Becoming the Gay Pig

In this article, I map queer entangled experiences with the game Bloodborne, a third-person Gothic-Lovecraftian horror Role-Playing Game (RPG). I come to Bloodborne as a player-researcher interested in investigating my own subjectivities and how they entangle with the game’s various elements. Among other things, I am a white, cis-gender, able-bodied gay Irish man whose identity has been readily impacted by the relationship between the Republic of Ireland (ROI) and the Irish Catholic Church. Starting with this acknowledgement, I relate experiences of playing Bloodborne with those I had growing in this state. My interest here is in constructing a cartography of entangled experiences with the game that begins from this positionality, exploring what implications it has for formulations of queerness and Irish queer identity as I do so. To accomplish this aim, I use textual analysis from a feminist materialist perspective to isolate and analyse elements of Bloodborne. Specifically, I focus on the game’s use of blood, mapping the substance’s in-game usage and using it to identify parallels between the game and my experiences in the Irish Catholic Church. I then relate these identified relations to queer identity by looking the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and how discourses at the time formulated Gay, Bisexual and Men Who Have Sex with Men (GBMSM) identities in particular By considering my own entangled subjectivities with Bloodborne, I construct a mapping of Irish queer identity with the game that explores how liberation may be achieved if you risk your own humanity.