The Brilliant Scholar Challenging Racism In Game Design
The Brilliant Scholar Challenging Racism In Game Design
The Brilliant Scholar Challenging Racism In Game Design
By Carolyn Petit
June 3, 2023
Summary
During her keynote speech at last year's ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in New Orleans, Dr. Kishonna Grey shared a story about the game Pokémon Go. She'd just become a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and as someone who studies games and their intersections with factors like gender and race and with Black experience in particular, she was eager to learn about this game that had become such a cultural sensation.
Her deep study of issues around race and gender in gaming has led to the publication of several books including Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live and Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming.
So her love of games was forged in circumstances blissfully free of the kind of contention and strife that she, as a Black woman in the gaming space, would eventually become only too familiar with.
For Dr. Grey, as for myself and many others, Xbox Live was both a gateway to an exciting new frontier in gaming, and our first direct exposure to hateful elements that our gaming had previously been largely free of.
She's also a highly sought-after consultant, being brought in by game developers and tech designers to help them think through making their games and their platforms more accessible and intersectional.
Dr. Grey's keynote concluded with a story about a game jam she attended where she asked participants to design a "Decolonial game." Too often, she argues, the underlying ideology of games unintentionally reflects "Continuing the project of white supremacy, continuing genocide and ethnic cleansing, continuing settler colonial models that we can disable and dismantle."
With so many games fundamentally about taking over spaces or harvesting them for our own gain - something arguably reflected even in the wonderful new game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where, as Link, you can plunder Hyrule to your heart's content - how do we make games that challenge such ideas?
Reference
Petit, C. (2023, June 3). The brilliant scholar challenging racism in Game Design. Kotaku Australia. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2023/06/the-brilliant-scholar-whos-challenging-racism-in-game-design/