University funds efforts to build an archive of LGBTQ content in games

Earlier this year Temple University awarded an academic fellowship to assistant professor Adrienne Shaw that will support her efforts to build out and maintain her LGBTQ Video Game Archive project.

It's a nice show of support for Shaw's efforts to research and archive examples of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer content in video games dating back to the '80s, efforts which may prove valuable to game developers and video game history buffs for years to come.

Speaking to Technical.ly Philly, Shaw (who is also an occasional Gamasutra blogger) said the extra support has allowed her to spend more time working on the archive, which she plans to continue expanding and maintaing for the foreseeable future.

"I view this as something I’m going to be working on for the rest of my life,” she said. “If I’m never done, I’ll be perfectly happy because that means people are finding new things or people are continuing to make LGBTQ content [in video games] which would be great."

She goes on to note that the archive's roots can be traced back to her work a decade ago on an article about representation in video games, a topic Shaw has written and spoken about at length. Now with funding (~$1,000) and technical support from the university, she's working on porting it from Wordpress to Omaka, an online publishing platform geared towards preserving historical archives.