The LGBTQ Game Archive, established by Dr. Adrienne Shaw, documents the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer content in games. This site collects LGBTQ video game content, cataloging games or game series and categorizing relevant material by actions, artifacts, characters, locations, relationships, traits, and more (including instances of homophobia or transphobia found in games). The intended audience is broad; the LGBTQ Game Archive is meant to be an online resource for researchers, journalists, critics, game designers/ developers/ publishers, game players, and anyone interested in learning more about the history of LGBTQ content in video games. Since 2015, the project has relied on research assistants from Temple University as well as various volunteers to collect information on, and create entries about, games with LGBTQ content.

The bulk of these files were saved by Cody Mejeur during a Digital Humanities post-doctoral project as a Graduate Student in the English department at Michigan State University. This project was an extension of an earlier effort established by Shaw through a Temple University Digital Scholarship Faculty Fellowship to preserve the materials used in the LGBTQ Game Archive after GayGamer.Net, a major source of LGBTQ gamer history, went offline. With research assistance from Aja Binette (then a Temple University Sociology PhD candidate) and Head of the Digital Scholarship Center Matt Shoemaker, Shaw created a model for bulk saving of the content and produced a spreadsheet file that could be used to add item information and metadata to a digital collections site hosted on Omeka. Mejeur further refined and automated the process of capturing various resource formats. Temple Communication and Media Studies Research Assistants Hocheol Yang and Weimei Sun continued to populate the metadata spreadsheet file and tracked down “dead links” which were available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. These efforts took place from 2016-2018, with final additions of files in 2020 before the digital collection was donated to The Strong.

To learn more about the project and its methodology, refer to https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/about/about-archive/.