#everyonegames: exploring queer gamer identity and community

The cultural perceptions of the mainstream gaming community reinscribe dominant ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. This has historically left women gamers, gamers of color, and queer gamers at the margins of gaming culture. I center sexuality as an analytic framework, first, to account for the stories and experiences of LGBT gamers and, second, to understand queer gamer identity and community. Through ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviewing, I argue that queer gamers employ multiple worldmaking practices through their connections with games and with one another. These queer gamer worldmaking practices make possible narratives that acknowledge queer gamers' existence and actively create spaces that foreground diversity in video games and in game communities.