ABSTRACT
This chapter explores queer/trans cosmological time in Genesis Noir (Feral Cat Den 2021). A third-person point-and-click adventure game, players play detective, ‘time’ personified, ‘solving’ the heat death of the universe, personified as a genderfluid shimmering lover. As players spin and flick their way through dramatisations of natural history, the player-protagonist’s initial yearning for stasis and fear of loss as the universe fizzles out of energy transforms into an embrace of change and an ethics reoriented from nihilism to involvement and curiosity. Played through a profusion of fleeting click-and-drag interactions branded ‘infantile’ by critics, its minigame mechanics refusing to ‘mature,’ it falls victim to marginalisation of what Stockton (2009) would call the ‘sideways’ development of queer life.
However, ephemeral visual-tactile play bringing micro- and macro-scales into touch allows us to realise the universe has no ‘outside.’ Embodied curiosity that embraces corporeal change and entanglement speaks to trans theory’s interest in fleshy affects (Steinbock 2013; 2019) and a queering of classical physics in a form of Freeman’s ‘eroto-historiography’ (2010), a sensual engagement with spacetime. This chapter argues that Genesis Noir uses affects of curious contact to reorient players to what I term a queer ‘possibility spacetime’ of ethical relation.
