Kishonna started by describing her presentation as a “whirlwind of Kishonna right now” – it was a fantastic introduction to today’s talk, and described HOW much ground she covered!
It started with a description of her recent book, Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, which came out in 2020. Really importantly she said that she loved writing it, that she had a lot of fun, and how just being in spaces – physically and virtually that people live in, in creating an understanding of our intersectional lives – informed the writing.
One of the key parts of intersectionality is understanding that there are no distinct spheres – home, work, affinity spaces, counterposts – so many things are happening in these spaces, and as folks are impacted by things happening online they are also impacted by things happening around them. What was interesting to Kishonna, in observing these intersections, was how much these other spaces come into gaming.
One key example of that was the incorporation of the #solidarityforwhitewomen by black women hashtag into the gaming space. There were a few gaming forums at the time, where black women ventured into talk about black lives matter, and this same space was talking about gamergate. These were happening simultaneously in 2014. She described it as fascinating, discovering that women weren’t just isolated in gaming anymore because these things were impacting their real lives, and their virtual lives.
So here, people like Kahlief Adams were using platforms to raise awareness to advocate for black lives, and they were powerful interventions. Now this process has been so normalized that so many people and companies make these statements, but don’t actually change practices, so it has become somewhat meaningless, but at the start it was very influential
So in thinking about Intersectionality, she described it as seeing it as pieces of a puzzle, and each piece develops part of our consciousnesses. And for each of us that will be different – gender, sexuality, disability, and so on, all of it comes together to create what makes ‘us’ us. Parts of our identities may matter more than others, but where she described intersectionality as so crucial is that it reminds us that all these elements are intertwined, and it is the world that can’t make sense and fathom it as a whole, the elements have to be separated.
So thinking about the artifacts and tools of technology, the hardware, software, some things influence how I interact, and some things are predetermined. In considering the things that matter – the visual, the aurality, going from play to streaming to engaging with digital media, there are so many layers that it is a version of intersectionality.
One instance where people like to flatten the layers is in a recent case where an Illinois senator has suggested legislation to ban Grand Theft Auto (GTA) because of increased car-jacking – demonstrating how people don’t understand the layers, and have to separate them.
Another instance was the hashtag #womenaretoohardtoanimate from June 2014, where Ubisoft had said they don’t know how to animate female bodies. Twitter was so useful here because it was a platform where people could go to call on the company to be accountable for such a preposterous view. What was more accurate was that the institutions don’t care to incorporate certain elements, and how to represent them.
Again, the intersectionality of gaming was prevalent here because despite this prejudice, ignorance and, often, obvious instances of racism, women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people enter into those arenas and are part of the conversation. Why? When it is so hard – Kishonna described it that it is because you don’t want those people to dominate those conversations, that it is necessary to want to be part of them.
One of my favourite examples from the talk that Kishonna gave of the limitations of design teams, was of the animated male stripper in Detroit: Become Human. The gif that she showed on screen was SO awkward of the male stripper it was hilarious, presumably because of the person on the design team being completely unfamiliar with how to make a male character sexy. In comparison there was no such difficulty with making the female stripper appear sexy in the same room.
Jason Voorhies in the Friday 13th Game was a hard one for Kishonna to write about because it was one she played herself. However, she felt like she needed to write about it because of how it was coopted by connected communities, to use the hashtag #makecrystallakegreatagain which identified people who had the same interests as you, and Jason became Klan Jason. The Trump and MAGA connected people would utilize Jason to go and kill all the women and characters of colour first and leave the white guys alone.
This was fascinating to her, and when she asked the community – and had to be subjected to the ‘n’ word in doing so by her interviewee who used it verbally. Kishonna tried to ask why he had used the word…and was instantly banned by the algorithms because she had written it down. This example of a black person using a zero tolerance word demonstrates how black folks are unfairly targeted because they use it in everyday vernacular. The algorithm can’t identify where the ‘n’ word is used as part of normal speech, the algorithm just sees it and instantly bans. Xbox thought they were banning racism, but instead are still just punishing black people – yet another argument as to why human moderation is needed instead of algorithmic moderation…but that’s a whole other area of conversation, and one we are familiar with.
Kishonna also identified the need for there to be affordances for how people react to persecution in different ways. She described how black feminism can often be a place to vent, and that the anger of black women in gaming is from a place that means something – it is not anger for angers sake, it is productive, but its silencing reproduces those same unfair targeting that would possibly not be present if there were actual humans moderating.
Another fascinating trope Kishonna referred to was in the answer to the call for more diversity in gaming. This has definitely been improved in the last ten years, in games like Overwatch and Apex for example. But. There are some gaping omissions, particularly in one example in first person games like Call of Duty where there is an inherent violence attached to it, but that because of some of the features afforded to the newer female characters, is exacerbated more directly. One character you can choose, called Farah, a Middle Eastern woman wears a hijab. Great example of diversity. BUT, the hijab is not coded properly, and glows, and remains visible when played in stealth mode and so she gets killed at a disproportionate rate to non-hijab wearing characters. [And this doesn’t even examine the fact that female characters are often just subject to more violence simply by virtue of them being female.] It comes back to the wilful ignorance of the people who create the characters who don’t understand, and don’t do research. As Kishonna put it, “black characters in games are haunted by the spectre of whiteness”.
One example which is meant to have ‘done blackness’ well is NBA2K16, and perhaps sports genres in general where blackness has always been present because black athletes have been a part of the sport in real life. In many instances black characters are just white-designed characters where the only thing that changes is skin colour. In contrast, NBA2K has intentional design – in the dances and character customization particularly.
Yet another example that Kishonna described (we told you it was a rich discussion!) is in the difference between dance games. It is apparently well known (and some of our DDI members attested to this), that Just Dance is for white folks, while Dance Central is more diverse, and the dances themselves involve intergenerational dances too in a much more inclusive atmosphere. In Just Dance, to anonymize or depersonalize the dancers they are all-white silhouettes, and while they utilize costumes from other cultures, the white bodies complicate the intended inclusivity.
There had been discussion from some scholars like Oscar Gandy as to how white people would be able to accept black characters, be it as sidekicks, the fall guy, or the comic figure in TV, but this has also bled into game culture, and often (as in the Walking Dead example Kishonna gave of the black character Lee Everett that is a university professor, but who starts off in a police cruiser) the black characters are not the main characters. They could have done something different.
Kishonna talked briefly about what happens when black people are in charge of the production; unsurprisingly things are very different. She gave the example of ‘I am a man VR’ from Professor Derek A Ham at NC State. It showed the pathways of activism, including historical background to Dr King’s assassination. She also referred to the Momo Pixel game Hair Nah, a black women-focused game rejecting white people trying to touch her hair. She emphasized the importance of recognizing how black folks connect to characters.
I WISH there had been more time to listen to Kishonna explore all of these things more, particularly the part talking about the great examples where black folk are represented accurately and can engage properly. It was a whirlwind for sure, and so full of important considerations for gamers, yes, but also for all of us who engage in the world as so much of the gaming community is part of everything – intersectionality indeed! Kishonna ended with mentioning how often, people make the mistake of wanting to create empathy for black lives, and thinking that that is a useful tool for helping create connections, but that this is a false premise. By just engaging with ALL people, and living all our intersections consciously, and learning from such profound and inspiring speakers like Kishonna it perhaps feels like there is a way through. It will just take a lot of work to get there.
Thank you Kishonna for a whirlwind indeed!!