Queer Intersections in Games is a collection of interactive visualizations of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, founded by Adrienne Shaw at Temple University. The Archive consists of all recorded representations of LGBTQ content in video games since the 1980s, and includes relevant commentary and resources. Queer Intersections in Games quantifies the Archive by counting representations according to their identity categories, such as gender, race, and class, and then visualizing the data using interactive tables, graphs, and pie charts. These visualizations are hosted on a website in order to make them accessible for scholars, students, and the interested public.

This project is meant to reveal historical and contemporary trends in queer representation in games by visualizing data representative of the entire LGBTQ Video Game Archive. It further highlights how those trends intersect with and are inflected by gender, race, and class. As such, the project enables intersectional analyses that contribute to building queer game studies that are more inclusive and cognizant of difference.

A few important notes:

  1. The current visualizations only include representations that have complete entries on the LGBTQ Video Game Archive. This is a significant number of games, but some games do not have complete entries, making it difficult or impossible to code their representations accurately and visualize them.
  2. In some cases, the sample size is too small to generate conclusive analyses. The visualizations in these cases still reveal trends in LGBTQ representation, but more research is necessary to explain *why* those trends exist.
  3. The current visualizations often use broad categories that require more granular and culturally sensitive analyses in the future. For example, the visualizations of race currently combine all characters from central and eastern Asia as “Asian,” and don’t acknowledge how diverse cultures in Asia are. In the future I hope to break these broad categories down further, and look at differences within them.
  4. These visualizations will be updated as the LGBTQ Video Game Archive expands and updates. Check back as new games are discovered and added!

Header Image Citation: I do not own the header image. It was created for The Rainbow Arcade catalogue and exhibition by Schwules Museum Berlin.