My favourite rhythm game, which I won’t name because I pay it £10 every month and I want you to make better life decisions than I do, recently tweeted that they were featuring Muse’s Plug In Baby in their Pride Month season pass. Their reasoning? “Muse has continuously made efforts in writing LGBTQIA+ positive lyrics. Their 2001 hit Plug In Baby was originally supposed to talk about transhumanism, before becoming more abstract. Play the catchy riff now via our Tour Pass: RAINBOW RHYTHMS!”
For those not versed in what ‘transhumanism’ means (it means technological human enhancement and does not have very much to do with transgender people), this is very stupid. Hilariously stupid. It is the funniest thing I have read all week. Come, trans humans, play my catchy riff. But there’s a warmth to it: some social media rep, somewhere, is clumsily reaching for people like me. They don’t really speak my language, and they don’t have the most effective tools to get to me, but the result isn’t harmful or flattening. It’s funny. It might even be unintentionally profound.
This is my third Pride Week writing for Eurogamer. I’ve written on trans people’s use of Twine, and on spiky queer representation in a range of explicitly queer games. Every day of my life I talk about queer people’s art, and how we make ourselves visible in the world. But I have been thinking a lot, lately, about the richness of the muddled queerness – sometimes so muddled you can barely call it ‘representation’ – in some games I’ve played from straight developers, and the surprising joy I have found in it; the strange, mixed pleasures of a game whose curiosity about queerness is unfettered by clear intention, knowledge, or propriety.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about Danganronpa. I have spent 80 hours of my life playing the Danganronpa series, not including the 20 hours I spent on watching a full Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls playthrough on YouTube. (I did not want to actually play it. The gameplay is very bad.) If you are not familiar with the Danganronpa series, it is a Battle-Royale-meets-Ace-Attorney visual novel series that is, quite frankly, insane, in ways that veer into both the incomprehensible and the genius. High school students are forced to kill each other by a bear plushie with a penchant for Beckettian monologues. The gameplay sections combine debate club with sharpshooting. One of the franchise’s biggest characters is a world-famous serial killer who occasionally has random outbursts about other students’ boobs. I cannot talk about this series with normal people.