New Publication! Exploring the pragmatics of transgender coming out narratives in videogames

We’re happy to report that The Journal of Pragmatics has published Frazer Heritage’s research on how transgender characters index their identities in videogames. Frazer’s paper uses data from the LGBT Video Game Archive to examine when in videogames characters tell the player (and other characters) that they are trans (and how this is done).

His findings include:
🌈 Transgender videogame characters primarily “come out” through implicature.
🌈 The social identities of Speakers (S) and Hearers (H) affect both inference and implicature.
🌈 Analysts need reflexivity in how implicature is interpreted.
🌈 There is a difference between character hearers (CH) compared to analytical hearers (H).

This research bridges the gaps between pragmatics, language, gender, and sexuality, as well as ludolinguistics research. But more than that, It is the hope that this paper will encourage videogame developers to think about how they index characters of different identities and critically reflect on their writing.