By Elle and Logan

Introduction: Logan

What does it mean to be queer? I believe it’s fair to say that queerness as a concept has metamorphosized over the last century, and is, for all intents and purposes, unrecognizable now when compared to its premodern implications. What used to be a derogatory term for homosexuality has been reclaimed as a personal sense of self-expression, a category of ideas and ideologies, a term for a contemporary wave of explorative academia, and, most integral to this current exploration, a form of confident divergence from the establishment. This divergence is present all around us in a variety of forms like books and films, but I’m a firm believer that contemporary ideology always pairs especially well with contemporary ways of delivering it. That’s why I adore the discussion of queerness in video games so much. The level of interactivity and passion involved in every step of the video game perfectly lends itself to the ability to experiment and challenge preconceived notions. A phenomenal example of everything I have brought up, from queerness as self-expression and confident defiance to video games taking full advantage of their unique medium, is the 2019 indie hit Celeste. 

Queer Resistance to Normative Play: Elle

One significant feature of Celeste that players might notice early on is that although the game records the number of deaths a player accumulates in the course of playing a level, the player is not penalized whatsoever for the number of times their character dies.  Any meaning or significance that a player might attach to death in the context of Celeste is challenged by the fact that players have the option to turn on Invincibility Mode, one of the Assist Mode features.  Players might, of course, also borrow meanings from their experiences with other games where they are penalized for accumulating, in some cases, a specific number of deaths. 

This can be read, queerly, as a resistance to a possibly normative way of moving through a platformer game that might prominently feature navigation along a direct, predetermined pathway.  The player of Celeste is empowered to choose how they wish to move through the spaces that their character encounters in the game.  Bonnie Ruberg writes that “Queerness challenges dominant beliefs about pleasure and power” (Ruberg 7).  I am imagining that a player might experience pleasure at not dying and I remain curious about where this pleasure is coming from.  Is it from their experience playing other platformer games where death might have greater significance within the gameplay than it does in Celeste? Where might the value of not dying come from? 

If playing can be a queer practice, or playing queerly can be a practice, and if “[Both] Queerness and video games… make space within structures of power for resistance through play,” then how might this resistance take place, be enacted?  I want to suggest one possibility, drawing on my experience with disability studies.  Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes that “Stairs… create a functional ‘impairment’ for wheelchair users that ramps do not” (Garland Thomson 7).  In a similar way, navigating the spaces with which players are presented in Celeste using Invincibility Mode might be read as a kind of resistance against a “normate” way of playing that privileges a player’s ability to navigate Celeste’s spaces as a signifier of how good the player is at Celeste, or at platformer games, or at video games more generally.  As my own personal experience with video gaming includes deep knowledge of a few specific 90s platformers, I would not derive pleasure from playing Celeste without Invincibility Mode on.  However, I want to suggest that resisting the value of character death, as Celeste offers it to players, as a signifier of anything offers a queer, anti-ableist mode of gaming that might be used as a model for making, or for playing, other games. 

Subverting Game Death as Punishment: Logan

As mentioned above, Celeste is a game that embraces what its contemporaries in the platforming genre generally see as acts worth punishing. In an overwhelming majority of mainstream platformers, if you fail too many times, you are punished and have progress taken away from you. Those who are already struggling are punished further, while those who manage to succeed, whether due to prior experience or natural ability, are rewarded further. Based on this description, it should come as no surprise that most conventions of the modern platformer have strong roots in capitalism. Platformers originated in arcades in which companies were financially incentivized to make games cryptic, challenging, and generally inaccessible. After all, you’re more likely to put quarters into a machine when you can’t clear it on your first try. However, mainline platformer series have largely remained unchanged in this way. When you lose all of your lives, you are punished. Your inability to play the game the way its designers intended is met with progress that you HAVE made being taken away from you. This is where Celeste comes in.  

The idea of death as punishment is subverted in several ways. First off, all progress is guaranteed. Unless you go out of your way to reset your progress, clearing a screen once means you’ve cleared it for good. Some of these screens are longer and/or more difficult than others, but beating one means your victory is yours to keep. This means that a player who struggles to overcome the games’ tougher challenges is rewarded every time they manage to do, and success doesn’t lead to pressure to succeed more under threat of their progress being undone. Additionally, the number of times a player dies in each level is tallied and displayed right next to their strawberries, the games’ main collectible. Celeste treats its collectibles and the players’ deaths as equal achievements: both things that deserve recognition from onlookers. This small change to the standard gameplay loop completely recontextualizes the act of platforming within its titular genre as something that is unequivocally deserving of praise, regardless of factors such as death count, time taken, and skill level. Not only does this increase accessibility for the genre, but it flips the traditional “do what we want how we want you to, or you’ve failed” narrative that subconsciously runs through the platformer genre on its head. Going by Ruberg’s classification of queerness in video games, I contend that this easily fits the bill. After all, what could be more antithetical to hegemony than rewarding failure and living experiences at one’s own pace without regard to experience or level of ability? 

Conclusion: Elle

Celeste is a queer game that troubles normative platformer expectations and calls into question the role of deaths, collectibles, and the relationship of gaming to capitalism.  Through these practices, Celeste offers spaces for players to engage with gaming in ways that disrupt normate ideologies of gaming.

Bibliography:

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie.  “Disability, Identity, and Representation:  An Introduction.”  In Extraordinary Bodies:  Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, 5- 18.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1997. 

Ruberg, Bonnie.  Introduction to Video Games Have Always Been Queer.  New York:  New York University Press, 2019.