear13, the camera focuses on the face and pleasure
reactions of the show host while driving fast cars. This aesthetics clearly makes
Stick Shift not aimed specifically towards a male gay or other LGBT / queer
public, but proposing a more abroad queer pleasure experience.

13
Face comparison between the avatar in Stick Shift (left); DeVeren Bookwalter in Blowjob
(center); and Top Gear host Jeremy Clarckson in Season 4 Episode 4 (right)

The avatar in Stick Shift maintains, at the same time, mainstream tropes
(about gaming, masculinity and car culture) and alluding to queer cultures
(desires and community experience). So, to analyze how mainstream players
are affected by these games, we need to determine what we understand about
different ways of conceiving identification in the gaming culture, how these
identifications ?? and .

After Recording This, Ill have to Suck a Cock Performance,

Heteronormativity and Queer Affect on Youtube

The ??. Different from other movements of Youtube as, for example,

If we think how ??. Recent studis understand that the main objective of a
good game is the state of flow14 -

(dificuldade de turismo identitrio / tempo real e experincia poltica como

agenciamentos diferenciais de masculinidade ao espao de falta entre pnis e
falo tempo real como contraponto ao flow)

TEMPO REAL QUEER TIME AND PLACE (Halberstam)

Acesso s redes de desejo queer Tempo real (queer time) possibilidade

de acesso ao jouissance e death drive (negao do futurismo)

14

The misuse of the flow is a rather common tool in Queer Gaming, where mechanics like
impossible difficulty, ever-changing rules and unfair challenges are organized to symbolize violence,
restriction and vulnerability of unprivileged populations (Anthropy, 2013)