{"pk":64533,"title":"Precarity, Porousness, and Queer Subjects: Critical Play of Ecological Solo Journaling Games","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In this article, I detail key experiences in my playthroughs of two solo journaling games that engage explicitly with environmental themes and use them to model material interventions into queer theory. In the first game, the Crushing Dark: A Solo Journaling RPG (2021), I explore the fragility of subjecthood and by documenting my player character’s (PC) attempts to maintain the integrity of a bathysphere against an inhospitable, albeit beautiful, submarine world. The second game, Dwelling: A Solo Game for Ghosts (2021), I investigate the erotic possibilities of memory as a ghost floating through rooms, creating memories, and making marks. I explore these vulnerabilities materially through the environmental humanities concepts of precarity and porosity. I argue that, while this intervention is not unique to the format of solo journaling games, this genre is a generative place of study because its format highlights the precarity of the player. To play one of these games is to engage head-on with queer understandings of unruly subjecthood and precarity—it is no wonder, therefore, that the tone of so many of these games is introspective melancholy, and that journeys through these games are so often journeys into oneself at least as much as they are journeys through a game’s world. Yet a self never exists in isolation but is always located in an environment which permeates as much as it shapes. Understanding our entanglements with slippery, sticky, or otherwise fluid media helps us to reconceptualize the fixedness of apparently static social structures and hierarchical relationships.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"environmental games"},{"word":"solo games"},{"word":"TTRPG"},{"word":"queer theory"},{"word":"journaling"},{"word":"memory"},{"word":"affect"},{"word":"materiality"},{"word":"subjectivity"}],"section":"Articles","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85c0486q","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Brandon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Blackburn","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Irvine","department":""}],"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/64533/galley/50367/download/"}]}