Burning Closets and Nights in the Woods

Abstract

This article examines game environments wherein LGBTQ characters and players are not necessarily on the same side, and the natural world might want nothing to do with you or even to harm you. The purpose of these environments is not essentially to separate humans and the natural world. Instead, the environments point to other forms of complex, messy interrelationships that often do not have neat closures and resolutions. In other words these are not just bad relationships between queers and their environments, they are moments and opportunities for critically shifting perspectives, and, in the words of Kadji Amin, “deexceptionalizing” and “deidealizing” the relationship between queerness and nature to better account for the position of queerness in systems of power.20 Within the context of queer games and queer game studies, this means deidealizing the connection between queer characters, stories, players, and their natural environments, refusing to romanticize ourselves as suffering, exiled stewards of the natural world with special access, knowledge, or kinship with it.