Queering Data and Dating: AroAce Modding and File System Playgrounds in Stardew Valley

Abstract

Modding the sexualities of video game characters is one way in which queer players have opened up new representational possibilities for themselves. This paper focuses not merely on what queer modding does but on how it does it. It highlights the extent to which queer modders engage with, leverage, and play in game data to customize their experience beyond what the base game permits, even if their changes are ultimately small when playing the modded game itself. Turning to a unique mod enabling asexual and aromantic relationships in Stardew Valley (Eric Barone 2016), this work also considers how a game's technical structures, from its file system to its underlying development technologies, sustain but do not determine queer representation. With access to these structures, modders can turn them, and the games built on top of them, into playgrounds for queer expression.