I will conclude that Hôkagô’s queer characters are not only produced by a variety of queer artists, the very motion behind their animation reminds us of a longer tradition of queer expression in manga and anime’s media mix. My presentation will dive into the fanzine milieu supporting the production of the game and interrogate the techniques of still images used to describe queer bodies and animate them in the game.
Looking at Tokyo Hôkagô Summoners (Life Wonders 2016), I will explore the strategies put together by the “Hôkagô” community to produce a diverse, inclusive and only mobile game for queer audiences in Japan. As a scholar and a member of the gay fanzine scene in Tokyo, I believe that the visual expressions sustaining the creation of queer amateur video games might help us to get away from a discussion of the simple queer content affiliated with AAA games.įor these reasons, Japanese Gay Amateur games represent an understudied mix of illustrations, gifs, and anime sequences giving life to queer bodies in niche game markets. As such, we tend to ask “what” is represented and not “how” LGBTQ+ communities use video games to express themselves. If academic studies of queering game practices tend to be focused on the question of adequate LGBTQ+ representations and characters in video games, the question of how queer bodies are represented through certain techniques of mobile images and CG animation is often dismissed.
