Black Games in Review: An Afro Future Flyby

[Music] okay uh welcome to black games in review and afrofuture flyby my name is lindsay grace i'm the chair of interactive media at the university of miami and i'm vice president of the higher education video game alliance i'm also professor game designer developer artist and author i currently work as night chair in interactive media at the university of miami and i'm it's a position funded by the knight foundation i've created and directed two academic game studios one at the university uh or sorry american university and the other at miami university in oxford ohio i am a solo game designer developer and artist i produced 25 plus different games for mobile web and pc i've also done some commercial solo dev a couple of my games i ended up in the app store's top 100 for arcade games and

puzzle games some of the icons for those games are shown here on the left and i'm an awarded game designer for a variety of designs that i've done in collaboration with students in collaboration with other designers and collaboration are as part of some of the studios that i've run most notably in 2019 i was selected as the games for change vanguard award winner at the games for change annual festival and i've been a lead curator and co-curator for a variety of exhibits around the world from scotland and germany to smithsonian american art museum in washington dc i've written more than 75 uh chapters articles and books most notably in those categories including uh include doing things with games social impact through play which is a book on designing social impact games and love and electronic affection which is a book about designing uh playful uh experiences centering on affection and

love within video games i've also done work with people like susan gold to help document the experience of game jammers we created a book called global game jam stories where we collected the stories and observations of people who were central to the early and generation of game jams global game jam and i'm currently working on a book i call tentatively called black game makers which is designed around helping document black game makers and their the games that they make so this work is supported by the carnegie by the higher education video games alliance and the black game makers association and the book will be published through carnegie mellon carnegie mellon's etc press uh it's also supported by the interactive media school of communication at university of miami and i just want to highlight if you're unfamiliar with the black game makers association it's actually founded by a fellow named lamont herrell and lamont is a former student and has done a really great job

of kind trying to encourage people to collect no popularize and sell games made by black developers so if you're unfamiliar with the bgma i strongly suggest that you go ahead and look it up and find out more about it and so when i started this project i began collecting games made by back made by black game makers and i looked at both analog games like black card revoked here you notice for each game that i mentioned i'll actually show you the url so that you can um you can get a good sense for where to find out more about them to games digital games like combat core which i'll talk about talk about again in a few minutes so i analyzed more than 50 games by black game makers and my aim was to try and help people understand some of the fundamentals so for example uh you'll notice here that the games i looked at about 69 percent of them were uh digital and the other 31 were analog you'll also notice that i from

predominantly in the analog side looked at far more card games than board games i'm not sure if this is an indication of the what's available and um the way the market works but generally it was far easier to find board games than it was to find uh i'm sorry far easier to find car games than it was board games and then in the digital game types category you can see that i looked at a variety of mobile games console games vr and mixed reality games as well as web only games but the dominant space was uh digital games including pc so there were a lot of products being made for the pc in comparison to some of these other categories uh secondary would be console games and mobile games at 19 and 16 so team composition uh was also something that i looked at and generally uh the whole idea was to only document things that were either created by uh uh people from the african american disorder diaspora or uh from people who were

uh working as co-designers so generally one of the kind of the neat things that i did find out is that if you look at the steam scores for these games you find that 81 percent of the or that as a mean for the ones that were actually scored they got an 81 which is a relatively high um scoring so i just want to highlight some of these games and give you a sense for how they work and and what they look like so one of the easiest places to start is bcfx which is a um is sort of known as the black college football game it's called black college football bc fx and it's a kind of a version of playing football wholly focused on historically black colleges and universities what we call hbcus so this is a football simulator it has some novel uh sort of additions to being a typical football simulator besides being focused on hbc use it's also got this really interesting halftime show mechanic where you can play through the halftimes and it's incorporated in hbcu legacy museum

where you can see some of the history and historical figures within the hbcu football history another good example that i have to mention right off the bat is university of dope um which is kind of describes itself as the first party game to celebrate hip-hop culture and um you can see more at university of dope.com this particular game has gotten a lot of great press it's been featured in huffington post esquire uh etc and it's really kind of a fun party game both of these games do something that i've seen in a number of the most successful black games which is that they're affirming uh positive elements of the culture so they're really about the successes that hbcus have had within um on the football stage as well as university of dope being sort of a playful experience around pop culture and african-american contributions to pop culture so others uh play with what i would call in-group knowledge so they're really looking for you to understand some things about blackness or about being a

member of the african-american community and so um a good example of this is passport to the hood which uh self-described is it highlights stereotypes of urban culture says everything that you hear behind closed doors and reflects on how you grew up and that you grew up is clearly a reference to in-group knowledge so there are other games that do a kind of a role-play opportunity so rap gods is a good example of that you can kind of guess by the description what you're doing there and uh another one rap quest two which is a mobile game is a hip-hop simulation for a rap career and there are a number of games that follow this model where it's sort of a day in the life of a rap star hip-hop star and these games actually illustrate common expectations of black games which is that i think a lot of times people are going to assume that there's hip-hop and urban culture that there's some element of black history and that there's some element of in-group and out-group experience um you have to sort

of be a part of the african-american community in order to understand what's happening in the game or to do well in the game and uh generally sort of expectation is that games these games are about blackness and that they're featuring elements of black cultural space and so there's another uh sort of variety of these games that focus on imparting some elements of history so the 1998 deck which is really just a card deck is a suite of playing cards that pay homage to the hip-hop rivalries of the 1990s uh and insecure uh the come-up game based on produced by globe games is based on the hbo show insecure and as they describe it it's about hustling heart and hype uh as your tools to build your new life in la and latoya peterson is one of the people who's contributing to my book uh and so i wanted to give kind of a shout out to her work as well as just describing games like far rock dodge ball

which is largely focused on location you play in harlem you play in other sections of new york but it is incorporating that urban culture expectation that i think some people would have as well as things like h-town minis where you've got these sort of characterizations um or like extreme characterizations uh and it's generally a fighting game or you have other games that focus on black history like the black movie guest quiz which is a mobile game i believe the developers out of cincinnati and it's there's a sense of community through history but i want to emphasize that black games are more than this uh i think of the examples i've given you previously as part of the yes and and i want to emphasize the and so games like swim city swim sanity uh is it's an online multiplayer underwater shooter it's really quite a beautiful game it's really quite a fun game i think it's a good example of how broad that the spectrum of black games can be another really beautiful game is ariel knight never yield

which just has this sort of really great aesthetic and really great feel it's just a really interesting game to play and you would of course in this context talk about sort of well um well uh known designers like mike pondsmith and the cyber cyberpunk series or another contributor to the book alan turner's work uh we're created a tabletop role-playing game that takes inspiration from the myths and folklore of tribal and indigenous indigenous cultures so reminding you of the kind of diaspora that exists and a lot of this work is actually uh in the book so i'm going to kind of save it and couch it so i can tell you more about uh some of the digital games but uh if you do read aaron tremail's done a really great job of creating this comprehensive chapter on black analog game designers that will be a part of the book but i can also talk about another contributor boris willis who's mixing games and dance so again if you're thinking about all the ways the black games are created there's really quite a

variety so i want to take this opportunity to talk about black game makers and i basically started meeting with people and listening to some of their observations some of their experience some of their motivation and there was one theme that seemed to be repeated every time and it was that not enough people tell our stories and i emphasized that in quotes because it was something that i heard often uh over and over again that the the stories of black game makers just weren't being heard their experiences weren't being shared and so i've tried to make a space for their stories to be told both here in this talk and also in um this particular uh uh book and i'm going to give my my story as a case study to kind of position and i hope you understand who's giving this presentation and perspective that i come from but also because i think it helps you understand um some of the experiences that i've shared with other developers so i'm a cabernet american if you're completely unfamiliar with cape verde there it is on the right-hand side uh it's a little tiny country uh

off the west coast of africa yes that's africa on the right and um i grew up in massachusetts very kind of far from cape verde but nestled in one of the largest cape verdean populations in the country and i've been making digital games off and on for 20-plus years and i have a variety of experiences that have to do with the way that i've built games but uh when i started making games i think one of the most important things to note is that i was the only child in our subsidized housing project shown on the right with a computer so it's a good example of what i've seen several game developers mention which is that i like the other game designers and i'm refraining from giving their stories because i want you to read their stories and hear them directly from them but 90 of my childhood friends owned or played a console game but very few of them made games they all played but they didn't really um make games and so if you look at some of the

data according to pew um pew research african americans are the most likely to play video games of any of the ethnic groups that they looked at uh particularly amongst teens at 83 in comparison uh those who self-identified as white were 71 percent uh likely to play video games and hispanic teens were 69 so take that in comparison to the igda statistic that basically says that less than two percent of all game makers uh identify as black uh that's a huge disparity and it's the thing i felt as a kid and continue to feel uh as some of the other game designers and developers have mentioned basically if 90 of my child or friends owned or played a console game um i was the only one actually making games and so there's this real sense of loneliness or sense of being different and outside of a community that you'll see persist in a lot of the the observations so my story in a lot of

biographies my story illustrates a common tale and that common tale is basically that the community of black game makers is much larger our game players is much larger than the community of black game makers there are far more black people playing games than there are in people of the african-american diaspora and the african diaspora they're former people playing uh obviously than there are in the community of black game makers and it's not even a question of proportion it's actually um it's disproportionate exceptionally disproportionate even when compared to any other population so i want to share with you some black game maker biographies to give you some context and again i don't want to i don't want to attribute them to anyone individually so i'm just going to suss out some themes that persisted so a few themes that seem to come up over and over again as people share their stories one was often feeling unique in the industry and so you can see this also come through in blog posts and discussions so there's an article and and blacks and technology

that asks where are all the black game developers and there's discussion on poly count that do black game developers even exist which should be really scary to people uh and then there are collections that are trying to help people understand where the black game devs are and so blackgamedevs.com is a good example of such work another theme was feeling no choice but to go solo and for context there are people like ariel knights never yield that have created really successful uh properties uh by going solo and i remember more than a decade ago i wrote an article for um for gamasutra and computer game guide that basically encouraged people to go solo i think that one of the ways that people solve this problem of limited access to the industry is to just do it all on their own which is tremendous amount of work but um also i think echoes a lot of the things that we've heard about the future of indie games uh when we were talking about it five to eight years ago and then another i'm just going to take this um anonymized facebook post uh for

you and just share another person on facebook just volunteered that they said that being african-american they've actually had investors say they love their company and love their game but they won't invest because i'm black uh but they say they still keep striving towards my goals there's a sort of sense of persistence even in the face of some pretty obvious obstacles uh another theme that kept coming up was this idea of being interested in making impact or doing what matters and a good example of that is five questions so uh this is basically a card deck that helps families communities people playing uh normalized discussions of finances so it's kind of like a way to um create community around talking and working through real important questions about finances uh other activities like ithrives the runaround were largely focused on co-design so the idea here is that they're going to make an impact by working with the community of african

americans and then basically creating a game around uh whatever sort of product comes from a participatory or co-design approach and then you have other folks who are doing things around indigenous economic justice so this is earth cipher from media breeze and you also have this other theme of fostering community there's a lot of discussion from people who are making these games talking about how they want to foster community so spill it is an interesting one and i like some of the artwork from their website these photographs you see on the left they'll have a persistent appearance because i shot them myself after i played the games but in short uh they're sort of talking about the opportunity to let spill it spice up your kickbacks um and help you understand sort of like getting a little more casual with folks but there's a whole other space where uh other people are creating games for black people by black people it's sort of the by black movement and for some

being a black game maker is central to the design itself and for others identity isn't actually central and i want to emphasize that not every black game is about black identity so almost everyone noted that there is an expectation of making what folks would expect is a black game and so um it's important to recognize and people had mentioned this recognize the diaspora that african american is is quite diverse uh and that there are a lot of different experiences and sense of um of what it means to be a member of the black community so basically that being black doesn't require um that the game actually incorporate what are kind of stereotypical black culture elements it can still be a black game if it doesn't include hip-hop it can still be a black game if it doesn't include what other other elements someone might assume make it black and so examples of this things like sky temple stack

a nice mobile game quite pretty are examples of that as is tiny bird garden uh here's tiny board tiny bird garden deluxe being shown um really interesting game uh very different uh or museum multiverse to make sure i show you at least a few uh vr games uh another vr game uh is basically uh run die run again but it's a first person parkour game uh another really beautiful game by retro ninja and we've got uh other games on the cat on the sort of the independent side that focus on um other like themes that are related to social impact so operator uh is basically about a journalist that has to use a police scanner to keep her sister out of harm's way while an intense protest becomes increasingly unsafe you can see the url there i encourage you to play it get that experience and generally i i want to help people understand that black games are as wide and diverse as the people that actually make them and

it seems so obvious to state this it seems like i shouldn't need to state this but in talking to people especially folks who weren't familiar with black games what i found is that um this is a surprising observation and news to people unfortunately so for example uh black games include art themes so this is artifacts two by fazero um which is uh self-described as a game about the entanglement of trauma in the mind and body uh and this is an indiecade finalist or an indicate selection back in 2018 a really interesting game uh or religious themes so when i get free is a christian bible themed playable graphic novel uh that um i think illustrates how these things can be integrated into uh gameplay and then we have a bunch of other games that are sort of new takes on old mechanics as i've sort of done these analyses so rageball for example um

i like its tagline anything else is just pong um but you can see uh some familiar mechanics and then some changes there or i i think you'd kind of be under a rock if you hadn't heard about treachery and beat down city at this point but uh you know really different set of um experiences and or uh combat core is another game i think i'd reference here that i think is really interesting um and available and then there are even games that maybe not aren't just flirting with interesting new mechanics but also just fundamentally distinct experiences that may and i want to emphasize this may incorporate themes of blackness but not in the ways that we would i think people would expect so it's not about saying oh look i have a person of color as my main character but there are experiences like the entanglement of trauma that come through in in really interesting ways

so uh hex gambit's an interesting game i would encourage you to take a look at uh as is chrono ghost um really sort of pretty platformer uh or something really different consider something like galactic bar fight um uh weird kid studios uh produce this i just want to kind of wrap up with some closing thoughts and give uh some sense of sort of what's next and and um uh just kind of help you reflect on the the situation uh of black games these days so i really did start this project to document the game makers in their games and i was really excited about doing that and um as i did it i i realized it was really important to tell black stories and to recognize black cultural production in games it's not just um this sort of horrible history in the us of really disrespecting the black community it's also just about recognizing the contributions that may not always be amplified

so from those stories i've learned some things that i think are really worth sharing and one of them is this this idea that in the absence of community we build it ourselves so there's a lot of activity around saying it's really hard to get into the games industry people aren't really supportive it's really hard when you're the only person of color or the only person in the black community and so a lot of people have made these efforts to create their own spaces websites um uh facebook groups etc so in the absence of community we build it ourselves seems to be a thing i've seen um likewise in the absence of access you see people trying to create it so creating training programs creating support creating social gatherings and again uh it would be great if that absence of access didn't exist but that the positive note is that people are creating those spaces and i think that's part of the future and then in the absence of support we support ourselves which is another sort of theme that kept coming through as i saw who was succeeding and how they were

succeeding so i want to kind of remind people that games are actually part of a milieu of culture there's a um a wide array of um cultural contributions that games make and so i i strongly believe that games themselves the ames industry the game's practice is healthiest not as a mono culture not rows and rows of the same work by the same people but instead as something that is born from diversity so much like a natural monoculture versus a diverse uh environment a diverse environment can weather storms and monoculture um can create some really uh bad situations so the game making community is stronger when it's diverse in my humble opinion so i'd strongly encourage all of us to work towards cultivating that diversity um to cultivate diversity across the spectrum and of course i have to remind you that black games matter which is why i did this research and why i'm trying to

share this work and put in front of you a variety of work that others have created so thanks uh you can shoot me an email if you have any questions and i'll be happy to answer them have a great day [Music]