why dont my mx sim tracks look like they should

WHY DONT MY MX SIM TRACKS LOOK LIKE THEY SHOULD SKIN

Dressup, I wonder if I should replicate myself or choose an avatar that’s the most unlike me. Photo credit: Manuel Moncayo/Courtesy of the Schwules Museum, BerlinĪs I sort through the possible visages and getups available on Mx. Soon I began dreaming about clothes that didn’t exist-cuts and colors I’d never seen before. But if my possibilities were wrapped up in the clothes I had to choose from, then I was already limited in who I could imagine myself to be. Did the plaid skort match the flowered top? Or did it just go? Was this power clashing? For me, dressing was an exercise in developing an aesthetic. My tiny hands tear at the perforated cutouts while I deliberate over each element of the doll’s outfit. We swap shirts and pout to make sure our lip gloss is mirror-slick. On the left, there’s a wily bedroom-floor pile of clothes and accessories. Suddenly, I’m 13 and holed up in my best friend’s room primping to pop music in a cheap full-length mirror.

WHY DONT MY MX SIM TRACKS LOOK LIKE THEY SHOULD SKIN

On the right, a naked figure hovers with options to select different faces and skin tones. Dressup captivates me because it examines the ways we use clothing to both cover and reveal. In Queer Games, Ruberg explores the work of artists such as Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer, a Montreal-based transmasculine nonbinary designer whose games, including the award-winning Dominique Pamplemousse, examine gender, the economy, and relationships. The words, the cuts, the art.” Ruberg says that games, like literature, can be read through a queer lens, and perhaps more essentially, played in ways that are queer. “You would miss so much of what was interesting if you only looked at the characters. Adrienne Shaw, a Temple University professor and founder of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, found that representation isn’t the primary demand for many queer gamers how the game is made is equally important. “We can think about queerness in relation to games in a way that goes beyond representation,” says Bonnie Ruberg, author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games(2020). In a study conducted for her book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture(2014), Dr. Without considering the inclusivity of a game’s design mechanics or the labor force behind it, even the most well-meaning design can be reductive or tokenizing. Video games are a natural vehicle for world-building, but queering virtual worlds goes beyond including LGBTQ characters or storylines. These are the kinds of worlds that today’s most avant-garde queer video-game designers are coding into existence. His ideas, along with those of other theorists such as trans scholar Jack Halberstam’s art of queer failure, which embraces failing as a form of anticapitalist resistance, provide a framework for imagining worlds of multiplicity and equity. “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potential.” Muñoz’s work, particularly his 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, encourages us to consider queerness as a portal through which to reimagine time, space, and the body.

The here and now is a prison house,” wrote the late theorist and scholar José Muñoz. This article was published in Fantasy Issue #87 | Summer 2020 Subscribe »

Why dont my mx sim tracks look like they should