“I Can Feel You Here”: Queering Intimacy and Haptics in First-Person Shooters and Beyond

Abstract

To explore queer touch in digital spaces, the authors consider three games that sit uneasily within the genre of the first-person shooter (FPS), in which the player mediates gameplay through a first-person perspective, typically in the form of an armed individual. The FPS was fundamental in establishing such technological idiosyncrasies as real-time rendering and physics that still shape digital intimacy today. As these techniques were developed, a normative and often violent regime of touch was established whereby sight equated destructive, obliterating intimacy. Yet, as explored in this article, through techniques such as glitch, mechanical remixing, and code reappropriation, normative touch itself can be broken, giving way to queerer forms of intimacy. The authors center their analysis on Trespasser, Portal, and Polaris. Although disparate in content, production context, and temporality, all three games seek to reinterpret physical intimacy in code and narrative.