{"pk":64532,"title":"A Queer OS Powered by the Apocalypse: Feminist Platforms and TTRPG Engines","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In this essay I argue that analog game engines speculate on what is possible for the digital, in a way that concretizes queer visions of the messy relationship between humans, systems, and computation. Drawing on Kara Keeling and Tara McPherson, I analyze the analog game engine Powered by the Apocalypse as an example of Keeling’s notion of a \"Queer OS,\" or an operating system that encodes queer relational structures. In my close analysis of Powered by the Apocalypse’s mechanics and conceptual boundaries, I bring feminist platform studies and analog game studies into dialogue in order to argue for a more expansive definition of \"game engine\" that accounts for the ways in which analog games imagine forms of computation and human-computer interaction that are not yet possible for digital game engines.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"TTRPG"},{"word":"PbtA"},{"word":"game engines"},{"word":"queer"},{"word":"operating system"},{"word":"platform studies"},{"word":"analog games"},{"word":"digital games"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0wp5c7h2","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Kaelan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Doyle-Myerscough","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":"Cinema and Media Studies"}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-07-04T09:01:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/analoggamestudies/article/64532/galley/50366/download/"}]}