Pleasure and Intersectionality in Queer Dating-Sims: An Autoethnographic Research-Creation Perspective

This paper, by Kevser Güngör and Lisa Schwencke, presents an autoethnographic research-creation project centered on Dispirited, a text-based queer dating-sim developed as part of a larger SSHRC-funded initiative at the Queer Sensibilities lab. The authors argue that pleasure, particularly the pleasure of seeing one's intersecting gender, sexual, ethnic, and religious identities represented, is a central force in both playing and creating games, and that representation itself functions as an act of resistance against the marginal treatment such identities typically receive in fantasy literature and independent video games.

The game is a branching interactive fiction in three acts, featuring four romanceable characters, each leading to three endings for twelve in total. Its worldbuilding draws on a decolonial counter-mapping approach, set on two floating islands, Alta and Ada, inspired by Chile, Turkey, and Islamic mythology. The authors deliberately foreground the limitations of cartography and narrative design and identify Re-Orientalism as a risk diasporic creators must actively guard against. On the queer side, the game offers extensive player-character customization, gender-neutral writing, and a reimagining of the seventeenth-century Map of Tendre as a co-creative tool for mapping players' romantic paths.

The paper's methodology is grounded in the authors' own identities and experiences, which they describe in detail, including their gender, sexuality, class, religion, and national heritage. Rather than relying on survey data or sample sizes, the work is framed through research-creation, with the creative process itself treated as a site of theoretical testing. The presentation, as outlined, is structured around three themes: the theory of pleasure, the expression of pleasure within the game and among players, and the pleasure of collaborative creation grounded in trust and attentiveness to difference.