 My name is Josh Greenberg. I'm the Associate Director of the School of Journalism and Communication. And I speak for my colleagues when I say that we're thrilled to present Professor Jack Halberstam from the University of Southern California as our distinguished speaker. Professor Halberstam joins a prominent group of international scholars who have headlined this lecture in the past. Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Lisa Nakamura, Gabriella Coleman, and Andrew Chadwick. This is an eclectic group whose respective records of scholarship deal with a broad range of topics and intellectual concerns. From the so-called death of television to the rise of the hacker collective, anonymous, neglected discourses in online games, satellite images of declassified bomb sites, and hybrid media systems. Professor Halberstam's talk, Queer Gaming, Glitches, and Going Turbo, will expand the Italian lecture's theoretical and topical terrain and continues a tradition of presenting, stimulating, and thought-provoking arguments about a core idea or a set of ideas and issues in communication. Tonight's event is one of many that are being held this month during the faculty of Public Affairs Research Month. We're pleased to be hosting this year's Attala Lecture here in the River Building, which houses our school and its programs. The space has been generously provided by our Dean Andre Pleard, who's in attendance this evening. Thank you, Dean Pleard, for your leadership in bringing Research Month to fruition and for your support of the Attala Lecture, and to Associate Dean Karen Schwartz, who played a key role in organizing these events, and to a number of staff in the Office of the Dean, notably Pierre Hamill and Karen Adma, who've been working tirelessly on the scheduling end of things. Another important event during FPA Research Month is our own Graduate Student Conference, now in its ninth year. We're pleased to once again host the Attala Lecture in conjunction with the conference, which began today and ends tomorrow, the conference organizing team, along with the entire Graduate Student Caucus and its executive deserve high praise for putting together an excellent event, which has attracted several top-notch graduate students in communication from across Canada, and it's great to see so many of them in attendance this evening. I'm one of a small number of faculty members in our school who were recruited to Carlton during the Paul Attala era. Paul is the Associate Director when I was hired 10 years ago to this month. It's a position he held for 12 years, making him the longest-serving Associate Director in the school's history. Paul had a sharp wit, and he was a gifted scholar. He was a remarkable teacher and a spirited interlocutor who savored a good conversation. Paul never shied away from a debate as far as I know and was always curious about why people hold the views that they do, and he wasn't afraid to push you to explain yourself. The main focus of Paul's research was television, in particular American network TV. As our colleague Michael Dorland wrote, network television represented for Paul a successful, if complex, model of the relationship between a media technology, domestic space, and its inhabitants, the audience, and an ethos he termed fun. It was, Michael writes, the utter lack of fun of the Canadian media context, its pompous seriousness that drove Paul to some famous vits of vitriolic contempt. The cancer took Paul from his family, friends, colleagues, and students too soon, and we're grateful to his family for providing the endowment that allows us to honor Paul with this annual lecture. I want to reflect a bit more on this ethos of fun because it's a fitting place to begin my introduction of our speaker. Jack Halberstam's recent book, Gaga Feminism, Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, it takes Lady Gaga as a symbol of how the world has changed with regards to gender, sexuality, desire, and the politics of publicity. While it may be tempting to dismiss Lady Gaga as little more than a corporate action figure in the flesh, Professor Halberstam convincingly argues that if we suspend such assumptions and instead take Gaga seriously, then we have the opportunity to explore and rethink some of the central ways in which everyday culture establishes normative codes about sex, gender, and socialization that discipline and constrain behavior and reproduce existing relations and systems of power and domination. Combining so-called low theory with its concern for the popular, with the high theory of critical feminist thought, the book celebrates the carnival-esque ways in which Lady Gaga unleashes what Professor Halberstam describes as representational mayhem on the world. The book concludes with a manifesto calling for a politics of performance in which going Gaga amounts to a repertoire of resistance strategies, blocking, slowing, jamming the economy and the social stability that depends upon it. It calls for a questioning of the status quo, but refuses to offer anything more than the promise that things could be different. Gaga Feminism extends a line of argument developed in Professor Halberstam's earlier book, The Queer Art of Failure. Here, too, we have a number of fun and accessible texts. Pics our movies like Finding Nemo, Toy Story and Over the Hedge, all favorites in my house. Two bumbling male buddy, Stoner Flicks, like Dude Where's My Car, a favorite of some of my friends. Professor Halberstam subjects these films to queer subversive readings as a way of theorizing about failure and to encourage us to think about how the ideological structures of North American society condition how we understand and perform sexed and gendered identities, how these shape childhood socialization and the politics that flow from such projects and performances. The book explores how low-culture popular films and media we might otherwise dismiss as silly or childish, contain critiques of a culture that rewards obedience and marginalizes those who do not fit the mold of what we might call normal. This evening's talk revisits and I think expands on some of these earlier arguments, reflecting on the animated genre of children's films that begin with Toy Story but include movies like Over the Hedge, Bee Movie, The Claymation, Film, Chicken Run. Professor Halberstam argues that CGI technology changed the face of animation, not simply because we shifted from 2D to 3D, but because the shift from analog to digital made other stories, relations and outcomes possible. If animated worlds featured large animals chasing small ones across a flat and passive landscape, after Toy Story, the world of objects took on a new, more dynamic and unpredictable dimension that affords potentially new narratives for living in late capitalist society. Tonight, Professor Halberstam explores this dimension with us in relation to games and asks us what kinds of new stories emerge from shifts in the codes and algorithms in these worlds. Jack Halberstam is a full professor of American studies and ethnicity, comparative literature and gender studies at the University of Southern California. In addition to the queried of failure in Gaga feminism, Professor Halberstam is the author of three other books and numerous chapters and articles addressing an array of topics, spanning such issues and terrain as cultural studies, queer theory, visual culture, popular culture and gender studies. We're very pleased that Jack has made the trip to Ottawa and is available to join us and deliver this year's Attala lecture. Professor Jack Halberstam. Wow, well, thank you for that fantastic introduction. I am absolutely honored and delighted to be here to join you. And yes, fun is definitely my keyword for the night and we'll have some fun, I think, but we'll also try to explore some of the questions that come up around queerness, the coding of queerness and the coding of identity in relationship to the evolving realm of gaming. But before I jump into the gaming, I do want to say something about screens because, you know, we're going to be looking at lots of different, basically screens as we go through the talk, but I was thinking about the topic of the conference when I went to see the Spike-Jones film the other week, her, right? Did you notice how the screen was kind of absent? It was literally gone, like the mediation that the screen offers that we're so affected to that we feel is completely indispensable. We're suddenly gone and he had the little thing in his ear and it was all sound all the time. I thought that was interesting and something that we might want to be thinking about, about ever more invisible forms of mediation and then the shift to the aural. A lot of what we're going to talk about in relationship to gaming comes to us through screens on the one hand, but on the other hand comes through writing. And writing is, you know, a very dense field of mediation and what the film wanted to suggest to us seemingly was that the voice was a less dense field of mediation and one that would allow us therefore to ignore the fact that there is no human body even attached to the voice such that someone can actually fall in love with the presence that is without a body, okay? So I wonder about the dominance of visuality and whether we're at its absolute peak with all of our screens. I noticed this, for example, in relationship to the iPhones and the smartphones. They can't decide whether the screen should be bigger or smaller, have you noticed? Like, so Apple keeps going back and forth because Samsung comes out with bigger screens and then people seem to like that they can do more on it. So it's unclear, do we want more screen? Do we want less screen? Are we more invested in the screen as we move from the age of cinema into the age of digital media? Or are we more invested? Do we just have more screens or are we actually dispensing with the screen? There are certain artists who have made it their project to begin to explore soundscapes. Sharon Hayes is a very good example. She's a queer artist who often uses sound to fill public spaces and alter the kinds of relationships that occur there. I just saw a show by Nick Cave in Boston and he creates these sound suits. And I think wearable media is a new thing. There was somebody at the Oscars the other night who was looking at his watch and he was like, you know, I can read my email on here, I can watch a movie. And he's like, but do you want to? Like, is this really like, oh fun, I'm gonna watch a movie now. Some of these things look good in James Bond and then you actually get to the point where that technology is available, less good, right? So I'm interested in, you know, what kind of future we imagine for screens. And so I want to take seriously the topic of your conference even as some of what I will present tonight seems to sort of skirt that topic. But all of what I present comes courtesy of some version or another of a screen. So I have basically four sections that I'm gonna go through with you and they're peppered with little media clips and sound clips and so on. I want to begin by thinking about what queer gaming might be. Queer gaming is queerness like now you add some lesbian and gay characters to grand theft auto so that you can be mugged by a lesbian rather than just, you know, is that what we mean by queer gaming or are we much more sophisticated than that and we need to think about codes? And if we need to think about codes on what level do we need to think about codes in order to shift the normativity of the world of gaming? And we all are sort of aware of the fact that the world of gaming is pretty normative. We all have sort of twitchy little white boys in our minds when we're thinking about gaming, right? They're all there, you know, playing or they're doing some version of Dungeons and Dragons at some really bad nerdy role-playing game, right? What would it mean for these worlds to be queer? And I'll get into that in a moment. Then I'm actually gonna give you an example of a film about a game. So we get into this sort of meta realm, a discussion of game within film. Then I'll talk to you a little bit about queer technology will be section three. And then at the end I'll talk about this concept of going turbo and connect it with the concept of the glitch. And you all know what glitches are. I mean, they happen much more often than we would like. But I was recently at a university where someone had created an art project called The Art of the Glitch. And the way that he described the glitch was as a kind of wilderness within the computer, a space that opens up and that is unmappable and uncharitable. That's a little romantic, but I really like the idea of the glitch as somebody who's very deeply invested in failure and in productive failure. The glitch is when the program fails, when the system fails, you end up with a glitch. Now, the idea then is not to see the glitch as something that's getting in the way of what you wanna do, but actually thinking of the aesthetic that is produced by the glitch, okay? And I think I may even have an image of that. Do I? No, I don't. Okay, so I have an image later on of a screen, like the bits, the combination of the bits actually produce very, very interesting materials when the glitch occurs that we should read aesthetically rather than just trying to get it off the screen, okay? So we might be bypassing in our zeal to play the game and to follow through on a trajectory. We might be actually missing the aesthetic of the game itself, which is very often located in the bits and pieces that are in between the game, okay? So the glitch would represent some of those bridges, whether they were supposed to be there or not, that might, if we slow down, catch our attention and be giving us different information than the information that's given to us when we actually play the game, okay? Now, I actually wrote a version of this paper for a conference I was invited to at Berkeley on queer gaming. And it was a really cool conference, it was in November, and it combined people who designed games with people who, you know, academics who think about games, but may or may not play them, and then activists who use games to make interventions into the public realm. It was a fabulous conference. There were a couple of things that really stood out. First, who knew how many programmers, how many game designers were transgender women? You may not know that, but there is a huge presence of trans women in the gaming world, and that definitely has an impact in the way in which certain kinds of characters are drawn. The other thing was I actually thought the conversations back and forth between the game makers, the artists and the academics were really amazing, and those are the kinds of conversations that I think one wants to create a platform for, rather than just sit here and kind of theorize in the absence of thinking about how the games develop. So let's, one of the, I said when they invited me to this conference, I was like, I don't really play games, which probably is horrifying to some people here when you're like, okay, you're gonna talk to us about games, and you don't really play them. No, I don't really play a lot of games. I'll tell you about what happened when I did play games in the not so distant past, but the person who invited me said, I'd like to encourage you to think about games in relationship to the work that you've done on animation, which Josh alluded to, and so I do actually want to begin by thinking about this transition. One of the arguments that I made in relationship to animation is that everything that happens in these new CGI animations happens at the level of the algorithm. And the algorithm is really the bit, the section of innovation that one should be paying attention to, a little bit like the glitch. So in Finding Nemo, for example, it's not just that you get a lot of queer characters, which you do get, actually, but the algorithm that was so crucial to Finding Nemo and its success is the algorithm that allows you to render light on water. That was the big innovation of Finding Nemo. You have a realistic world in Finding Nemo because they finally figured out how to animate light through water. Monster's ink, how to animate hair, which was not possible before. In a bug's life, how to animate the proud. So you could have multiple insects that are not the same insect drawn over and over and over again, but is actually a mass drawn in all of its complexity and its individuality. Those algorithms are what create CGI and make it very different from the linear animation that comes before it. And I'll have a little thing about that in a moment. So let me start with a clip then that brings together the games and the animation. And this comes from a little show that I was introduced to that I adore called Adventure Time. Does anyone watch Adventure Time? There are really wacky characters in Adventure Time that are not exactly human and not exactly animal and not exactly machine. And I really love that about this animated series. And there's a little character called Beemo and I want to introduce you to Beemo. What's on the menu, Beemo? I've created... Okay, I'll make sure you get the whole thing. Who wants to play video game? What's on the menu, Beemo? I've created a new game called Conversation Parade. What do you think about the stars in the sky? It's okay, I guess. Yeah, they're cool. That is an interesting response. But I love shut down. Beemo, that was weak. What now? Okay, so you've got Beemo's butt head who wants to play video games, right? They're Jake and Finn, I think they're actually called. They want to play video games, but Beemo's like, okay, let's play a game. We're gonna have a conversation and they're like, oh, hell no, we're not having a conversation. That's super boring. So, but it's a reminder that what a game is is not so different from a lot of other forms of human interaction. And I sort of like that reminder here. The other thing that's really cool here is, what is Beemo? What is Beemo? And Beemo is sort of a combination of a game console, a BCR, an alarm clock, a toaster, and so on. And in that sense, he sort of captures one way that we might think about the queerness of this little creature, is that his form resides in its function. What is he depends upon what he does. So, I just want to continue. There he is. He's like this weird little hybrid creature. Is he an old Macintosh? Is he a console? Is he a game boy? There's actually a whole episode where he wants to be a human boy and he's not able to. It's very tragic and so on. So, I want to finish this thought about animation here. So, as Josh was saying, in my previous work on animation, I made this argument that CGI completely changes the face of animation, not just because we shift from 2D to 3D, because in fact, many people can't even register that shift, but because the shift from analog to digital, from linear to fractal makes other stories possible. And the point that Josh made about linear is very easily conveyed to you by simply remembering what cartoons used to be. And it really was a large character chasing a small character across an unmoving landscape. And you could put Sylvester and Tweety in there. So, what changes when you get 3G is that the camera has a point of view within the realm of the cartoon itself. And so, many different perspectives are possible and an entire world comes to life so that it isn't simply two characters in a loopy narrative. There are many, many other stories that become available. And as I said, as these new algorithms appear, different kinds of stories can be told. Okay, let's see where we go next. All right, so what kinds of stories emerge from shifts in the codes and algorithms in gaming world? So I'm gonna warn you in advance that I don't know the answer to this question, but what I want to do here today is explore with you the questions that we might ask. And I'll ask those questions in a moment and then hopefully towards the end of the talk, we'll have a few answers in place at least. Obviously, we're also interested in what queer theory, what gaming has to offer queer studies, but also what queer theory may have to offer gaming in terms of a critique of the normative, the predictable, the stable, the thinkable, and I would say an embrace of the ludic and the loopy. And also think about Toy Story as a beautiful little cartoon because it's really about the relationship between objects, absent the human. And I think that a lot of game world try to make you believe that you've entered into another world where you are extraneous to that world and the real relationship is between the non-human objects. All right, as promised, I will give you my sad little story about when I played video games. And of course, playing with toys is different from playing a game. And so I want to mark that distinction as well. Oh, that's just the poster to say that there is a large community of people who are super interested not only in queering gaming, but queering the tech too. And that's one of my points about BMO is that it's the hardware as well as the software. It's the object, the toy, as well as the program that has to be queered, okay? So we tend to focus a lot on the software. What about the hardware as well? The toy, literally the toy, the tech. How would we queer that material? All right. And I have, I hope, given you this, the argument about queer algorithms. So obviously I'm not arguing that we just need gay and lesbian characters in games. I'm arguing that we need to recode what we mean by sexuality and gender. And while that's very hard to do across human bodies, isn't it something that we could think of doing within a game or within a computer program? Right, so if you can't recode how we read each other and how we read bodies, could we come up with a game within which we had completely redistributed the meaning of gender, the meaning of embodiment, the meaning of desire? And if we can't, what does that say about ideology? Why is it so difficult to imagine things very, very differently? The algorithm is a way of beginning this conversation about coding. All right. All right, so the game that I played that I was so bad at, I mean, even the fact that it's the Sims, you're probably like, oh, that's pathetic, right? How many years ago, yeah, that's what happened. So I was really interested in gaming. I missed, you know, I'm too old to have been around to be young enough when the really, really fun games were around, so by the time I had a little bit of time on my hands and enough cash to go and buy a game, it was the Sims, okay? But some people here probably still play Sims. Do you guys still play Sims? Yeah, right, but now it's with people instead. This was when, well, no, people. You just have these cities. But it appealed to my sense of, you know, authoritarianism probably that I wanted to control the world. I had a kind of utopian fantasy that my Sims city would be amazing. Everyone would be happy. The roads would be fixed. The schools would be open. The parks would be blooming. Well, it actually, my world went downhill really quickly. I probably had the record for creating nuclear disaster is my guess. And it was really frustrating to me because there was something about the game that completely eluded me. I do feel that once the game began to be played with Sim people, I understood that there was a normativity coded even into Sim city when the people weren't there and that there was something about the normativity that I was refusing. I mean, that's the narrative I'm telling myself for why my city went into ruin. But it is a nice illustration of the fact that you cannot just change the surface of a game. You actually would have to change its entire core, its coded core in order to make it do something different. I believe that when the Sim people entered into the Sims game, we saw what the game was really about. And what the game was really about was ordering space according to predetermined understood norms of intimacy, space, housing, habitation, interaction, relation, and so on. And all of that normativity was hidden when it was just Sim city and comes out when it's those Sim people. And adding a couple of gay men doesn't make it any better. Like look at modern family or any of these new, the new normal TV shows. Okay, so that was my little sad experience playing games. So what I want to do though is use my failure to play these games, which hasn't assuaged my interest in games. I'm still very, very interested in them. I want to use some of the work that I've done on Gaga feminism, which is rethinking the politics of gender in an era when sex and gender have changed radically in the last decade. I want to combine it with some of the work that I've done on failure to ask, I hope, some different kinds of questions about gaming and teching and the relationship between queer people, queer theory, queer studies, screens and media. And I have some questions that are gonna guide us through the second half of the talk, okay? So, here's question number one. And this is where we're gonna get into some of the turbo, going turbo. How much free space is there in a game to change the game? I think you can hear that that's really not a question about the game, it's also a question about ideology, right? How much free spaces are in any set of scripted relations to change those relations? Again, that's a very hard question to answer in talking to bodies, but maybe it would be easier to answer a relationship to a game space. And in a related question, is there space within the game to go wild? So, people who really do play games, that would be a good thing for you to be thinking about. And I know that there are games that are set up that you're supposed to fail at, you're supposed to lose the game, and there are also games that you really can undermine by playing them against the grain and playing them for different reasons, playing for a different trajectory and a different outcome. And maybe some people have some of those narratives that they can tell us. Okay, question number two. Under what conditions in a game can so-called new life be imagined, inhabited and enacted? Okay, again, if we're not simply interested in adding queer people to the character list, then are we actually trying to recreate what we understand as life altogether? Is it possible within the space of a game to reimagine what a city would look like, to reimagine how people are meeting, talking, having sex? I don't know, let's not get into that. But you know what I'm saying, can we change social interactions by reimagining the space? Does the space change the way that people interact? We know that it does. So under what conditions can new life be imagined, inhabited and enacted? Where then, let's say you do create a virtual space, and I was talking to somebody today about, to Jennifer, about Second Lives. Did anyone ever play Second Lives? I had so much hope for Second Lives, and I was so disappointed by it. It seemed like a virtual world where nothing much was happening that was any different from what you just did in the pub. So there was nothing different about it. How would you know though, when you had created a world that had newness factored into it, coded into it, where would the change have occurred? How do we pinpoint the place where change emerged? Is it at the level of code, environment, action, actor, imagination, relation, interaction, all of the above? How and when, this is the queer question if you like, how and when does heteronormativity function within any given game? As I said with SimCity, I think there was a sort of normativity already functioning in the game prior to the introduction of people, right? But how would we pinpoint what was normative about SimCity? How, where and when does heteronormativity function within any game? When we talk about norms, are we talking about normative play, normative conceptions, or normative outcomes, okay? And then finally, last question, what are the possibilities for extending our understanding of queerness through games? How about the ludic, right? The ludic isn't just playing a game, it's like really getting a little bit crazy. Can you get crazy in the game? Can it offer us possibilities for thinking change that are not available in serious environments? That's the fun piece. When we're serious, there are certain kinds of knowledge available. When we start spinning in a kind of ludic way, there are other things that we're going to think about, imagine and enact, okay? So what are the relationships between the queer, the wild, and the ludic? Now if you think I'm gonna answer any of those questions, you're sorely mistaken because this is the sort of, you know, beginning the participatory part of the evening, you'll be answering these questions, so we'll be a pop quiz, so you might wanna write something down, okay? Okay, so I wanted, why did I, you know, what's this connection then between animation, the coding of animation through new kinds of algorithms and the coding of games through new kinds of algorithms such that we could potentially imagine something that we're tentatively calling new life. Let me give you an example of a place where I found at least a meditation on these questions and maybe it's a surprising place to you, but given my history of talking and writing about animation, it shouldn't be too surprising, Wreck-It Ralph. Has anyone here watched Wreck-It Ralph except for me? Thank God, five of us, all right. For the rest, don't worry, there will be elaborate plot summary, okay? But anyway, it's a really cute film, Josh, your kids might like it. It's a cute film partly because, of course, kids are as into destroying things as they are into building. We give them building blocks and we think that they're, you know, busy building. Usually they're busy building in order to destroy and destruction and building are absolutely on a dialectic for the child. The video game knows that and so Wreck-It Ralph is a video game in an arcade that pits the character that wrecks things against the character who fixes things, fix it, Felix. And it's a delightful little story and I'll try to give you the basics of it, okay? So the basic conceit of the Wreck-It Ralph game evolves out of a gaming logic. Ralph is a character in a game situated in an arcade, among other games, and his function in the game is to destroy buildings while the human player works as quickly as possible through an avatar named Fixit Felix. I bet, do I have a, oh no, not yet. To build up what Ralph has decimated. Fixit Felix is a super annoying little good guy who everyone loves and he gets all the cakes and all the rewards and he sleeps in a warm house at night and poor Wreck-It Ralph is left in the town dump and what does Fixit Felix fix things with? He has a little annoying golden hammer that his daddy gave him, okay? So he has this little hammer and whatever Ralph does he fixes and therefore becomes the hero of every single scene. Within the game and among the game's characters Felix predictably wins the claim and love for his role as Fixit and Ralph equally predictably is the game's bad guy. He's hated why because he destroys for the sake of it and therefore has to live with his definitional negativity. Never mind that the game requires him, right? This is a Foucaultian kind of structure. The game won't work unless he destroys the building but he's still the bad guy, right? So this is a very Foucaultian production of criminality, that the system absolutely requires only so that you can now banish the criminal to the edge of town, all right? I'm gonna show you a cute little scene that for anyone who hasn't seen the film will make you wanna run out and see it. Ralph is protesting against this position that has been assigned to him of the bad guy and he's asking the age old question whether he was born this way. Is he made bad or was he born bad, okay? So he goes to a bad guy's anonymous. I don't wanna be the bad guy anymore. I can't mess with the program, Ralph. You're not going turbo, are you? Turbo? No, I'm not going turbo. Come on, guys. Is a turbo I don't want a friend or a metal or a piece of pie every once in a while? Is a turbo I don't want more out of life? Yes. Ralph, Ralph, we get it. We can't change who we are. And the sooner you accept that, the better off your game and your life will be. Hey, one game and it's time, Ralph. Now let's close out with the bad guy affirmation. I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'm proud to be gonna be. So cute, right? Okay, this is really like harkening back to Toy Story because the mise en scene has nothing to do with the humans. It's what I was saying earlier about the relationships really being between the toys, and in this case, being between the characters and the game. Nobody wants Ralph to be too dissatisfied because they don't want him to go turbo. Going turbo is what I described earlier and asked questions about is when you leave the game, you leave the logic of the game, and therefore the game is no longer playable, and the arcade only runs if everyone conforms to the logic of the game, so no one must go turbo, and that's kind of an interesting kind of queerness, a queer function of leaving the game, refusing the game, refusing the system as it has been set up in advance of you joining it, right? The system is set up for Ralph to fail over and over and over again, so his choice is either to play the role that's been assigned to him or to go turbo and leave the game. So that begins to answer that question of how you can change the game, and of course, Ralph is not happy with his Latin life, and he does in fact seek to leave the game, and I'll tell you later what happens then. But I also want to say that the film isn't just subversive, and many times when I'm reading these animated films, I'm not only looking for subversive stories, I'm noticing the way in which these kinds of animations are both conventional and subversive at the same time. This is a deeply conventional story in that it has a sort of assimilationist narrative where Ralph can be brought into the community as long as he's just like us, so he has to not be other in order to be assimilated. It's also conventional because it sets up a good and evil binary, even though they may be dependent upon each other, they're also exclusive of each other, and then it's also conventional in that it's a quest for redemption. Ralph wants redemption. He doesn't want to change the world, he wants to be accepted, so we might wish for an algorithm that is not about just being accepted into the world as is, but is the algorithm for absolute transformation of the game altogether. Okay, it's also the final piece that makes it a kind of conventional game is because there are a lot of obviously queer characters in Wreck-It Ralph, and it tries to pair them all up romantically at the end, including Jane, do you guys know who Jane Lynch is? She plays a very butch soldier who we're supposed to believe is romantically involved at the end with Fix-It Felix, whose voice actor is the gay guy from 30 Rock. Do you know who I mean, the blonde guy? So you've got the blonde gay guy from 30 Rock playing Felix, and you've got the blonde butch female character from Glee, and they're supposed to be a romantic couple, do you see? So it's not in, even when you have gay characters, they're still being forced into a sort of heteronormative narrative, but here's the point. So I'm not only claiming that this is a kind of subversive film, the film does transcend expectations in a way that might be significant to us here at this conference as we struggle to move our notions of change, queerness, and transformation beyond a quest for recognizable gay lesbian characters on the other, on one hand, and humanitarian and non-violent scripts on the other. It does so mostly by scrambling, in fact, the relationships between good and evil, managing to animate a class critique of the distribution of good and evil across the characters, and here's a great image of, you know, the function of Ralph is a constitutive exclusion. His exclusion allows for the realm of Fixit Felix to seem viable, right, good, magic, and so on. And by also recognizing the glitch in the matrix that far from representing the evil of disorder and the sight of failure actually presents opportunities for unpredictable and improvised modes of transformation. Now what is the glitch then in Wreck-It Ralph? And then I'll move on to my last section before concluding. The glitch is a little character in another game that these characters go off to, called Sugar Rush, and there's a little female character in that game who has become detached from the system and functions only as a glitch. And it is her solidarity with Wreck-It Ralph that creates the transformative possibility in the game. Do you see? So the person who represents the constitutive exclusion joins forces with those two queer characters who are being forced into a romance and the glitch in the machine and their solidarity brings about transformation because they are all of them violations of the code of the game. All right. There you have it. Okay. See what I mean about Fixit Felix? Super irritating. The little hammer and all that from Daddy. Okay. All right. We did that. There's that romanticized couple. And here's the glitch. So that's what I wanted to begin with. Whenever the little character who has been dislodged from the game and now only appears as a glitch because we see this kind of glitching in the animated film itself. And again, rather than look away or be annoyed that there's this interruption to the game as it should be played, I'm suggesting that there's an interesting aesthetic that is embedded in glitch visualizations themselves. All right. So queer coding. Moving right along. And I'm gonna conclude by just saying a little bit about the way in which some queer theorists are talking about tech. And then I have one last piece before ending. So there are a couple of people who are working on queer tech and focusing on the hardware rather than the software. First, let me talk about the hardware. Then I'll tell you about a few queer games by way of conclusion. So Zach Blass is both a somebody who makes art out of techno hardware and also somebody who writes about queer tech. And he creates these things he calls gay bombs which are concepts that he wants to drop into the discourse to create explosive reactions. And he has these images of the bombs themselves and they've been a bit controversial because people are like, oh, you wanna pose as a terrorist that seems really problematic. Do you wanna make this connection between queerness and terroristic violence? And his point is that, well, people like Osama bin Laden were already representationally being cast as a feminine, homoerotic, as queer in some way. And therefore his queer bombs were taking back this representational coding of the other, if you like. Misha Cardinius creates wearable technologies that allow queer people in a room to signal to each other that they're all in the same space. And so you'd wear these devices. It's a little bit like Grindr or something, I think. But they're a little more cumbersome than just looking on your phone. You're supposed to be sending out little messages. And it wouldn't just be for gay people. I mean, the heterosexual people who found each other attractive too could send little messages to each other. So this idea of wearable technologies that would enhance the coding back and forth between people and maybe even formalize it in some way becomes part of what she understands as queer hardware. Zach Blass notes, citing Galloway and Thacker that queerness means writing code. And so queer theory is queer code. It breaks codes, recodes, hacks codes, and drags code. In other words, it's almost impossible to think about theory separate from what we're calling coding. So queer theory and queer gaming are easily connected. All right, the way I'm gonna wind down then is by telling you, oh, first I'll talk about the role of failure and then a few gay games to just sort of wrap up, okay? So in my book, In the Queer Art of Failure, I actually advocate for failure. It's not that I'm describing the way in which failure is always being assigned to queer people. I advocate for failure saying that in a world that's only interested in profits and normativity, one should learn to be a loser, right? If capitalism only cares about making money, then it would be anti-capitalist to refuse to make money, to lose, right? To fail to profit. In a world that only cares about families, it would be worthwhile to learn how to fail in order to create the possibility of other forms of intimacy. So this was the argument. Well, right when my book came out, Jesper Joule put out a book about the pain of playing video games called The Art of Failure, okay? And he makes a very similar argument but leaves the queer stuff out. And the argument in Jesper Joule is that when we play video games, you have to remember that you rarely are playing simply to win because if you played a video game and the first time you played it, you won it. You wouldn't play it again. And the developers of the game need you to play it again so they need you to fail. The game requires you to fail in order for it to be a worthwhile game. And you may play it 25 times before you actually win it. The minute you win it, it's over in many ways, okay? So winning is actually often not the point. And he's interested in the pain that we feel when we play video games and the repetition that we engage, the fact that we go back to that pain over and over and over again. And he even wants to argue that potentially we play video games because we long for the pain of failure. The pain of failure that it's, you know, something that we want to avoid in our everyday lives is actually almost pleasurable when we encounter it in the realm of a game, okay? Now it's similar to, I know it sounds kooky, but it's similar to an argument that was made quite a long time ago by Carol Clover about horror films in a great book called Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Does anyone know that book except for me? Okay, so in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol Clover said, you know why I think young boys, young boys, teenage boys go to see horror films? Not because they identify with the killer, because they get to masochistically identify with the victim. And in a world where boys are being trained to only be engaged with mastery, success, coherence, wholeness, right? It's a relief to be the chaste rather than the chaser. It's a relief to be the victim rather than the predator. And she made a whole argument about the masochism of the boy who wants to leave behind this emphasis upon mastery and completely, you know, be in this realm where he doesn't have to be in control. That's similar, I think. And for this reason in horror films, the girl who survives is often very androgynous. Have you noticed that, right? She's called the final girl. And as soon as you see an androgynous girl in a horror film, she'll survive. So Clover says the girl has to be androgynous because both boys and girls identify with her. Now I think it's quite similar to this argument about the pain of playing video games. We presume that we play to win. It is true when we play other kinds of games in sports we play to win. But is it possible, as Jasper Jules says, that we don't play video games to win, we play to fail. And the pain of failure is actually what we should be investigating rather than the triumph of succeeding. Think Wreck-It Ralph. He represents the pain of failure. He is the failed element in the game that makes the game worthwhile in the first place, okay? So I want to offer that up by way of then introducing a few games that I think have a very, very queer element to them. And they're not necessarily set up to be queer games. Does anyone know this one, Analoga Hate Story? Because yeah, it's made by a Canadian, Christine Love. It's a narrative game that you enter into. And you come, as a player in the game, you enter into this role-playing world where you find a spaceship. And I think it's in like 2052. And the spaceship has been circulating through space since the John Dynasty, it's a Korean spaceship which is a medieval Korean dynasty. And everyone on the spaceship is dead, okay? And what you have to do is figure out what happened here, okay? What happened here? Why, when this spaceship had survived for many years, why eventually did the people on the spaceship die out? Now the answer to the game is that the spaceship became embroiled in a patriarchal crisis. And the only way that you can resolve the problem of the game is to think like a feminist and come up with solutions around this patriarchal order that was self-destructive, okay? What it means to think like a feminist isn't clear because you have two AIs in the game who are advising you and both of them are unreliable. But it's a feminist game that is coding, is coding a solution to the problem of social failure through the aegis of feminism. Do you see what I mean? So just think of Grand Theft or a silly game like that. What if that game had a feminist solution? You know, you've got to find some bad guys and these women have to like track them down. Or somebody's behaving sexistly in a sexist way and people have to stop that person from behaving that way. That's sort of, and somebody here has played it so they'll probably tell me I'm completely wrong. But something like that is at play in analog hate story. It's super text-based so you're doing a lot of reading. The idea that you just enter seamlessly into this world is completely wrong. You do a ton of reading. You're endlessly trying to resolve things and you're often wrong. Failure is part of the game. Another one, this has been called a kind of riot girl game called Gone Home. Again, there isn't really a successful outcome to this game but it's similar to the other one in that you enter, you come home for the holidays. It's a college kid who's been away, comes home, everyone's gone. And you have to navigate this virtual realm and try to figure out what has happened here. It's very similar to the other one. But in the process, what you find out is very affectively moving. So the point of the game is not simply to find out, you read the clues, move through the environment and arrive at a solution. The point is actually to be changed by your contact with the narratives that you uncover. And people get very emotionally caught up in this game and that's what has made it register as a feminist game. Not just that there's a feminist politics being played out but that the game is something about affect and about provoking an affective reaction that changes you, literally changes you by playing the game. So that goes back to one of those questions that I had. What would constitute change and where exactly would it happen? It's been called a riot girl game, partly because in the process of scripting this virtual journey, it changes what we understand gaming to actually be. And there are a couple of others that other people may know but I'm gonna move to my conclusion. Okay, so I'm just gonna conclude by saying that going turbo, it seems to me, and remember what going turbo is. Going turbo is where you leave the game. Now you don't leave the whole realm of gaming but you leave the logic of the game that produced you. Okay, so if you were in Wreck-It Ralph and your role was to tear everything down, you enter another game and you serve another role and you interact with other players in different ways. It's an anti-identity politics, right? That you're not born that way. You don't only play the role that was assigned to you but you figure out how to enter into other games, that's the point of Wreck-It Ralph, and become a different kind of player because you're in a game where your role isn't scripted in the same way. The other thing is that when you bring all these different players together, you get surprising solidarities that change the meaning of relation. So if Felix and Wreck-It Ralph are just completely stuck in a dialectic of good and evil, what happens when Wreck-It Ralph hooks up with the little girl who's the glitchy girl? They don't get involved in a romance but her being a glitch and him being a bad guy, they actually reinforce each other rather than dialectically oppose each other and in that function they are able to release each other from the logic of their games. Do you see what I mean? So going turbo, it turns out, is part of what we mean by going wild and changing the game altogether. All right, so I'm gonna conclude then and I just have a little paragraph that I want to read by way of conclusion and it gives you the outcome to Wreck-It Ralph which will ruin it for you, sorry about that. So in Sugar Rush, which is the game that Ralph goes turbo and goes to instead, he meets Vanellope, that's the little girl. Vanellope was once a great driver, Sugar Rush is a driving game, but the evil king of Sugar Rush has unplugged him from the game's central brain so that she appears as a glitch. As a glitch, she can't race, she becomes an outcast against whom the other game characters come to define themselves as fast, good, true, and sweet as Sugar Rush. Sweetness is a currency in the what realm of Sugar Rush. To cut a long story short, Ralph's journey, however, introduces a virus into Sugar Rush and the game, like Ralph's game, gets shut down and is under threat of being totally destroyed. Ralph, Felix, the female soldier in Vanellope join forces against the evil king, the sort of the sovereign ruler, defeat the virus and bring Sugar Rush back to life. And I love this idea of Sugar as a kind of currency, like that the point is not to win money, the point is just to create more sweetness. I mean, it's almost like Matthew Arnold or something, you know, we're trying to create sweetness and light in the world. The collaborative efforts to save these game worlds allows Ralph to see the good in Felix who can fix what he can break. Vanellope recognizes that she was made a glitch, not born one, and she argues for a different form of community and even for the power of the glitch. And the evil king who'd gone turbo and tried to change the game to his advantage by fixing it so that only he would win has been banquished and destroyed. By the end of the game, everyone's back in their places, but everything has changed. That's the beauty of everyone playing each other's games and then coming back to the beginning. Even as Wreck-It Ralph seems critical of the good, bad logic of destructive Ralph versus creative Felix, it also recognizes that we cannot live without these binary dialectics. And so, while we can't make binary oppositions disappear, we can make community dependent upon the recognition of all the different parts of the matrix rather than the valorization of some parts over others. We can also embrace the glitch, tear down as much as we build up and every once in a while go well and truly turbo. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have some time for questions. If you have a question, there's a mic in the aisle. Please come to reveal yourself and your question. Please use the mic because it's connected to the soundboard and that will allow us to record the entire discussion. Okay. It will live on in the archive. No pressure though. Thank you so much for that wonderful speech. We read Queer Art of Failure in Professor, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. We read Queer Art of Failure in Professor Brady's class. We actually just discussed it yesterday, truly wonderful. And I was really struck, in particular, in the introduction in sort of speaking to failure within academia and academic contacts, you speak about the documentary, The Class, and the professor in France who had a severe amount of disconnect with his students and asked them at the end of the class if they had learned anything. Right. And the girl comes up and says, I truly learned nothing. Right. It's like not a dig, but a true, like an actual sort of like confession. And I think the phrase that you said was, how do you be taught to lead not, or how do you lead to be, how do you lead to learn not teach to follow? Yeah. So I think I come from a background in the arts and in the arts, failure is a part of the creative process. It's actually, the idea that you could succeed is the foreign idea. The idea of failing, of trying, and knowing that that idea might not lead anywhere is essential to creating, and especially collaborative creation. But I'm curious, now being in an academic context, and you do speak to this a bit in the book, but if you could speak here about, do you see a sort of a pedagogy of failure? Like how do we actually bring the idea of failure? Can it be taught? Can it be brought into the classroom? Even on a graduate level, like can you bring people into their master's program and go, now we're gonna talk about how you're not gonna succeed? Right. Can failure be a pedagogy? Right, grad students are really not the people to talk to failure about. They feel that very keenly. But the point is not, I actually used to, when the book first came out, I went around with the book and I called my little presentation, and how to fail, like a self-help guide. Which of course is ridiculous because we all know very well how to fail. So the point is not simply to teach people how to fail. The point is for us to recognize the logic of success and failure and how it's weighted always towards the success of some people based upon the fixed failure of the many. I mean the 1% and the 99% was one formulation of this. And the best articulation of it is to think about capitalism really not as a system that distributes wealth but more like a gaming table where as long as many people are willing to bet, a few people can win. And we're very, it's very clear that capitalism is now a game. And it's a game akin to gambling. Not a game akin to some of these sort of complex games that you might play in your spare time. Not an environment where all kinds of different outcomes are possible. But in fact, capitalism is a game like Vegas that is set up to make sure that very, very few people walk away with huge amounts of money on the basis of many, many people being seduced into betting. So failure, under those circumstances, we have to see failure as the norm. And once you start thinking about failure as in fact statistically the average, then you do things differently. So if we all understood that not being wealthy was statistically the average, then we would be less inclined to support a system that rewards the rich. If we recognize, to give a different environment for thinking about this, that it is in fact statistically average for marriages to end rather than to last the whole lifetime of the participants, then we might think differently about marriage. Do you see so? If instead of saying to a 15-year-old, oh, you'll find your person and you'll settle down with your one person, you will, it's gonna be great and your prince will come, your princess will arrive. Okay, or you could say, over the course of your lifetime, you will have lots of wonderful relationships. Get on with it. You're 15, you should get going because there's lots of people out there. What are you waiting for? Don't worry about marriage and what the outcome is gonna be. Romance is also a game. Let's use this notion of game. It's a game. Don't play it as like, this has to immediately be set in stone and last forever. That will kill it right there. So a lot of the things that we do socially are set up like games. If we understood failure to be part and parcel of what we were playing and that sort of the pain of failure way, we would play the game differently. And I think that's where I'm trying to go with this metaphor of the game. If you're not focused on success, you play differently. Everyone does. Once they stop worrying about succeeding, they play the game differently. And I'm pushing for that through the failure stuff and definitely with the gaming stuff. Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I love that you brought up that graph and that queer technology. I love this idea of looking at hardware and how it could be male and female and how even there's the example of like, let's transform what power gets through to the CEO. Like we can do that through hardware. We can make sure that the CEO actually gets a less power to their computer. And how can we play with power in terms of like looking at the theoretical level and making that work in terms of hardware. But I loved your talk and I loved that you focused on a lot of symbolic level of this issue. And I'm really interested in the materiality of it as well. And so when we talk about code, I'm really curious about the ways in which this plays out on a material level, how we can look at code. For me, it's social media software in particular, but how code could be seen as this material structural level of society that we also need to disrupt. Okay, so how, I don't know. So give us an example. Okay, well, Facebook, very obvious right now. The last two weeks, there's been major changes happening to the profile. There's the 58 new options for gender. Right, right. But, well, through my experiments, I can discover that at the level of the database, there's nothing has changed. You're still actually, each user is transformed back into the binary at the level of the database. Okay, but how this- But that's a perfect illustration of what I'm saying, that we're endlessly being fooled in some ways. And I don't wanna just make a false consciousness argument, but software is complicated enough that we often think that change has occurred because we can see that now we have more options. But just as in capitalism, you feel that you have many options and then you find out they're all owned by the same company, second cup and Tim Hortons. Oh, great, I have many choices. They're owned by the same company. I don't know if they are, they probably are. But, and plus they serve the same bad coffee. So who cares, right? But that's right. At the deep level of the change in Facebook, there is no change, right? So we want to both be interested in surface and depth here, but also recognize that surface and depth doesn't actually do justice to the particular topography of a social media. Yeah, so I guess my question would be then, how can we conceive of software as a structural material reality that embeds ideas about gender or ideas about all kinds of things, all kinds of social constructs? And how can we then try to trouble software at the level of materiality of the code? Yeah. No, it's a great question, but I think that's why I keep focusing on the algorithm. And it may be that, you know, I may be even misusing the term algorithm, but algorithm is like a formulation that makes it possible to render something that was previously not possible in the world of animation. You know, so as I say, you couldn't realistically make fur in animation, which is why when you see Tom and Jerry, they don't have fur, right? Tom and Jerry don't have fur. They just have like, they're just a color, right? But Monsters Inc, they have fur. Now you think, well, who cares? But think of something like Fantastic Mr. Fox. The rustling of the fur in Fantastic Mr. Fox is a huge part of why that stop motion animation actually works. And it's being rendered differently there because it stopped motion, but still something that the nature of the real shifts and changes in relationship to some of the algorithms that we are able to produce to represent it, right? So I think there's that point. But I also think that we are limited by what we have produced outside of the realm of social technology. We are limited then when we go into the realm of social technology by these presumptions that we bring with us. And I think what's sort of exciting about gaming is that people are actually coming up with different ways of thinking about not simply who you are when you're in the social media space, but for example, you might change things by changing the environment, right? So you might change everything by changing the landscape within which people interact rather than just thinking about is this character gonna be recognizably gay or lesbian? So I think that I'm saying that you can't change things sort of in there until things are also re-imaginable out here and that there's a lively and dynamic interaction between those kinds of spaces. And they're not even two spaces, they're thousands of spaces. Yeah. Again, thank you for coming and I really appreciate it to talk. I kind of feel like a little bit on trial. My name's Kyle and I'm a gamer. Uh-oh. Okay. So hit me. I want to kind of take a stab at entering one of the questions that you raised in your talk. Okay. One specifically about where we can go with queer gaming and how we could possibly break into the industry that way. I know mainstream games, the one that I was thinking about through your whole talk was the Mass Effect series. Yeah. For those that have played it, it's a dialogue-driven game. There's action involved but the main story is driven through dialogue and character's choices. And there are romance options within the game that cause quite a stir back in the day where you could, not in the original game, but in the sequels, you could do male on male or female on female or even male and alien, female and alien, which gave a bunch of different options and people became uncomfortable with. Wow, yeah. But at the same time though, it's also the quintessential pop culture versions of those relationships. Right. There's nothing that was really different or unique about these kinds of situations. It was just there and it was just an option for the player to choose. Where I think the groundbreaking changes can happen are in games like Home Alone, as you mentioned earlier. So it would be the indie scene where that is going to happen because I think big companies like Bioware who created Mass Effect are more constrained within the corporate culture and within more traditional norms simply because A, they're massive and B, they're expected to follow with a set of I guess gendered norms. Yeah. Whereas indie games, and especially it's more relevant now simply because of things like Steam Workshop and Steam Greenlight programs for computer games where indie games are becoming much more popular and they're getting out there a lot more. And I'll use Home Alone as an example because I played the game and I absolutely loved the game. It allows for a different type of storytelling and a different sort of way that it can happen. Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you for that. I think, I mean, that sort of captures, you know, what the limits are of our desire for the games to give us a portal, if you like, which is the name of one of these games. You know, there is that portal game where you literally have to figure out how to make new portals. It's very, it's very queer actually because it's like making holes where there are not holes and trying to figure out how to access, put things in them. But it's, the portal game is really quite interesting because of it's asking you to make your way through space separate from the pathways that have been given to you. And I keep coming back to that, which may suggest that, you know, subversion has simply been very, very formally scripted for us and there's nowhere to go because even the ways in which we can rebel are already scripted into the game. That's the kind of, that's the ideological read that I would say an old fashioned Marxist might give, a sort of Zizakian Marxist, if you like, is gonna give that kind of read. But I think that for people who are really engaged with games, as you say, there are indie games, there's a lot of thought that goes into trying to figure out on the one hand how to create in the gamer himself or herself a meditation on possibility, probability, potentiality. And then also how to offer up spaces that are somewhat satisfying in relationship to difference, change and transformation. It's very hard for us to be satisfied with outcomes as it turns out. And I think that, you know, the more you can customize a game, the more likely it is that you're gonna be able to, you feel that something has succeeded in your relation to the game other than just, you know, having an outcome, completing the game. Completing the game is never the point, it seems to me. The other piece of this, of course, is Mass Effect a dialogue game that you dialogue with another player? Right, right, right. So these interactions also produce all kinds of unpredictable outcomes, it seems. And unpredictability is a huge part of this. So, thank you, please. Yeah, these microphones are always taller than me. It's very frustrating. I loved your talk. And I did pick up on an interesting tension. And that is between the argument that technological change or messing around with the technology creates the possibilities for newness. But then there's also this really interesting strain of nostalgia that runs through the talk as well. I mean, Wreck-It Ralph is great because it's Donkey Kong, basically, right? And you've got the Mortal Kombat dude and you've got Blinky and Pinky and whatever else from Pac-Man. So I wanted to maybe hear you talk a little bit about the role of the past, of pastness in the creation of futurity. So maybe speaking a little bit more to your work on temporality and really thinking about the fact that gaming and gaming culture requires building on what's already there and that that is at the level of code, but it's also on the level of the symbolic. And so what role does the past, this nostalgia, that which already has been play in our effort to make something new? As a historian, I figured I had to throw something about time and... And before you leave, what, let me ask you, I mean, what do you think? I mean, I absolutely, I'm not trying to make an argument about a newness that is, comes from nowhere and is just, you know, is literally a glitch. Something glitchy happens and there's a new opportunity. And I do, that's a really great point about Wreck-It Ralph that it's a conglomeration of the bad guys from all the other games. It's not just, you know, random bad guys, right? Some of these bad guys, we recognize the bad guys. So it's a solidarity of all the different bad guys from all the different games. But it seems to me that there's a queer history there itself that, or if you think about all of the rejects of history, all of the different kinds of identity positions that have represented constitutive exclusions, exclusions that allow the system to operate as good and true, right? Then that solidarity, it seems to me, is sort of an interesting way of thinking about queer history. Do you know what I mean? By putting those figures into connection rather than reading them as completely separate entities particular to their, only to their historical moment. I mean, what's kind of great is that the Pac-Man, the little Pac-Man figure is given new meaning by its relationship to Wreck-It Ralph, right? It doesn't any longer just seem like it's the one that eats the Pac-People, Miss Pac-Man as well, I guess, Pac-People, right? It's not just that it now becomes part of a system that we can see precisely because we line the games up and we see all of the different bad guys in relation. Is it nostalgic though? I'm not sure if it's nostalgic. So much as maybe it reminds us that what we often are seduced into thinking of is very new when a new game comes out, often takes the very same form as the games that have come before it, which I think was what the other guy was also saying, the packaging, right? The packaging may be new, but we may in fact just be playing Super Mario over and over again, or we may just be playing Dungeons and Dragons over and over again. So I don't know if it's nostalgic so much as repetitive, which of course are different things. As a historian, do you accept any of that? But I do, I do. I just thought it was really interesting that you, you're two examples of these really wonderful examples of doing it differently, of breaking the mold. Are the ones that are harder to identify sort of the historicity of game culture, right? Whereas something like Wreck-It Ralph, which is wonderful for this argument, really does make a point of drawing on this lineage in order to sort of make these arguments I think you're making. And so I just found that very interesting. I was trying to process it at the very end. Well, I also want to be careful about, you know, I've noticed recently, like a lot of people, that there's a certain consistency to what I claim in different work. You know, in the Queer Art of Failure, I'm saying, okay, you want to know how to upset the logic of success and failure, learn how to fail, you know, and in Gaga feminism, I'm saying, okay, things have become very chaotic in relationship to gender and sex. Let's not restore order. Let's make it even more chaotic, you know. So there's a, I have a kind of, I obviously go for this homeopathic method where there's crisis, more crisis, where there's success failure, more failure, you know. But I've been accused recently of this sneaks liberalism back in the form of a sort of individual quest. And I can see that a little bit in this argument that it seems to be arguing for figuring out the game or the logic or the algorithm that's really gonna transform things that then gets embodied in a couple of little characters so that we might be back in the realm of a sort of heroic individualism within which someone figures out how to break the code. And I really don't mean, even though I think that we're all overwhelmed by that logic, however much we try to dispute it, that's part of how liberalism works, I don't, I mean, I'm really not talking about individuals anyway, I'm talking about characters that have nothing to do with a subjectivity, but I do keep wanting to suggest that where these moments of change occur, it's part of a system or it's part of a solidarity or it's part of a structure, not simply an individual quest. But we'll talk more, Jennifer. Thank you. Yes. Hi, I'm not a gamer, but I hang out on social media a lot and I've noticed that something like what you were talking about sometimes happens on Twitter. Okay. Probably on Facebook too, and actually it speaks to that larger, more collective participation in the game and in the glitch and the one that came to mind, where a game breaks out and it can be like a global game where people are exploring the medium in a new way and the one I was thinking of was there was a woman about three months ago who she's a PR executive and she wrote this really offensive, hostile tweet that was racist and offensive to Africans and she was on her way to Africa and but she had to turn off her phone, right? So she sent out this tweet and then she had to turn off her phone for like nine hours or 14 hours while she was in transit and then in the meantime her tweet got retweeted, her offensive racist tweet and this hashtag got set up and I can't remember what her name was but it's something like Chelsea so it was, has Chelsea landed yet? And over the 14 hours in which she was in the air this hashtag was used about 60 million times around the world as all these people were waiting to see what would happen when Chelsea landed in the country that she had been being offensive about, right? I mean there was a little bit of a nastiness and a shuddered quality to it but there was also this quality of like what can we do with this medium and there was a kind of almost like weird moment of global solidarity in which so many people thought what this woman did was absolutely offensive and inappropriate and I've never seen like that happen on a global scale before. I felt like it was the platform of the social media being explored in terms of like what can we do here that's different. Well it's also the, you know this is the structure of the viral that we're happy to bandy this but actually the structure of the viral is very complicated so I'll just give you an example when Gaga Feminism was coming out I published it with a trade press and I was very earnest and naive and I thought okay it's not an academic book I know how to market this to a popular audience I really had a fantasy it would be a popular book which of course it wasn't. Partly not because it's written in a complicated way but because it's not really saying things that people you know popularly believe or even want to hear for that matter but I went to the press and I said what's the marketing strategy because I do a bit of traveling and I'd be happy to do some little book talks and they were like yeah we don't really do those anymore book talks like you mean the author like showing up and trying to say oh no that's just so cumbersome who would do that and I was like yeah okay I kind of get that what's the plan? Oh we're just gonna like put a bunch of stuff out on the internet and hope it goes viral. I was like wow really is that, that's the plan? And that's actually the plan for a lot of what we call publicity and we were talking about PR you know a lot of the plan for publicity is about going viral and it turns out that going viral there's nothing random about it. What you think are random things that have gone oh look Ellen's tweet of her with Brad Pitt and you know all the stars at the Oscar. Wow that went far I mean that's not exactly surprising right but it turns out there are companies that what they do for you is they'll take what you need to sell and they will see if they can make it go viral. So it's actually a thing that you pay for. It's not organic, it's not at all organic and that may have seemed organic but even that probably there was some other logic at work there and that's what makes it so hard in the end to actually change what we're calling here the symbolic because a lot of times what we're doing is tinkering in the realm of what Lacan will call the imaginary or what some of us would call the ideological but we're not really shifting anything in the larger scheme of things because we often are mistaking effects for causes and vice versa. So I think that the structure of the viral is something that we really actually need to know a lot more about in order to understand how we are actually at the other end of marketing systems that rely upon the viral rather than being disrupted by it and that's why my work doesn't quite go far enough because I am still, that's why I'm saying I'm doing this self critique of being a little bit stuck in the possibility of thinking that there could be change or that we would know change when we see it because I'm not sure that we would because so the way in which let's say capital has already penetrated our social media to get back to some of the earlier questions is such that the things that appear to us in the realm of the random, the accidental, the surprising and the ludic actually were already marketing techniques that have understood viral pathways and have made much better use of them than any of our little theories or indie games could do. That's the really bleak version of this. But also I guess the other thing I wanna say is that again we are very, one of the things that really holds us up is the way in which we do politics and even in that being offended by someone's speech as opposed to being offended by say global racism. So we're all gonna attach to the tweet, oh has Chelsea, oh that damn Chelsea as opposed to the entire US government, right? We're able to now fixate on the symptom rather than the actual illness. And again I think Twitter feed makes you feel as if a solution, we nailed her. We really nailed her for being racist and there's a lot of this calling out, telling people that their speech is bad, they said something wrong, but not much fixing at the level of the structural inequalities that produced the racism in the first place, right? So I would say on the one hand let's really think together about what the possibilities are for a kind of counter capitalist occupation of the viral pathways, but on the other hand let's not fool ourselves. And she's back. Is that allowed? I don't know. Is everybody okay with this? Okay. You know if they start like booing or clapping or whatever they do. Tell me if it's happening behind my back. I will watch. No yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a whole economy going on right now to try to track how these algorithms are changing. Because they're changing all the time and they're opaque, we can't reach them, we can't even see them and they're restricted from our access. But I'm just curious then, if we're interested in a larger project of social change, how do we conceive of power? How do you conceive of power? Okay, that's one of those like huge questions that I'm probably not gonna answer other than to say I do, I think that is a very, very good question. But the only answer that seems appropriate here is to say whatever theory of power we have going, we need to keep updating it the same way you update your damn phone. Because things shift so fast in relationship to the nexus of systems that are representation, subjectivity, ideology, flow of capital, are changing so fast that we can't just be happy with the Foucaultian version that we got and keep rehearsing it. It seems to me that we are endlessly having to update our version of power. The version that I just gave you where we see something surprising and we say, oh my gosh, this has gone viral, that's so weird. And then we realize it was a marketing strategy all along suggests that there's an endless kind of catch-up game that we are doomed to play that is deeply disappointing. But at the same time, some of the games that I think I was asking us to think about games that make you feel something as opposed to games that make you do something suggest that we are also inventive in relationship to changing the changing nature of power. Shall we say this is the last question, Josh? Yeah, I've got a positive last question. Great. So I really enjoyed your talk. And I love the idea of going crazy, going wild, going ludic. And I really see that there is a possibility in gaming and digital platforms in this notion of disembodied bodies perhaps and new gender performances. And I'm just wondering if you can provide some other avenues for going crazy as a subversive. Oh, I see, yes. Well, actually, this piece is to be in a book on the wild. And I am interested in whether there is such a thing as the wild anymore. And I don't just mean wilderness and I don't just mean animals roaming free. I mean spaces that are exactly as I'm saying. Spaces that are not pre-colonized and therefore programmed to produce surprise and curiosity and wonder. But spaces whether aesthetic, political, social, or otherwise that are capable of some kind of unpredictable randomized production. And I have a lot to, as with other things that I've written, the interesting part of the book is its archive, the things that can go into the archive of the wild. I have one chapter on the relationship between animals and children as liminal creatures that allow us to glimpse changing features of what we call the human. Or I have a chapter on Stravinsky's Right of Spring as an event that produces startling new relationships between so-called modern and primitive and also provokes a kind of riot of boy to I taste in response. And I have this chapter, I have different chapters that are trying to explore the possibility of a continued space of surprise. I imagine that this is exactly why I get called a liberal who keeps being invested in these spaces of possibility and freedom even if they're accessed through the negative rather than the positive. But I thoroughly believe that part of the intellectual function in this day and age should be to keep pursuing potentiality even as we see those spaces of potentiality quickly shutting down. Thank you. Thank you, Jack, that was fantastic. We always hope that the Ital lecture will stimulate a lot of discussion and dialogue and debate and questions and follow-up questions. And I think it clearly achieved that this evening. So thank you for coming. Thank you to everybody for coming with your questions and listening. There is a reception, we'd love for you to stay. And once again, thank you to Professor Halberstam for joining us and that closes this year's Ital lecture.