Queer publishing and the right to describe your own game

In Laurie O’Connel’s Lichcraft, a fictional wait for a gender-clinic appointment lasts three hundred years. Becoming undead offers a way to outlast the queue. The creator describes the game through spite, necromancy, trans experience and satire, giving the reader a much more specific account than a general category such as dark fantasy could supply. The creator’s description of Lichcraft

The premise makes self-description consequential. A collection that retains only the necromancy would lose the institutional absurdity around which the fantasy is organized. A description that retains only a broad identity category would leave out the game’s particular humor, conflict and proposed activity. The work deserves the same attention to subject and form that a librarian would give any other complex publication.

I am examining public creator statements, historical organizing principles and collection guidance here. Those sources support discussion of how work is presented; they do not authorize assumptions about the private identities or experiences of everyone who makes, submits or reads it.

The game’s terms do intellectual work

Lichcraft’s character creation draws on politics, a hobby, a day job and a source of magic. That combination places ordinary affiliations and capacities beside the extraordinary aim of the premise. Its creator also identifies a light rules structure and inspiration from Forged in the Dark. The resulting description lets a reader consider the work as satire, as a roleplaying procedure and as a specific imaginative response to institutional delay.

The relation among those features is where analysis begins. Politics can become something a character brings to action, while a day job can contribute to a magical undertaking. A critic can ask how those choices frame competence, collective life and survival. Answering those questions fully requires the text and, for claims about what happens in play, evidence from particular sessions.

For an academic librarian preparing material with an instructor, I would preserve the creator’s subject language and ask students to connect their interpretation to an identifiable feature of the publication. A broad claim about representation becomes more useful when the student can explain which premise, rule or image supports it and what the interpretation leaves unresolved.

That is also a way to resist treating a queer publication as a specimen whose only interest is the maker’s identity. The writing, procedures and material decisions remain available for criticism. Respect for self-description makes analysis more exact because it gives the critic a clear account to engage, question or complicate.

A movement statement is a situated document

The 2019 DREAMJAM page offers a different kind of self-description. Its organizers invited tabletop experiments across several design lineages and published principles concerning inclusion, opposition to harassment, consent, creator treatment and experimentation. The invitation allowed prototypes and varied forms of contribution. Those are historical statements of purpose, rather than evidence that every participant shared an identity or that every aspiration was fulfilled. The DREAMJAM invitation and principles

For a researcher, the page helps establish how an event framed participation. An individual submission still needs its own description. The event’s principles may be relevant context, but membership in a submission list cannot substitute for reading a work or locating its author’s account.

That distinction becomes especially important in exhibitions. A curator might place several games together to explore an organizing moment. The label should explain the basis of the grouping, with the event as its evidence. It should not quietly turn a shared distribution context into a claim about every contributor’s politics, gender or sexuality.

Hope Olson’s analysis of subject construction gives this problem a professional vocabulary. Subject access arranges relations among concepts, and the arrangement can privilege some relationships over others. Applied here, the question is whether a record lets a game’s particular subject remain visible or makes it disappear beneath an institutional category that has become too broad for the work. Olson’s “How We Construct Subjects”

Local description can retain more than one kind of statement. A controlled term supports retrieval across a collection. A brief attributed note preserves how a creator describes this publication. A contextual link explains an event or publishing relationship. Keeping those functions legible helps readers distinguish the institution’s arrangement from the maker’s words.

Visibility has a history

The University of Iowa’s account of queer zines describes correspondence, exchanges and publications intended to make lives and histories visible. It also discusses Homocore’s provision for mailing in plain envelopes. The combination shows that reaching readers and controlling exposure could be simultaneous concerns. This is evidence from broader queer-zine history, not a demonstrated ancestry for every queer RPG publication. Iowa’s collection essay

That history makes a seemingly administrative distinction worth keeping. A name printed in a publication, a later public credit and a private identifying detail are different kinds of information. Bringing them together in a searchable institutional record can create an association the publication itself did not make.

The Zine Librarians Code of Ethics addresses the responsibilities that accompany collecting and describing personal work, including creators’ names, privacy and the effects of wider access. It provides a practice framework for making these decisions with care; it does not remove the need to examine the particular item and relationship. The code’s web edition

I would therefore use the public credit appropriate to the work, retain creator-supplied terminology with attribution, and make correction easy when a creator identifies a problem. If an institution wants to add personal identifying information beyond the publication, it should be able to explain why that addition is necessary and how consent or other relevant constraints have been addressed.

This is precise descriptive work, and it serves discovery. A reader looking for Lichcraft should be able to find its satire, its trans subject matter and its game design without being handed an invented biography of its author. Let the publication speak in its own terms, then make the institution’s contribution to the record clear enough to examine.