In graduate school, Adrienne Shaw, associate professor of media studies and production, created a list of known games with LGBTQ+ content as part of a project on the relative lack of LGBTQ+ representation in games and gaming communities. Now, she will discuss this archive and her other related projects in her upcoming Graduate Speaker Series.

“I had never done more with that list, and after my first book was published and another major grant project was over, I realized no one had yet done research on LGBTQ+ game representation over time—although such projects existed for other types of media,” Shaw said. “I decided that would be my next big project.” 

Shaw started systematically archiving games with LGBTQ+ content in the spring of 2015. The LGBTQ Game Archive website was made public a year later, with a list of about 151 games. Soon, however, Shaw had to accept that the project would never be “complete.” There are now over 1,200 games on the main list, many of which are still to be researched. Many more have come out in the last five years and are yet to be documented.  

“Once I started digging into the research … it became clear that in addition to more and more games with LGBTQ+ content being released every year, there were many from the past that had been largely forgotten,” Shaw said.

Shaw had not originally intended to share this information online. But, once she discovered that some well-known examples of LGBTQ+ content were being talked about without full context and that some games were being incorrectly listed as having such content, she decided to make her findings widely and immediately available. Since then, she has gone on to do presentations for community organizations and game companies, co-curated a museum exhibit and designed infographics to help contextualize content on the archive. 

The archive is a labor of love. Because most research funds are available either as start-up funds or for bounded projects with clear end-products, Shaw’s journey in securing funding has not been easy.  

“While I have found funding for different parts of the project, it has proven difficult to find funding that could pay for the ongoing maintenance or upgrading of the site,” Shaw said.  

She pays the annual WordPress fees out of pocket to ensure the project remains publicly available. 

Many individuals and institutions have helped Shaw with the archive along the way. Different stages of the project were supported by independent study students and research assistants at Temple and numerous volunteers, who are listed on the archive’s website.  

The Duckworth Scholar's Studio—then known as the Digital Scholarship Center—supported a related archiving project that is now housed at the Strong Museum of Play. Funds from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council helped pay for research assistants for four years and for a video project, in collaboration with Feminist Frequency, for the “Rainbow Arcade” exhibit Shaw co-curated for the Schwules Museum in Berlin.  

Finding lost history can be deeply rewarding.  

“There are two games by independent designers, 1989's Caper in the Castro and 1996's GayBlade, that I was able to help make public again by connecting the designers with digital archivists and working with the Internet Archive to make them available,” Shaw explained. “When I started my 2006 project, neither of these games was publicly remembered, and now, they are known all over the world.”

Shaw will discuss the LGBTQ Game Archive, the Rainbow Arcade and other ongoing projects and exhibits in her upcoming Graduate Speaker Series on November 13 from 2–3:20 p.m. in Wachman Hall, Room 108.