This website, including the fictional institution TAROTechnology as well as the HTTP error pages you encounter, are all props in an experimental browser-based game called Troubleshooting with Tarot.

In the first segment of Troubleshooting with Tarot, you are introduced to the seemingly legit website of TAROTechnology, a fictional non-formal educational institution liken to and parodying the non-fictional Codecademy and Codeup, that promotes the ideology that social progress depends upon the furthering of our technical aptitude and profits off of individuals that lacked the supposed required literacy to compete. However, as opposed to being solicited to learn coding, writing, and troubleshooting computer programs, you are positioned in a subverted universe in which technical literacy in drawing, writing, and interpreting Tarot cards are the default necessary “21^st century skills” desired for any career paths (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2010). Here, Troubleshooting with Tarot draws attention to the implicit assumptions in contemporary discourses around what is considered a technology and what kind of know-how are deemed worthy as a technical literacy.

In the second segment of Troubleshooting with Tarot, you are faced with a HTTP connection error page and prompted to engage in the act of troubleshooting the problem. However, in lieu of lines of code, Troubleshooting with Tarot displays a Tarot card for players to decipher using a modified version of Laura Gibbs’ Tarot widget (Gibbs, 2019). Here, Troubleshooting with Tarot exploits the normative narratives of technical troubleshooting that relies upon outsourcing problems to those with the specific technical literacy to take care of, which inadvertently further reinforces the legitimacy of that knowledge and those with access to that knowledge, to extend the narrative of this universe where specialized literacy in Tarot is assumed and considered matter-of-fact. In doing so, Troubleshooting with Tarot calls into question whose knowledge and what kind of knowledge do we consider matter-of-fact and continue to extend.

In the anthology Queer Game Studies edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (2017), Edmond Chang conceptualized queergaming as an act that engages in “the articulation of and investment in alternative modes of play and ways of being” that insist upon “a refusal of the idea that digital games and gaming communities are the sole provenance of adolescent, straight, white, cisgender, masculine, able, male, and ‘hardcore’ bodies and desires” (p. 15). Targeting the technological imagination underpinning gaming communities, the experimental browser-based game Troubleshooting with Tarot is my gesture of queergaming aimed at resisting hegemonic narratives of technology and normative expectations about programming language literacy through playfully centering communities of Tarot practitioners that engages Tarot as a technology. Troubleshooting with Tarot juxtaposes two distinctly different community of practitioners, namely the sought-after masculinized computer programmers (Wajcman, 1991; Ensmenger, 2010; Taylor, 2012) and the precarious feminized Tarot practitioners (Gregory, 2012; Miller, 2017), that both employ interpretative strategies to create and produce knowledge based on its own internally bounded and coherent epistemologies. In sum, Troubleshooting with Tarot takes technologies seriously by considering what counts as a technology and why might that be the technology we’re accustomed and presumed to use.

I am Hong-An (Ann) Wu 吳鴻安, and you can reach me at wuhongann@gmail.com with any questions, feels, thoughts, and/or concerns.

This project, Troubleshooting with Tarot, was supported in part by a Humanities and Emerging Arts (HEArts) Grant from the Office of Research at The University of Texas at Dallas to the Studio for Mediating Play housed under the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at The University of Texas at Dallas.