“Your Sweat is so Shiny and Beautiful”

This investigation is not simply to locate queerness in Ring Fit Adventure, but to locate Ring Fit Adventure in the questions of queer game studies. Although I don’t believe that critical work has to necessarily ground itself in sensical logics, Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch (2019) with its unusual strain sensing “Ring-Con” and “Leg Strap” controller attachments is a fitting nexus of questions of the body as it relates to video games, quantification, flow state, and surveillance. In the spirit of the modders using the Ring-Con to bring physicality to unlikely digital places by incorporating outside hardware, writing scripts, and taking things apart, I’m hoping that introducing Ring Fit Adventure into the work of queer games scholars and dissecting the nature of its affordances will create some connections and have some interesting effects–even if what I end up with is a little buggy and asks more questions than it answers.

Like the posture-forcing ruffs of 16th century Europe that strained the body beneath a circular status symbol of wealth and the ideologies of power, the Ring-Con and Leg Strap adorn the wearer in the ideals of modern life. Wearing garments that hurt or mold the body, particularly in the case of women’s fashion throughout history, have long been tied to control and power. The Ring-Con and Leg Strap are garments intended to shape the body, although the language of Ring Fit Adventure has evolved towards more of a healthy lifestyle approach than its noted body-shaming predecessor, the Wii Fit. Game designer and queer games scholar Jess Marcotte identifies controllers and hardware as sites of “entrenched hegemony” that could act as “an entry point” for “disrupting, reorienting and queering the hegemonic status quo of games,” in their essay, Queering Control(lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices.”[1] The Ring-Con and Leg Strap impose an embodiment of the mechanics and ideologies of gaming and fitness in RFA onto the player. These sleek, tastefully geometric accessories and their cyborgian intentions are to neoliberalism what high heels and corsets were to monarchies and colonialism. It is because of, not in spite of this that these controllers invite interesting and potentially queer or queerable experiences between bodies and video games; I’ve been participating in them myself. I also own a corset. People have looked to technology to augment the softer, more unruly machines they inhabit for thousands of years, but the past few decades have seen undeniable shifts in the way society relates the body to technology. People have begun to see themselves as regulatable machines, and even the mushroom micro-dosers can’t escape the fact that technology has shaped this new natural. Ever-more expensive and well-designed jewelry promises to constantly measure our squishy unknowables, gently circling the digits of the wealthiest and most tech-worshipping/fearing to help them suck the data from their own veins and ward off death. I know this sounds like the opening passages of a dystopian YA novel, but I’d argue that genre has had more insightful investigations of transhumanism than all the keynotes in California. Enter the cheery, helpful visage of the gaudily hued Nintendo, a brand which I have held close to my heart since before I could spell heart, so close that now it’s literally measuring my pulse. (fig. 1)

Figure 1. The game instructs me how to use the Ring-Con to read my heart rate

Establishing the uses and personalities of the term, “queer” as the writer intends to use it appears to be a sort of established device of queer games studies. I’ve chosen to join the practice because it performs the critical mission of the word, which is to remain in motion, not to keep outsiders out, but I believe to keep insiders from getting too cozy and diluting its spirit. Queer in this discussion will be nebulous, referring to the verb, the aesthetic, the identity(ies), the politics, and including but not limited to what I’ll generalize as “gay stuff”.

A Hypothesis: Flow State Fitness

The Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con controllers are inserted into the Ring-Con and Leg Strap so that its motion sensors can allow the player to move through the game with their body. Once the Joy-Con is inserted into the Leg Strap’s little pocket, the game instructs the player to fasten it to their thigh. It’s light and surprisingly comfortable considering the hefty, constraining equipment I’ve donned for other embodied game experiences, like PlayStation VR. Many mainstream games prioritize inducing the “flow state” and interpellating players into its world and away from their criticisms and realities. It’s not a secret, but the ways in which the flow state is constructed are unseen, unacknowledged, naturalized. Marcotte ties the phenomenon to mechanics of control, “Common control schemes prioritize smooth, seamless experiences that are designed to be self-effacing and encourage subjugation into the flow state.”[2] It isn’t a closed circuit within the game world, and I might court the postmodernists here and assert that probably nothing is. “These norms within game design best practices tacitly support other hegemonic practices.”[3] I have played Ring Fit Adventure for eleven days, nonconsecutively because ouch, and my hypothesis was that I would experience a degree of immersion, as that would likely be the most straightforward way to accomplish what I thought the dominant affordance of the game would be: to hide the unpleasure of working out in the pleasure of video games. My analysis of the affordances of RFA will be informed by Adrienne Shaw’s interpretation of “Reading Using Positions”[4] through the work of Stuart Hall, as well as their definitions of affordances influenced by the work of William Gaver and Peter Nagy and Gina Neff. Guided by Shaw, affordances are “highly interpretive” and will allow for a discussion of the ways that RFA and its controller attachments relate to ideologies of fitness and control, “the imbrication of culture and technology.” [5]

After eleven “play sessions” as RFA calls them, I see that my hypothesis was wrong. I have yet to experience the sensations of RPG-induced flow state, and I assure you, I am very susceptible, just ask my 2006 gnome mage, Cindylouwho, whose life in World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004) quickly became my only priority. Even weak narratives like that of Hitman (Square Enix, 2016), filled the empty corners of my quarantined mind in 2020. After jogging (in place) and knee lifting my way through enough of the Mario-style worlds to feel confident I understood the narrative structure of the game, which consists mostly of turn-based battles that encourage using different exercises through a Pokémon-like weakness system (red enemies are weak to arm exercises etc.) and doing errands for charming townsfolk à la Legend of Zelda, I concluded that narrative immersion was a false affordance of RFA. By false affordance I mean that it looks like narrative-induced flow state for the purposes of cloaking the pain of exercise is what RFA and its controllers seem “like they should be able to do but do not.”[6] The hegemonic affordance, where “the designers’ and users’ imagined affordances align”[7] is fitness dictated by a game and controlled and monitored through the Ring-Con and Leg Strap. To put it simply, the hegemonic affordance of Ring Fit Adventure is repetition.

Over and Over: The Constructed Beauty of Efficiency

In their piece, Queering Human-Game Relations: Exploring Queer Mechanics & Play, Naomi Clark and Merritt K investigate how politics and ideologies could be woven into a game’s mechanics, “the idea that a game’s rules, rather than just its imagery could encode queerness or—more often, heteronormativity.”[8] RFA is almost all controllers and mechanics, the visuals are pretty basic compared to other Nintendo titles; the stages are unimaginative and homogeneous and the enemies are not cute, elements Nintendo draws from heavily to induce wonder and flow in their open world titles, like Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017). The narrative, something Nintendo also excels at, is evidently not trying to overwhelm the player in the lore, characters, and details that could draw their minds from the strain of exercise. So, it feels clear that mechanics and rules are the most influential aspect of the game to consider, although even games that focus on the visuals should be analyzed through their structures because aesthetics can be an eliding device. Merritt K discusses game designer and theorist Paolo Pedercini’s thoughts concerning game mechanics and capitalism, writing, “most games reproduce capitalist mindsets through the encouragement of efficiency-minded gameplay.”[9] RFA takes this to an extreme, and the efficiency, repetition, and system learning for “gains” in game and presumably in one’s own body, must be performed by the user, who is encouraged to embody them in their very sinews and accept them into their life outside of the game. Eat more fiber! Take brisk walks! Not only are you gifted essentially a surrogate body to work out through and control, and therefore improve your own physical body, but the stats are really owned by you in an intimate way. Unlike other video games, where earning another 50 health is an accomplishment of skill in the game, the stats for your Ring Fit Adventure character are your stats, the numbers at the doctor’s office or between your feet on the scale. The game is always counting: “Total Calories Burned”, “Your total Standing Twist reps have hit 600! Wow!”, “Ring Press: 176, Knee Lift: 135…” “Five More! One Left” and on and on. (fig. 2)

Figure 2. Ring Fit Adventure displaying my results for the day

 Why is this different than any other workout? Maybe it isn’t. Playing Ring Fit Adventure has made me realize that the reason I wasn’t experiencing the sensations of something new, formed from two opposites, is because that is simply not what was happening. Rather than a merger of differences that could result in something new, video games and working out are nearly the same thing, and at the very least have been shaped by the same impulses, intentions, and desires. Clark and K also use fitness metaphors throughout their piece, such as “reps” and describing games as “exercise machines” for different goal-related skills, supporting my argument that video games and fitness are two faces of the same god: efficiency.[10] There is a temptation here to claim this union of sames is an expression of queerness. It is not. According to queerness as defined within queer theory, I’d argue that this replicated, aestheticized labor is decidedly not queer because it reproduces too many modes and ideologies that go against the queer politic by valuing control, system-adhesion, regulatory behavior, and static binaries, such as waiting for the player’s body to conform to the image displayed on the screen to continue. It is the .doc where I wrote down every bite that passed my lips, and the digital tools that encouraged me—at first badly designed Tumblrs and then the clean lines and user-friendly graphics of calorie-counter and fitness-tracking apps, their little bars and meters filling and emptying, rewarding me with sounds and animations straight out of a slot-machine. These are the dominant affordances of fitness as I have experienced them, and the dominant affordances of many video games. Fitness appropriated this affordance from gaming, sucked it into itself and absorbed its power to shoot back like Kirby. I am in many ways beyond those mindsets, but I felt every one of those fizzling fairy lights of disorder light up anew as I played Ring Fit Adventure. I disagreed with theorist Keither Burgun’s argument that Pokémon was not a game because, as described by game designer and theorist Merritt K, “their primary mechanic of grinding boils down to a trade-off between the player’s real-life time and their in-game success.”[11] I disagreed because I felt like grinding was “a meaningful choice within the context of the game.”[12] Now that I’ve been the Pokémon, performing the same attack over and over because of a specific game mechanic, I’m not so sure.

Clark writes that “Games have always been sites of tension between cultural ideas about the productive and the unproductive—not just between ideas like work and leisure, but between the idea of ‘doing something for a purpose’ and ‘doing something for no reason save itself.’”[13] Ring Fit Adventure really leans into the dream of productive gaming, even congratulating players for playing it: “It might not sound like much, but doing anything for 10 days is tough.”[14] It is needy and remembers and watches everything. K asserts that “Games are cultural fantasies of the way things work.” RFA is a fantasy of fitness but on another level it’s a fantasy of control and success. If you can just play the game, closely follow the rules the experts have set, and let them measure your progress down to the decimal according to their milestones and charts, then life will be better. Then you have accomplished something that it is desirable to accomplish. Pedercini describes goal-focused games as the “aesthetic form of rationalization”[15]. Ring Fit Adventure exists for goals or “gains”, and it exposes the ways in which modern conceptions of health have adopted this aestheticization of capitalist efficiency from video games. We are the main characters, and our bodies are avatars we can level up with rules, diets, advice, pleasant colors, and products. Indeed, modern fitness has borrowed heavily from video game vocabulary and concepts: level up, completing challenges for rewards, stats, boosters, difficulty levels, etc.

You and Me, Me and You

My RFA avatar can look more feminine or masculine no matter which gender I choose, including the “I prefer not to answer” option. We find a sentient ring named, “Ring” and begin an epic quest against “Dragaux”, the incarnation of toxic masculine workout ideals, like obsessing over weakness and excessive training. Ring has the odd status of both lifeless piece of fitness equipment in my living room and in-game sidekick brought to life by the techno-magic of the Nintendo Switch. It straddles the virtual and the physical worlds, and both the player and the avatar depend on Ring for in game and real-life goals, I assume in an effort to compress the two.

While representation is not the focus of this essay, I felt I should take the time to address it as there are very few characters in RFA and it remains one of the more understood, mainstream entry points into deeper conversations of the nature of queerness in media. Bo Ruberg discusses the queer gamer in Video Games Have Always Been Queer by locating historical transgender characters, like Birdo from Super Mario Bros. 2 (Nintendo, 1988) and writing that although “Heteronormative content remains standard in most game genres…videogames are now, and have been since their origins, important sites of queer expression and self-discovery.”[16] The character Tipp is referred to with they/them pronouns or their name and a quick search online revealed that many players have read Tipp as a nonbinary character, “Tipp, an absolute overlord of all that is non-binary…” wrote one fan on the RFA fandom wiki.[17] Tipp is a faceless character that shows the player how to stretch before and after sessions and performs and instructs the player in each exercise, every time. Tipp’s presence is particularly comforting in contrast to the enthusiastic, first-person outcries from the Ring-Con to “Press me against your stomach!” and other disturbing attempts to reinforce the corporeality and sentience of the exercise equipment I’m holding as I bend and squeeze it as hard as I can.

Cooldown

 To return to my earlier hypothesis about flow state, the narrative is not the way RFA is introducing a flow state sensation, and according to some of the ways flow state could be broken, laid out by Marcotte, RFA may actually be actively interrupting the flow state in favor of its stated goals of helping players make exercise a habit; “Let players be bored, or frustrated…Let them remember that they have bodies, and encourage them to think about that embodiment.”[18] The clearest evidence that RFA is intentionally disrupting flow is that after about fifteen minutes of moving (not playing), the player is asked if they’d like to cooldown and stop for the day. Choosing to continue prompts the advice not to “overdo it.”[19] To return to Marcotte’s proposed flow disruptors, in addition to stirring great frustration and boredom in me as I played, particularly as I leveled up and discovered that mostly meant doing 35 knee lifts instead of 25, RFA certainly never lets me forget I have a body. Ring is constantly telling me to adjust here and there as the Thigh Strap and Ring-Con betray my stiff ankles and hips and cost me higher damage attacks. (fig. 3) For hours after I’ve turned it off, my body doesn’t let me forget I have Ring Fit Adventure. While I’m used to games leaving psychic traces, like envisioning my errands lined up in neat squares after playing The Sims (EA, 2000–) for too long or feeling uneasy about sleeping after revisiting Catherine (Atlus, 2011), it is odd to feel a game pressing on my body when I wake up in the morning. I work out regularly, but there’s something about the intense repetition of just one movement at a time in the constant enemy battles in RFA that makes it somehow harder to recover from. There is a disconnect between winning the game and getting a well-rounded workout, and I will always choose the former. Like Pokémon, the player chooses from a customizable roster of six attacks, made up of a limited number of exercises. New exercises and up to ten skill slots have to be unlocked. This structure contributes to the dominant affordance of relentless repetition, and the result is an odd performance of video game character-like movements: every few minutes I assume the same position with the Ring-Con and perform the exact same movement exactly as I did before for the exact amount of time, like a programmed attack animation. Continuing their fitness metaphor for gaming, Merritt K writes that considering the limited nature and genres of most games, “it starts to seem like we’re working the same muscle groups over and over, like an isotonic exercise machine that only works out one part of the body at a time.”[20] In the case of RFA this metaphor was made quite literal.

Figure 3. Tipp demonstrates the Ab Guard. The game waits for me to perform the exercise as shown

New You

In their piece, Naomi Clark and Merritt K also discuss the ways that video games can queer or be queered beyond representation and narrative, and linger in the eerie spaces between body, ideology, intention, design, and video game. Clark states that their use of “queer” is specifically as a verb and as “a relentlessly unfixed signifier.”[21] Clark writes that “queer comes with a politic” and I want to include that because Ring Fit Adventure has the potential for a politic. Embedded in its strain-sensors and calorie counters are the constraining standards of health and success but in its reimagining of how the body interacts with a video game and truly original mechanics and controller style, there is real potential for a queer interruption, either critically or creatively.

The Ring-Con is constructed with an internal spring made of fibre-reinforced plastic making it very durable, which is not always a priority for expensive video game equipment. Its dominant affordances are to control RFA through squeezing, pulling, and turning. Generally, squeezing the Ring-Con is “select” and pulling it is “go back.” It’s a totally new way to interact with a game console but it makes a surprising amount of sense in a sort of visceral way, and I acclimated to it very quickly. Artists and modders online have been experimenting with the Ring-Con and Leg Strap in some very interesting ways. YouTuber Ress & the Robotic Orchestra[22] made a “ringcordion”[23] (fig. 4) out of the Ring-Con, which creates music from squeezing and pulling, and even switches between major and minor keys when tilted. The ringcordion was made with Unity and Wwise and is an oppositional affordance of the Ring-Con, as it is certainly “an unexpected use of the text/technology” and an affordance imagined by a user and not the designers.[24] Ressa queered the Ring-Con into the ringcordion, making a device of labor and physical gain into a purely creative musical instrument. Its constant counting and wellness snippets have been muted beneath the playful freedom of creation that’s as discordant or melodious as the player desires. Most oppositionally, the Ring-Con in this incarnation is no longer meant for exercise. Also in the spirit of anti-hegemonic gaming, the entire mod with full instructions is available on GitHub.[25] The corset has been twisted into a xylophone and everyone’s invited to play.

Figure 4. YouTuber Ressa & the Robotic Orchestra demonstrates the “ringcordian”

Writer Christopher Reardon offered a list of ways that RFA could be made more accessible, including adding modes and graphics for wheelchair users and the visually impaired, “Nintendo could have its own version of the Xbox Adaptive Controller—bolstering sales and encouraging exercise.”[26] So, accessible uses of the controller are already possible there in the design, but they are currently imagined affordances, and it may be left to modders and makers willing and able to share their labor if Nintendo does not turn these into negotiated uses or dominant affordances under certain game modes.

Some modders, like the YouTubers mechachoi and SuperLouis64 have done some interesting things with the Ring-Con, but ultimately they all amounted to using it to control other video games, essentially making games, like Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017) and Mario Kart (Nintendo, 2017) into exercise games. (fig. 5) As exercise remains the purpose of using the controllers, these are closer to Shaw’s negotiated uses: “using the text/technology ‘correctly’ but not necessarily as intended.”[27] It is intriguing how exhausting it is for SuperLouis64 to move through open world games using the Ring-Con and Leg Strap, highlighting the vastness of the landscapes in BOTW and the loss of a sense of control and the constructions of freedom that is built into these games. However, in the context of this discussion, introducing exercise into non-fitness games for the purpose of exercise is still a negotiated use of the Ring-Con and Leg Strap.

Figure 5. YouTuber SuperLouis64 playing BOTW with his modded Ring-Con and Thigh Strap

 Micha Cárdenas’s piece, Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts and Algorithms proposes “the stitch” as a new methodology for engaging critically and artistically with the reality of violence in the electronic surveillance and networking of bodies, particularly of trans people of color. It has become an accepted “fact” that representation is positive, but for trans women that is not always true, “for trans women increased visibility may mean increased violence and increased surveillance.”[28] Cárdenas describes the stitch as “an operation that involves using one entity to connect two formerly separate entities.”[29] The stitch looks to answer “what an ethical act is in a field of mediation”, it is a “material and conceptual operation” that is informed by the practices and experiences of art, making, feminism, trans and queer experiences, and writing.[30] I have not performed stitching here, as I believe that would take a great deal of specific intention, but I hope that bringing it alongside the other critical frameworks I’ve engaged with in my analysis of Ring Fit Adventure will make space and allow for the type of artistic creation or manipulation that Cárdenas calls for. I think there is great potential in the Ring-Con and Leg Strap for intervention and the kinds of performance and “garments” in Cárdenas’s work, which look to take trans people of color from “objects of study” to “subjects of knowledge creation.”[31] The Ring-Con and Leg Strap, with their strain-sensing, motion sensing, and biometric recording, have a potential for care rather than gains, for creation rather than reduction, and perhaps for queering the nature and intention of its observations.

Hold Me Tight: So, is the Ring-Con Queering the Controller?  

Embodied experience is something queer and trans studies looks at intimately and extensively, and embodied interactions with technology and systems are often queer experiences, and usually not positive ones. Bringing the body into the colorful, narrated digital game space of RFA in a mediated way is multifaceted. In one sense, the Ring-Conned body is acting along the capitalist characteristics of both gaming and fitness to quantify, set goals, and encourage repetition. (fig. 6) In another sense, the nonnormative, embodied interactions between the player and the Nintendo Switch, mediated with pain and exertion through the Ring-Con and monitored by another controller held flush to the thigh, feel like something is possibly being queered. The “Thigh Rider” minigame, which it must be acknowledged sounds like an erotic queer indie game, involves the excitingly strange mechanic of putting the Ring-Con between the thighs and squeezing it to blast a robotic tricycle into the air as it runs along an obstacle course with coins at various heights. DDR may have also used feet instead of fingers, but there’s something particular about thigh-squeezing as the only way to interact with the game that feels like performance art and maybe even a little medical. Nintendo has always invested in motion (The Power Glove, The Wii) but after playing this minigame I couldn’t help but feel that RFA had been influenced, even just through the ether, by queer games like We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine, which requires multiple players to touch each other’s hands on a wooden game board and “resists providing players with traditional agency and power by limiting what actions it is possible to take within the bounds of its rules.”[32] But queering isn’t only nonnormative, it is also ambiguous, productive, and connected to but not dependent on queer politics, and while the Ring-Con and Leg Strap could be seen as queering the pretty traditional Joy-Cons that snap into it, it so intrinsically operates within the hegemony of quantification and data collection that it’s hard to give it such a title without these asterisks.

Figure 6. Tipp teaching me how to use the Ring-Con

“Copy the example. Press your right thumb lightly against the Joy-Con. Don’t press too hard. Hold your thumb in its place.”   

As I peel away the layers of RFA, what remains is a historical core that has psychic and technical influence over the affordances and mechanics I analyzed. This is informed by the approach of trans studies and its centering of discussions of embodied institutional regulations and control, of forced binaries, and of technology and video games as they relate to “where your body is and where it can go.”[33] Ring Fit Adventure does not allow the game to continue until the player’s body is positioned as it thinks it should be, and it will wait patiently for the body it’s monitoring to fall in line. This technology and its affordances are inherently tied to the institutional regulation of the body, and at their inception, to the violence and erasures of census data, medical institutions, educational institutions, and other mass organic quantifiers in the name of rational civic harmony.

This discussion will end with a consideration of the role of data and surveillance as they pertain to thinking about this game and its close relationship to the player’s body. The biometric readings RFA takes begin with an analysis of how the player runs, animated on the screen by the leg strap on an invisible body moving in concert with the physical Leg Strap worn by the player. As if essentially strapping a Game Boy to my thigh wasn’t unsettling enough. The game learns each player’s unique run, taking into account age, height, and weight—and why wouldn’t one share that information? After all, not giving accurate information could impede the readings and assessments RFA promises are important, like calories burned. So, it’s a trade: data for data. (fig.7) In “multi-task mode” the Ring-Con can even be used while the game is turned off and it syncs the reps next time it’s turned on. This recording seems harmless and is intended to help the player understand their body and “progress”, but data is never harmless and never neutral, and neither is the idea that the body can be understood through it. Computers got their start in weaving art from punch cards, and then they settled into the identity they carry to this day: data processing, people processing to be specific. The IBM website proudly displays the history of their 1890s device that turned bodies into punch cards, and safe to say Ring Fit Adventure would not exist if it had not. [34] Perhaps I’d be playing a game that wove exquisitely patterned sweaters. The IBM series “Icons of Progress” tells the tale of how they changed the world for the better, “Herman Hollerith’s first tabulating machines opened the world’s eyes to the very idea of data processing.”[35] This idea is very much so around today, particularly in the neoliberal insistences that everything is better if it’s been gameified. Clark challenges those who consider games the gateway to progress, “Jane McGonigal evangelizes the idea that games can make the world a better place, by using game mechanics to reprogram our habits and motivations. Doesn’t this scenario become a nightmare immediately if the technique is removed from McGonigal’s well-intentioned hands?”[36] Yes, removed from the gentle hands of Nintendo, what could be done with a ring that senses our movements, learns how an individual person runs, and takes our pulse as a measure of the effort we’ve exerted? These simple descriptors of Ring Fit Adventure and its affordances, mechanics, and controllers sound dangerous out of context. Suddenly the dominant affordance is not fitness or even repetition, but the surveillance and recording of bodies. The rule sets within video games reflect those of government and police control,[37] particularly RFA, which literally holds the player’s body and professes how much it cares as it frantically translates it into digits and icons to decide how to best instruct it to move in space.

Figure 7. Ring Fit Adventure is learning so much about me!

This is a uniquely important time for artists, critical theorists, and gamers to consider and understand the history and nature of technologies that gameify or mediate the body and its relationship to technology, even and especially if it is for a “productive” or “positive” aim. The stakes are high between technology and the body, and understanding the magic and power that brew between the two and their place and form in our imaginations and daily lives is essential to the health of our bodies and minds, both outside of and within digital spaces.

1.        SuperLouis64 - Controller Bender, Can You Lose Weight by Playing Breath of the Wild? - Ringfit Controller Mod Explained Version 0.9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYn3pWXMPF8.

2.        Whit Pow, “Critical Game Studies and Its Afterlives: Toward a Queer and Trans Game Studies,” n.d.

3.        “Frequently Asked Questions | Ring Fit Adventure | Nintendo Switch | Nintendo,” Nintendo Official Website, accessed December 10, 2021, https://www.nintendo.com/sg/switch/al3p/faq/index.html.

4.        Ressa & the Robotic Orchestra, I Made an Accordion of Nintendo Switch Ringcon and Played It!, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTb0LbGJ478.

5.        “IBM100 - The Punched Card Tabulator,” accessed December 11, 2021, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/tabulator/.

6.        Ruberg Bo, “Introduction,” in Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York University Press, 2019).

7.        Whit Pow, “Queer and Trans Game Studies Lecture” (Lecture, NYU Steinhardt, MCC, September 9, 2021).

8.        Jess Marcotte, “Queering Control(Lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices,” The International Journal of Computer Game Research, 2018.

9.        Naomi Clark and Merritt Kopas, “Queering Human-Game Relations: Exploring Queer Mechanics & Play,” Www.Firstpersonscholar.Com, February 18, 2015.

10.     Ring Fit Adventure, Nintendo Switch (Nintendo, 2019). 

11.     Ressa Schwarzwald, Ringcordion, C#, 2021, https://github.com/ressium/Ringcordion.

12.     “Tipp,” Ring Fit Adventure Wiki, accessed December 10, 2021, https://ringfitadventure.fandom.com/wiki/Tipp.

13.     Micha Cárdenas, “Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts and Algorithms,” n.d.

14.     Owen Bell et al., We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine, 2015, wearefine.ca.

 15.     Christopher Reardon, “What Nintendo Needs to Do for Ring Fit Adventure to Thrive,” LaptopMag, July 12, 2021, https://www.laptopmag.com/au/features/what-nintendo-needs-to-do-for-ring-fit-adventure-to-thrive.

[1] Jess Marcotte, “Queering Control(Lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices,” The International Journal of Computer Game Research, 2018.

[2] Marcotte.

[3] Marcotte.

[4] Adrienne Shaw, “Encoding and Decoding Affordances: Stuart Hall and Interactive Media Technologies,” Media Culture & Society 39(4) (2017): 598.

[5] Shaw.

[6] Shaw.

[7] Shaw.

[8] Naomi Clark and Merritt Kopas, “Queering Human-Game Relations: Exploring Queer Mechanics & Play,” Www.Firstpersonscholar.Com, February 18, 2015.

[9] Clark and Kopas.

[10] Clark and Kopas.

[11] Clark and Kopas.

[12] Clark and Kopas.

[13] Clark and Kopas.

[14] Ring Fit Adventure, Nintendo Switch (Nintendo, 2019).

[15] Clark and Kopas, “Queering Human-Game Relations: Exploring Queer Mechanics & Play.”

[16] Ruberg Bo, “Introduction,” in Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York University Press, 2019).

[17] “Tipp,” Ring Fit Adventure Wiki, accessed December 10, 2021, https://ringfitadventure.fandom.com/wiki/Tipp.

[18] Marcotte, “Queering Control(Lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices.”

[19] Ring Fit Adventure.

[20] Clark and Kopas, “Queering Human-Game Relations: Exploring Queer Mechanics & Play.”

[21] Jess Marcotte, “Queering Control(Lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices,” The International Journal of Computer Game Research, n.d.

[22] Ressa & the Robotic Orchestra, I Made an Accordion of Nintendo Switch Ringcon and Played It!, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTb0LbGJ478.

[23] Ressa & the Robotic Orchestra.

[24] Shaw, “Encoding and Decoding Affordances: Stuart Hall and Interactive Media Technologies.”

[25] Ressa Schwarzwald, Ringcordion, C#, 2021, https://github.com/ressium/Ringcordion.

[26] Christopher Reardon, “What Nintendo Needs to Do for Ring Fit Adventure to Thrive,” LaptopMag, July 12, 2021, https://www.laptopmag.com/au/features/what-nintendo-needs-to-do-for-ring-fit-adventure-to-thrive.

[27] Shaw, “Encoding and Decoding Affordances: Stuart Hall and Interactive Media Technologies.”

[28] Micha Cárdenas, “Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts and Algorithms,” n.d.

[29] Cárdenas.

[30] Cárdenas.

[31] Cárdenas.

[32] Owen Bell et al., We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine, 2015, wearefine.ca.

[33] Whit Pow, “Queer and Trans Game Studies Lecture.”

[34] “IBM100 - The Punched Card Tabulator,” accessed December 11, 2021, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/tabulator/.

[35] “IBM100 - The Punched Card Tabulator.”

[36] Clark and Kopas, “Queering Human-Game Relations: Exploring Queer Mechanics & Play.”

[37] Whit Pow, “Critical Game Studies and Its Afterlives: Toward a Queer and Trans Game Studies,” n.d.