Genesis Noir and cosmological time: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Big Bang

This chapter explores queer and trans cosmological time in Genesis Noir (Feral Cat Den, 2021), an abstract, adventure game framed as a film noir where players take on the role of a detective, ‘time’ personified, on the case of the heat death of the universe. Our player-protagonist’s initial yearning for stasis and fear of loss transforms into an embrace of change and an ethics reoriented from nihilism to involvement and curiosity. Vast temporal sequence and spatial depths are realigned in the fluctuating rhythms and shimmering characters of its queerly hybrid 2D/3D animation. Played through a profusion of fleeting click-and-drag interactions branded ‘infantile’ by critics, its short minigame mechanics refusing to ‘mature,’ it falls victim to the marginalisation of what Stockton (2009) would call the ‘sideways’ development of queer life.
However, ephemeral visual-tactile play that brings micro- and macro- scales into touch allows us to realise there is no ‘outside’ to the universe as we proceed to interfere with it in the process of investigation. This embodied curiosity that embraces corporeal change and entanglement speaks to both trans theory (Steinbock 2013; 2019) and a queering the observer position of classical physics (Barad 2013) in a form of Freeman’s ‘eroto-historiography’ (2010). I argue that Genesis Noir uses affects of curious contact to reorient players to what I term a queer ‘possibility spacetime’ of ethical relation. This game offers not a puzzle to solve but a toy to feel with.