Playing with Asynchronies
by Juan F. Belmonte-Ávila
As Elizabeth Freeman (2010) puts it, time binds us, interpellating us towards normative rhythms, personal lifepaths that are legible and lineal, and that make us use our time in ways that are socially seen as productive. Despite this, there are also forms of living and experiencing time out of sync, out of sequence, and, to some degree, unbound from chrononormativity. Trauma makes us live in-between multiple—sometimes broken—temporal lines, trapped between a present we still have to face, a past that haunts us, and a future that may scare us. Similarly, queer identities are often forced to live against, and despite of, restrictive understandings of temporality, while autonomously, and potentially revolutionarily and proudly, expressing time out of normative sync. This talk will invite the audience to think about games that play and deal with time as something out of sync. Three different temporal asynchronies will be discussed—mechanical, narrative, and what this talk will tentatively call extra-ludic—to reflect on the connection between time and queer identities in video games.
Juan F. Belmonte-Ávila is an Associate Professor in English Studies at the University of Murcia, Spain. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at Indiana University (2009-2011), a Fulbright-SAAS Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Utah (2020), and a visiting scholar at McGill University (2012), the IT University of Copenhagen (2013), the University of Edinburgh (2022-23), and, as of Nov. 2025, The Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies. His research focuses on the study of gender and sexuality in video games. Some of his most representative recent publications are “Meaningful Grunts and Radical ‘Blehs’: Polysemic Identities through Nonhuman Noise in Video Games.” (Journal of Sound and Music in Games), “Multiplicity, relationality, and petal avatars: Thatgamecompany’s Flower as an identity model.” (Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies) or the volume he co-edited, Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games (Routledge).
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