Video games as spatial fictions from the trans

In 1992, Danielle Bunten Berry introduced herself to the world –quite possibly– as the first transgender woman in the video game industry. Renowned for creating pioneering titles such as M.U.L.E. (1982), her games transcend technology, representing how virtual space becomes a bridge between reality and fiction in the experience and representation of gender identity. Bunten studied engineering and later worked at the National Science Foundation, where she developed mathematical models of urban systems which “was as close to making games as I could find”. She was drawn to games because, as a child, they offered an escape from her dysfunctional family. Thus, games became an alternative reality to her own. In 1984, she published The Seven Cities of Gold, a game that perhaps best reflects her vision of creating new world systems. It became one of the first open-world games, embodying her belief in games as a space for different realities. She developed innovative technologies for it, such as a world creation engine that always employed this idea of a new world. Her commitment to “building worlds from scratch” can be read as a metaphor for self-affirmation of identity, blurring the lines between what is possible and normative. After her transition, Bunten stopped making video games in a non-new world that she found tremendously hostile, probing how boundaries between reality and fiction—and the social fictions about gender— impose violent limits. However, her key role in producing space in games meant that when Will Wright published The Sims, he dedicated his success to Bunten. This article not only offers a historical overview of her career but also explores how her transgender identity influenced her creative approaches to building new spaces in video games but also postfictional and autofictional: the narrative of a gender in transition challenges fixed categories just as her games invite imagining new realities.