Opening the Horse

Opening the Horse is a method for queer game design. It is enacted through a series of tabletop games, each attempting to function as a sort of rhetorical Trojan Horse.

Through their respective fictions, the games attempt to entice the player as well as conceal their intentions as rhetorical objects.

After being exposed to the formal system which encodes the procedural rhetoric, the games shift their fictional contexts such that the connection to the queer rhetorical context is made more direct in order to prevent the communicative act from failing altogether due to misinterpretation.

Matthew R.F. Balousek grew up in Michigan, then dropped out of art school, then dropped out of community college, then got two degrees in computer science. He makes games with an emphasis on rhetoric and systemic expressions of queerness. He also makes bread, bots, interactive fiction, and bad jokes.