Wingless Fairies by Lily Belmira (2024) is instead a plundercore project—a video game constructed using assets from commercial works. In this case, the 3D models of the Great Fairies from Nintendo’s fantasy series The Legend of Zelda (1986–ongoing) are reused for the main characters.

Since Ocarina of Time (1998), these characters have had a visual design seemingly inspired by drag culture. In Wingless Fairies, they are no longer magical beings, but Belmira uses their bodies to tell the everyday stories of the people to whom such stereotyped portrayals refer. “I have complicated feelings about the Zelda Great Fairies,” Belmira explains. “I liked the idea of reinterpreting them as trans, but when the source material treats them as a throwaway joke, it’s less about reinterpreting and more about humanising.” Queer culture has a long tradition of reclaiming offensive representations and terms once used pejoratively—including the word “queer” itself. According to Belmira, “the way people are embarrassed or shocked or enchanted by these characters feels a lot like how people see me, or how I used to see other trans people as a kid. Making the player a fairy brings that context into the game: that androgynous character you thought was weird as a kid is you now.”

Two closely connected disciplines are machinima—cinema made within or using tools from video games—and virtual photography, the art of taking photos within video games. !CURSED! by Carson Lynn (2022) is a multimedia project focused on the figure of the reanimated skeleton. It consists of the machinima Reversal Ring and a series of collages combining digital screenshots from the dark fantasy world of Dark Souls III (FromSoftware, Bandai Namco Entertainment, 2016) with images and texts drawn from memes and archives of queer zines—often themselves made from collaged and recontextualised media. As with R.O.T., a game with a seemingly toxic hypermasculine aesthetic reveals a queer side: in the hostile, traumatic, absurd yet wondrous world of Dark Souls, queer people recognise their own experience. The skeleton—and more broadly, the undead—tells of possibilities for life beyond binaries, even the binary of life and death. “Hijacking a game can come in many forms, but the act of machinima/virtual photography often goes hand-in-hand with the exploitation of game mechanics,” says Lynn. “And that’s the most appealing part to me: creating something with tools never intended for the purpose of creation.” Lynn tends to avoid games that simplify these practices by providing tightly regulated “photo modes.” “A game company can’t regulate and censor machinima/photography/memes that exist outside of their walled gardens,” Lynn concludes.