[1] Bo Ruberg is a scholar whose work matters in the world. They write so that they, and we, can see better possible futures. This is true of their previous books, Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (2022), The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (2020), and Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019), among others, and it is especially true of How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding Through Video Games (2025). The concept of building queer worlds, or building worlds queerly, is crucial work for scholars, practitioners, students, and activists to undertake in this particular political moment, especially in the United States—as it has been in so many before, as Ruberg acknowledges. How to Queer the World offers theoretical and practical frameworks for how to begin doing the work of unmaking worlds and remaking them into worlds that are better. Ruberg's goal with How to Queer the World is to provide models for how to think queerly with and through video games toward using them as models for doing the work of liberatory worldbuilding in real life. They draw a distinction between worldbuilding and worldmaking—the former as a concept in game studies and game design and the latter drawing on José Esteban Muñoz's work in queer theory. Worldbuilding, which is the term Ruberg uses most often, refers to the elements of game design that developers and engineers use to build worlds both in terms of and beyond those games' narratives. In terms of worldmaking, Ruberg draws on queer theory, defining the concept as one that "describes the ways that people with LGBTQIA+ identities set new worlds into motion through both their art and their everyday lives" (39). In this way, queer worldbuilding in video games, in this text, is a form of queer worldmaking more broadly. That said, there is a necessary slippage between these concepts, especially given the "nebulous" nature of queer worldmaking as a practice in life as in art (39). Across its theoretical engagements with queer theory, video game studies, critical race theory, posthumanism, and other theoretical approaches to media studies, this text asks its reader to think deeply with games as a mode through which the world is made and unmade. The book is, as Ruberg notes, "delightfully unmoored from the typical boundaries of disciplinarity" in ways that aim to expand the reader's understanding of the stakes and mechanics of queering the world through critical analyses of games and video game design (26).
[2] How to Queer the World comprises six chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. What Ruberg moves us toward is the idea that video games are less defined by their video or gaming elements and more by their inherent insistence on building worlds. Each chapter works through one or two video game case studies. Ruberg uses each of these games to explore the ways in which our thinking on queer worlds can be framed through video game worldbuilding principles. How to Queer the World is written with scholars, students, and game developers in mind, taking a holistic approach to thinking and writing about games from varied perspectives that account for both critical and practical approaches to video games.
[3] In the first chapter, "Nine Thousand Little Worlds," they focus in on What the Golf, an absurdist "golf" game (though it is both that and anything but that) as just one example of a video game as the instantiation of thousands of worlds. In What the Golf, the player moves a golf ball (or other object) across a course toward a hole with the help of a golf club (or other object) while avoiding obstacles and terrain in the way. While the premise is simple, as Ruberg explains, the game quickly begins to challenge its foundational terms: What meaningfully constitutes a "ball," "hole," "club," or "obstacle" shifts and morphs quickly in the game. What the player is left with, then, is an ever-changing set of conditions with which to move something from somewhere to somewhere else in each of the game's worlds. These worlds, importantly, are not repetitive but instead proliferate "outward into a seemingly infinite array of possible worlds" (39). Building out a theory of what Ruberg terms "trans mechanics," Chapter Two, "Inverting the Laws of the Universe: Trans Time Mechanics and Queer Astrophysics in If Found…," makes an argument about trans temporality through both quantum and astrophysics. This chapter reads the game If Found… through its engagement with black holes and with literal erasure (the player moves through the interactive novel by erasing the protagonist's journal) as complex, sometimes contradictory approaches to queer worldbuilding. If Found… and Gone Home are the two Ruberg focuses on with the most robust narratives. If Found… tells several stories, primarily the young trans woman protagonist Kasio's, of moving home to rural Ireland to live with her parents with whom she has a difficult relationship. In order to piece together what is happening in Kasio's life, the player must take an eraser to different parts of her journal pages, obliterating her past writing and drawings of her own lived experiences. Erasing pieces of the image or text in If Found…, as Ruberg points out, functions as a transitional move, significantly linking the act of erasure to both movements through space-time and to trans storytelling. In this chapter, while this game is, as Ruberg notes, more concerned with storytelling than others discussed in the book, it is the confluence of form and function—trans mechanics as a way to get at trans time—that make the game interesting as a queer worldbuilding project. Engaging here with work from scholars like Karen Barad, Jayna Brown, and His Malatino, the chapter unpacks the relationship between queer and trans experiences and nonnormative temporality. The central focus of the chapter, though, the text upon which its theory of trans mechanics and trans time is operating backwards, is the game text itself. Like so much of the work in How to Queer the World, this chapter takes the worldbuilding games seriously and treats the game(s) as interlocutors in a conversation about what queer and/or trans experience is, what it means, and what it does in the world. In this way, while the book is written with a queer game developer audience in mind, Ruberg also writes alongside game developers as primary theoretical engagements.
[4] The third chapter, "Queer Bodies in Motion," deploys analyses of two games, Goat Simulator and Wobbledogs, to discuss how game mechanics—in this case, specifically, game physics—"serve a critical role in encoding cultural meaning into video game worlds" (107). How to Queer the World accounts for physics both in terms of in-engine physics system (game physics) and physics as a study of phenomena in the world (real-world physics). For Ruberg, both Goat Simulator and Wobbledogs present different approaches to queer bodily movement—the former presenting its player with a model of "queer ways that bodies move through space" and the latter "a vision of how bodies themselves might move queerly by embracing the uncanny, non-Newtonian fluidity of the wobble" (107). In this chapter, Ruberg gets to questions of realness, drawing on a term from drag culture that understands realness as a "socially constructed performance that is open to evaluation and reinterpretation" (111) and the inherent messiness of queer identity. One of this chapter's interventions, building on the work of scholars like Eric Freeman and Amanda Phillips and game developers, including Robert Yang, Jimmy Andrews, and Loren Schmidt, revolves around the concept of "soft" and "hard" bodies (or, more broadly, physics objects) in games and the ways in which these distinctions uphold or challenge notions of "masculine hardness" and "practices of care" alternately (112). This chapter also includes feminist engagement with physics engines/mechanics as they relate to gendered bodies, particularly women's breasts as they bounce and jiggle in games, presenting the reader with avenues to think about game physics, realness, and sexualization of particular kinds of bodies in games. Game physics, as Ruberg points out, "reflect the values and beliefs of the developers who create them" in terms of both those developers' sense of what constitutes realness and their priorities in terms of player embodiment in games (140). Looking at how bodies move (through space and in relation to each other) is a fruitful engagement for feminist, queer, and other scholars of marginalization in video games and beyond.
[5] The book's most critical chapter, and the one that deviates most from more traditional queer criticism of games, is "Straight Paths Through Queer Video Games: Overbuilding the World in Gone Home" (chapter 5). It looks at an ostensibly queer game that "straightens its queer potential," despite being lauded as "a positive example of a queer game" (171). Gone Home follows Katie's path through her parents' house following her younger sister, Sam's, disappearance. Sam has run away from home with her girlfriend, Lonnie, and it is the player's job, through Katie, to discover where she has gone. Ruberg opens the chapter with a discussion of Sara Ahmed's work in Queer Phenomenology, framing the chapter's engagement with Gone Home through a queer geographical approach to worldbuilding. The chapter similarly situates Sami Schalk's work in the field of crip theory as a lens through which to engage this game, which Ruberg argues is a queer story told straight in terms of its narrative and gameplay being "on rails" (171). Often derogatory, the description of a game on rails means that the player has little control over how they interact with the story, moving linearly between set pieces in prescribed, "straight" ways that, for Ruberg, deny the telling of queer stories in queer ways. Here, Ruberg engages not just with narrative design, but with the ways in which narrative and mechanics intersect to build, or deny, queer worlds. The chapter engages with concepts like environmental storytelling and the designation of "walking simulator," setting up an argument about how Gone Home could have been, and has been read as, a queer game in terms of how it tells its story (174–76). Ultimately, though, Gone Home presents the impression that players can "not only walk a deviant path but quite literally get lost within an array of possible deviant paths," but this impression is just that; as Ruberg puts it, "The invitation to wander is only a veneer over a highly structured gameplay experience in which the player moves along strikingly linear and indeed teleological paths" (181). This chapter also includes a discussion of the practice of speedrunning, or moving through a game as efficiently as possible, racing to the end to complete the game in less time than other speed runners. Speedrunning's "disengagement from games' representational content" in favor of "frame-perfect gameplay," for Ruberg, signals a kind of straightening in relation to how Gone Home is played as anathema to queer meandering or wandering (187).
[6] How to Queer the World works through a technical analysis of games and what games are doing to establish the stakes and potentialities of video games. Operating in line with other relatively recent work like Aaron Trammell's Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology (MIT Press 2023), How to Queer the World takes a philosophical or theoretical approach to the study of games. Games become a lens through which to investigate what it means (for Ruberg) to unmake and remake the world queerly. While Ruberg utilizes case studies, the real work that their book does is less concerned with the games at hand, though they are useful as examples, and more concerned with what they allow us to do, how they allow us to think queerly. While firmly situated in game studies as a matter of topic, the theoretical intervention this text makes is broader than its immediate field, speaking to queer theory through games rather than to games through queer theory.
[7] This is a book that we vitally need right now, and it is important reading for anyone adjacent to cultural production—not just scholars, but activists and practitioners and students as well. Ruberg does not answer every question that their work raises—no one could—but they offer important models for the reader to do that imaginative, critical work after setting the book down. While the presumed reader for this book is invested to some degree in game studies, the introduction and the book's framing raise a question for scholars working across media: If all games are worlds, what sets them apart from other media, or are all media objects worlds as well? Ruberg's text provides ways of thinking through media writ large as worldbuilding, or worldmaking, endeavors. While How to Queer the World focuses on video games, one key principle, that "the technical is always political," would be well taken by scholars of film, television, music, digital media, and so many other forms of cultural production (25). This book is no doubt useful to its target audience, especially game designers and other practitioners in the field as well as academics, but it also provides useful ways of thinking through its theoretical engagements outside of games to better understand art as essential to revolutionary work. In terms of How to Queer the World's usefulness specifically to audience and fan studies scholars, this text provides a lens for understanding how the framework of a video game text, its embedded mechanics over and above its narrative, can itself be queer. In this way, scholars looking to engage with concepts like queer reading strategies from an audience studies perspective for video games gain a more holistic approach to what constitutes a "queer game" outside of straightforward narrative classifications. Ruberg follows in the lineage of queer theory scholars like Muñoz toward a liberatory framework for media analysis that will be useful to scholars across the field of media and cultural studies and beyond it.