S(t)imulating history: Queer historical play in Gone Home and The Tearoom

In this article, I analyse two recent videogames about queer history, Gone Home (2013) and The Tearoom (2017), to demonstrate the potential of play as a method of queer historical engagement. Responding to recent scholarship on queer history and nostalgia in popular culture, I contend that videogames offer novel ways for interacting with the past that foreground the positive affective dimensions of play (joy, pleasure, camp, humour, etc.) without denying the realities of historical trauma and injury. Queer historical play, I posit, is an alternative method for engaging with the queer past that breaks from the overwhelming emphasis on trauma and the antisocial in queer studies of history and queer studies more broadly.