http://kotaku.com/video-games-blackness-problem-1686694082
Evan Narcisse
Filed to: Culture
Today 2:10pm
Video games have a blackness problem. This has been a known thing for a while, and we do talk about it from time to time. But I'd like to keep talking about it.
When they appear at all, black video game characters are often reduced to outdated, embarrassing stereotypes. It's commonly accepted that part of the reason for that is that there simply aren't enough black people making video games. Surely if that changed, video games' depictions of black characters would improve, right? What else might it take?
Come On, Video Games, Let’s See Some Black People I’m Not Embarrassed By
I've never played as a black video game character who's made me feel like he was cool.… Read more
I decided to email with several prominent black critics and game developers to start a conversation. What is the source of video gaming's blackness problem? What is to be done? I enlisted games researcher and critic Austin Walker, Treachery in Beatdown City developer Shawn Alexander Allen, Joylancer developer TJ Thomas and SoulForm developer and Brooklyn Gamery co-founder Catt Small to talk about what we all thought. Our conversation, which took place over email, follows.
Evan Narcisse (Me):
Actual black people don't seem to have had very much to do with creating my favorite black people in video games. Or many other people in games, for that matter. That bothers me.
In other art forms, it's possible to trace a long history of black people crafting their own stories in the face of a system that tried to suppress them. Sometimes those stories were straightforward chronicles of existences lived under oppression, like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Other times, writing a book, making music, movies or TV was a means to calling out the structural injustices of living in America. Those things aren't mutually exclusive but it's tended to be easier for one sort of endeavor to find institutional backing and support. The thing about Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, for example, is that it's got the distance of history to make it more comfortably consumable. You can safely cluck your tongue and sigh about how rough black people had it in the ol' slavery days. You don't have to acknowledge how the systemic legacy of the laws that prevented black people from voting still lives on today with election fraud.
I've written before about the desire to see more black faces and different kinds of black stories in video games. That desire's changed a bit in the last few years for me. I keep thinking about how AAA games get made and the invariable, invisible compromises that happened along the way. When I think about black characters and visions of black life in video games that resonated with me—whether it's Adewale or Aveline from the Assassin's Creed games—I have to reckon with the idea that they was very likely no black person making decisions about those characters.
Because I've written about this stuff before, I've had some weird experiences over the years where developers would e-mail me about their games. It's been either "hey, it's okay if we have a funky black person in our game, right?" or "Evan! Look at this black person in our game! Tell the world!" That alone hasn't been enough for me to get excited to enough to follow up with the people involved. I also tend to resist the easy narrative that people seem to want to invoke, which seems to be that a simple aggregation of more black faces gets my stamp of approval. I'm just one guy who's lucky enough to voice his feelings publicly. I'm not a spokesperson but when I do write pieces like this, this or this, people tell me that I'm speaking part of their experience too.
This Is Why We Need More Black People Making Video Games
When I traded correspondence with writer David Brothers last week, I made the argument that video… Read more
For a while last year, I felt guilty about not playing Watch Dogs. It was set in Chicago, a city that's racially polarized in the most tragically fascinating ways. I didn't expect a high-risk, big-budget franchise starter to try for anything daring with regard to how it rendered black lives. (Remember Liberation and Freedom Cry debuted on the sidelines—on the Vita and as DLC, respectively—and not on the biggest possible stages.) But, friends who played Watch Dogs told me how retrograde the projects-dwelling Black Viceroy thugs were, like bogeymen kludged together from decades of the worst stereotypes. So much for progress, I thought. And the guilt went away. Because why should I feel like I have to have something to say about a game like Watch Dogs when it doesn't have something to say about black people?
That element of Watch Dogs was just another thing that made me feel like an outsider in video games, despite the fact that I think and write about them every day. What I've really been craving have been games that make me feel the opposite way, something that leverages any of the myraid modes of modern blackness. One of my favorite books—The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty—does that really well, moving through suburbs, rap videos, academia in a hilarious satire that still nails some home truths about how black people are portrayed in the media. Black lives exist everywhere in every strata of society, in all sorts of strata, ways and methodologies. Corporate video games still have yet to even scratch the surface of that. You've written about Watch Dogs, Austin. Do you think the black characters in the game could've been more than what they were if more black people were involved in its development? Or is the big corporate machinery that makes and moves a game like that too big to avoid pitfalls like that?
Austin Walker, game critic:
Evan,
Maaaaaaan, I think Watch Dogs could've had better black characters even if there weren't more black people working on it.
Lots of noise was made of how Watch Dogs' map of Chicago doesn't really line up with the real city. Well, the question for me is, what maps were the developers working from? Well, if their depiction of the inner city (and thus their only depiction of blackness) can be a clue, then their maps might have been the sensationalist TV tabloid stories of the early 90s.
In those depictions, Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects (clear inspiration for the Rossi-Freemont Towers in Watch Dogs) were a lawless battlefield where young black men sold crack and shot at cops and harassed neighbors. But these alarmist stories never actually linger on the neighbors, do they? They show the white chalk outlines on the street on the day after a murder, but not the block party held there just last week. We get photos of brothers in cuffs, but never holding open doors or helping folks with their groceries. Listen, Cabrini-Green, by all accounts, had lots of problems. But it was also a place where people lived their lives.
(Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)
There's a solid New York Times story on the destruction of the final Cabrini-Green tower, focusing on the conflicted feelings the community. About halfway through, there's this bit from a girl reminiscing about her time living there: "There were block parties. There were Old School Mondays, where everyone would come back; people who had been gone for 25 years would get together. I remember my first Christmas there. And this little area called the Blacktop, where I learned to ride a bike." Watch Dogs has no room for little black girls to learn to ride bikes. As Kirk Hamilton pointed out in his review last year, black people in Watch Dogs "exist simply to kill or be killed, or occasionally to engage in sexual assault while on camera."
Watch Dogs: The Kotaku Review
My first question for Watch Dogs was, "Well, what if I don't want to shoot Maurice?" Read more
This is what I mean when I say that Watch Dogs could've been better even without more black folks on the dev team. When non-black people want to learn about the experience of blackness, they often seem to turn to source texts that, themselves, could've used more black folks involved in the creation. Texts that focus on the tragedy instead of presenting a holistic view of life. Part of this is, as you suggested, the "big corporate machinery" behind a game like Watch Dogs. It might have been way easier to arrange a viewing party for a mediocre old documentaries than it would've been to justify an expensive trip to interview the folks who actually lived Chicago.
But, the result, in games like Watch Dogs, is that blackness is presented as pathological. The black spaces are violent, ruined, and dangerously mysterious. The black characters, at best, overcome that violence through exceptional intelligence or talent, or, at worst, give into their darkest urges. Sometimes there's a degree of sympathy in this sort of depiction: "Wow, look at how bad they have it." But what we really need—in games as well as in other media—is something more complex than this image of devastated black lives. And yeah, part of the solution there could be more melanin in game development.
It's interesting that you mention the history of black folks creating our own art in oppressive contexts—sometimes specifically in opposition to forces that wanted to keep us from creating it, or who wanted to own what it was that we created. We weren't allowed to learn to write because it would offer us dangerous weapons like private communication, careful record keeping, and long-form thought. Our music accompanied and eased our work, or it broke free from the brutal rhythms of the factory. Our films reflect the complexity of our heritage. I don't know about you, but I heard these sorts of stories as a kid a lot.
But there isn't a version of this story for games yet. The closest we have is the story of being good at playing certain games: the cousin who got to be a defensive tackle on an NCAA team. The uncle who played ball overseas. The brother (or sister! Or non-binary black person!) who could kill a cypher (because let's not forget that the unwritten rules of freestyle rap have as much in common with improvised games as with music). Maybe the closest thing we have are stories where players transcend and "change the game forever" by shifting the conventions. But we don't even have these stories for digital games, yet, even though lots of black folks play them. I'm not saying I'd settle for someone black to be on the winning team at The International 5, but it'd be something.
Mostly though, I'm ready for games to offer a more complex vision of blackness. In another recent letter series (and I know, it's a faux pas to link to one letter series from another), I wrote about the broad range of material that appears in the "blaxploitation" catalog. This is what I want for blackness in games: Recognition that the struggle exists, but that it exists in the lives of complicated people, not caricatures. Maybe with Liberation and Freedom Cry, we've seen the extent to which the Ubisoft Formula can serve that desire.
So, on that note, here are MY questions: what might a complex and (dare I say) compelling vision of blackness look like in a genre other than open-world-stab-'em-up? Alternatively: have you played anything lately where the variety of blackness felt represented?
I'm guessing no, but listen, a dude can dream.
Evan Narcisse
Filed to: Culture
Today 2:10pm
Video games have a blackness problem. This has been a known thing for a while, and we do talk about it from time to time. But I'd like to keep talking about it.
When they appear at all, black video game characters are often reduced to outdated, embarrassing stereotypes. It's commonly accepted that part of the reason for that is that there simply aren't enough black people making video games. Surely if that changed, video games' depictions of black characters would improve, right? What else might it take?
Come On, Video Games, Let’s See Some Black People I’m Not Embarrassed By
I've never played as a black video game character who's made me feel like he was cool.… Read more
I decided to email with several prominent black critics and game developers to start a conversation. What is the source of video gaming's blackness problem? What is to be done? I enlisted games researcher and critic Austin Walker, Treachery in Beatdown City developer Shawn Alexander Allen, Joylancer developer TJ Thomas and SoulForm developer and Brooklyn Gamery co-founder Catt Small to talk about what we all thought. Our conversation, which took place over email, follows.
Evan Narcisse (Me):
Actual black people don't seem to have had very much to do with creating my favorite black people in video games. Or many other people in games, for that matter. That bothers me.
In other art forms, it's possible to trace a long history of black people crafting their own stories in the face of a system that tried to suppress them. Sometimes those stories were straightforward chronicles of existences lived under oppression, like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Other times, writing a book, making music, movies or TV was a means to calling out the structural injustices of living in America. Those things aren't mutually exclusive but it's tended to be easier for one sort of endeavor to find institutional backing and support. The thing about Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, for example, is that it's got the distance of history to make it more comfortably consumable. You can safely cluck your tongue and sigh about how rough black people had it in the ol' slavery days. You don't have to acknowledge how the systemic legacy of the laws that prevented black people from voting still lives on today with election fraud.
I've written before about the desire to see more black faces and different kinds of black stories in video games. That desire's changed a bit in the last few years for me. I keep thinking about how AAA games get made and the invariable, invisible compromises that happened along the way. When I think about black characters and visions of black life in video games that resonated with me—whether it's Adewale or Aveline from the Assassin's Creed games—I have to reckon with the idea that they was very likely no black person making decisions about those characters.
Because I've written about this stuff before, I've had some weird experiences over the years where developers would e-mail me about their games. It's been either "hey, it's okay if we have a funky black person in our game, right?" or "Evan! Look at this black person in our game! Tell the world!" That alone hasn't been enough for me to get excited to enough to follow up with the people involved. I also tend to resist the easy narrative that people seem to want to invoke, which seems to be that a simple aggregation of more black faces gets my stamp of approval. I'm just one guy who's lucky enough to voice his feelings publicly. I'm not a spokesperson but when I do write pieces like this, this or this, people tell me that I'm speaking part of their experience too.
This Is Why We Need More Black People Making Video Games
When I traded correspondence with writer David Brothers last week, I made the argument that video… Read more
For a while last year, I felt guilty about not playing Watch Dogs. It was set in Chicago, a city that's racially polarized in the most tragically fascinating ways. I didn't expect a high-risk, big-budget franchise starter to try for anything daring with regard to how it rendered black lives. (Remember Liberation and Freedom Cry debuted on the sidelines—on the Vita and as DLC, respectively—and not on the biggest possible stages.) But, friends who played Watch Dogs told me how retrograde the projects-dwelling Black Viceroy thugs were, like bogeymen kludged together from decades of the worst stereotypes. So much for progress, I thought. And the guilt went away. Because why should I feel like I have to have something to say about a game like Watch Dogs when it doesn't have something to say about black people?
That element of Watch Dogs was just another thing that made me feel like an outsider in video games, despite the fact that I think and write about them every day. What I've really been craving have been games that make me feel the opposite way, something that leverages any of the myraid modes of modern blackness. One of my favorite books—The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty—does that really well, moving through suburbs, rap videos, academia in a hilarious satire that still nails some home truths about how black people are portrayed in the media. Black lives exist everywhere in every strata of society, in all sorts of strata, ways and methodologies. Corporate video games still have yet to even scratch the surface of that. You've written about Watch Dogs, Austin. Do you think the black characters in the game could've been more than what they were if more black people were involved in its development? Or is the big corporate machinery that makes and moves a game like that too big to avoid pitfalls like that?
Austin Walker, game critic:
Evan,
Maaaaaaan, I think Watch Dogs could've had better black characters even if there weren't more black people working on it.
Lots of noise was made of how Watch Dogs' map of Chicago doesn't really line up with the real city. Well, the question for me is, what maps were the developers working from? Well, if their depiction of the inner city (and thus their only depiction of blackness) can be a clue, then their maps might have been the sensationalist TV tabloid stories of the early 90s.
In those depictions, Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects (clear inspiration for the Rossi-Freemont Towers in Watch Dogs) were a lawless battlefield where young black men sold crack and shot at cops and harassed neighbors. But these alarmist stories never actually linger on the neighbors, do they? They show the white chalk outlines on the street on the day after a murder, but not the block party held there just last week. We get photos of brothers in cuffs, but never holding open doors or helping folks with their groceries. Listen, Cabrini-Green, by all accounts, had lots of problems. But it was also a place where people lived their lives.
(Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)
There's a solid New York Times story on the destruction of the final Cabrini-Green tower, focusing on the conflicted feelings the community. About halfway through, there's this bit from a girl reminiscing about her time living there: "There were block parties. There were Old School Mondays, where everyone would come back; people who had been gone for 25 years would get together. I remember my first Christmas there. And this little area called the Blacktop, where I learned to ride a bike." Watch Dogs has no room for little black girls to learn to ride bikes. As Kirk Hamilton pointed out in his review last year, black people in Watch Dogs "exist simply to kill or be killed, or occasionally to engage in sexual assault while on camera."
Watch Dogs: The Kotaku Review
My first question for Watch Dogs was, "Well, what if I don't want to shoot Maurice?" Read more
This is what I mean when I say that Watch Dogs could've been better even without more black folks on the dev team. When non-black people want to learn about the experience of blackness, they often seem to turn to source texts that, themselves, could've used more black folks involved in the creation. Texts that focus on the tragedy instead of presenting a holistic view of life. Part of this is, as you suggested, the "big corporate machinery" behind a game like Watch Dogs. It might have been way easier to arrange a viewing party for a mediocre old documentaries than it would've been to justify an expensive trip to interview the folks who actually lived Chicago.
But, the result, in games like Watch Dogs, is that blackness is presented as pathological. The black spaces are violent, ruined, and dangerously mysterious. The black characters, at best, overcome that violence through exceptional intelligence or talent, or, at worst, give into their darkest urges. Sometimes there's a degree of sympathy in this sort of depiction: "Wow, look at how bad they have it." But what we really need—in games as well as in other media—is something more complex than this image of devastated black lives. And yeah, part of the solution there could be more melanin in game development.
It's interesting that you mention the history of black folks creating our own art in oppressive contexts—sometimes specifically in opposition to forces that wanted to keep us from creating it, or who wanted to own what it was that we created. We weren't allowed to learn to write because it would offer us dangerous weapons like private communication, careful record keeping, and long-form thought. Our music accompanied and eased our work, or it broke free from the brutal rhythms of the factory. Our films reflect the complexity of our heritage. I don't know about you, but I heard these sorts of stories as a kid a lot.
But there isn't a version of this story for games yet. The closest we have is the story of being good at playing certain games: the cousin who got to be a defensive tackle on an NCAA team. The uncle who played ball overseas. The brother (or sister! Or non-binary black person!) who could kill a cypher (because let's not forget that the unwritten rules of freestyle rap have as much in common with improvised games as with music). Maybe the closest thing we have are stories where players transcend and "change the game forever" by shifting the conventions. But we don't even have these stories for digital games, yet, even though lots of black folks play them. I'm not saying I'd settle for someone black to be on the winning team at The International 5, but it'd be something.
Mostly though, I'm ready for games to offer a more complex vision of blackness. In another recent letter series (and I know, it's a faux pas to link to one letter series from another), I wrote about the broad range of material that appears in the "blaxploitation" catalog. This is what I want for blackness in games: Recognition that the struggle exists, but that it exists in the lives of complicated people, not caricatures. Maybe with Liberation and Freedom Cry, we've seen the extent to which the Ubisoft Formula can serve that desire.
So, on that note, here are MY questions: what might a complex and (dare I say) compelling vision of blackness look like in a genre other than open-world-stab-'em-up? Alternatively: have you played anything lately where the variety of blackness felt represented?
I'm guessing no, but listen, a dude can dream.
