Alternative Localities: Queering Time and Space through Videogame Play

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2025, examines how videogame play can create "alternative" queer localities in time and space. Drawing on queer theory (Ahmed, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Muñoz) and game studies, the author argues that queerness is not only a matter of sexual identity but of non-normative temporal and spatial operation, and that play can release participants from everyday rhythms and norms of mastery, progression, and completion. The work is framed as a summary of a PhD thesis by Hollie Wistow at the University of Nottingham.

The research adopts a mixed-method ethnographic approach combining material culture analysis through object interviews, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. Observational participants were recruited through online servers and chatrooms focused on non-normative play, while interviewees were recruited via snowball sampling from the author's personal networks. All participants were given pseudonyms and informed of their right to withdraw consent. The study is qualitative and small in scale, and no quantitative statistics are reported.

The three chapters trace distinct entry points into queer play. The first examines alternative controllers, using a phenomenological approach to show how experimental input devices disrupt mastered literacies and encourage softer, less hardcore sensibilities toward control. The second uses observation to explore a community of players who break virtual space by leaving pre-designed maps, showing how they challenge what is treated as fixed, working, and normal in game worlds. The third focuses on domestic contexts, finding that play in the home can disrupt dominant cultural imaginaries of domestic life and reshape its social and spatial structures.

Overall, the paper contends that videogames can construct sites oriented around alternativeness, both within and outside game structures, and offers a set of theoretical considerations for understanding queer times and spaces in the context of play. The geographic scope is largely implied to be the UK, with the time frame centred on contemporary digital play practices.