"Queerness exists for us as an ideality," writes José Esteban Muñoz in his seminal book Cruising Utopía, "that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world." And what a potentiality, what a possibility the teens imagine! Within the videogame, the teenagers can express whatever style, whatever gendered or non-gendered presentation of themselves they like ("Online, it's easier to be yourself," one of them states). The teens Tyson and de Sousa spoke to have particular ideas about what a utopia looks like. The filmmakers superimpose videoconference footage directly onto the teens' private game server, juxtaposing the meatspace-the real, the tangible, the present-alongside the digital space-the potential, the virtual, the possible future. The teens' sentiments strike a particular chord since Tyson and de Sousa set much of the film within Minecraft, a game famed for allowing players to build, well, a "perfect" world of their own, block by block. "My idea of a perfect world is a forest," chimes in one teen. Better access to mental healthcare, queer history in schools, desegregated bathrooms. In Tracing Utopia, a documentary that premiered in the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021, filmmakers Nick Tyson and Catarina de Sousa question a group of queer teenagers about their vision of a queer utopia. Where are we escaping to? Is it actually a better world than the one we're attempting to leave behind? Videogames can offer us worlds we might like to live in can they offer us worlds we can live in? And particularly for queer people, what does that world look like? When we talk about videogames as "escapism", we tend to focus on provenance: we're escaping from the humdrum of our jobs, our obligations, the petty horrors that fill modern life.
Next up, Sharang examines the way players are using video games to explore the potential of a queerer future. Hello! All this week Eurogamer is celebrating Pride with a series of stories examining the confluence of LGBT+ communities and play in its many different forms, from video games and tabletop games through to live-action role-play.
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