Game developers and scholars gathered at the Strong National Museum of Play over the weekend to explore Black Indigenous and People of Color game studies.
WXXI’s education reporter, Noelle Evans, caught up with two leading scholars on the subject to hear their meditations on how games can shape our understanding of each other, the world we live in and our role in it.
Below is a transcript of a radio broadcast story. Conversations were edited for brevity and clarity:
LINDSAY GRACE: My name is Lindsay Grace. I'm Knight chair in Interactive Media at the University of Miami.
NOELLE EVANS: And what’s your role here today?
GRACE: I am chair / co-chair of this particular event, the BIPOC games conference focusing on Black, indigenous and people of color game studies.
NOELLE EVANS: And why, for you, is this important?
GRACE: I think one of the most important things to recognize about games is that they are kind of a cultural artifact. And being a cultural artifact, it's important to ask questions about what these things mean in society, or what these things mean to the people who make them.
EVANS: When you say cultural artifact, what do you mean?
GRACE: Basically, when we think about things like film or other media, we think of them as sort of not only contributing to and produced by society, but also sometimes a reflection of what society values or doesn't value.
... In the context of games, often what we're doing is we're saying there is a particular governing philosophy about how things work, what's good, what's bad, and that there are those values or philosophies are often tied to one view of the way that cultures interact. And so a lot of decolonization in games is about questioning those assumptions and reminding people that there are other ways to look at the kinds of problems we solve in games.
EVANS: Can you give me an example?
GRACE: ... So I produced a game more than 10 years ago called Healer. The idea behind Healer was it was a recreation of a World War II atrocity. It was the Nanjing Massacre. And one of the things I found in a lot of games was that we were almost championing recreation of history, and these are really awful events. So my game decided, or was designed, to prevent people from recreating, but instead to try and heal from it.
So in this case, instead of reproducing the atrocity by killing others, everyone who has been a victim, a noncombatant, in this can be healed as your player walks by. So you pull the bullets from them and you try and kind of undo the atrocity, instead of recreating atrocity, as we often seen in games.
... One of the things I think is really interesting in game studies is we have the opportunity to think critically about the kinds of problems we're solving and then also the kinds of solutions we're offering. So a lot of what people talk about in, say, decolonizing games is about reinvestigating those two questions, what's the real problem here? What's the source of that problem? Similarly, how are we solving the problem?
ALLEN TURNER: My name is Allen Turner. I am a professor at DePaul University, assistant professor, and I teach game design. ... When we sit down to play, I feel like there is a transformation that happens. We stop just being us and we start being this other being that’s in engagement with an experience.
And often when you try to have an engagement with people about things that are heavy or things that are intense, there's so much presumption about how hard that is that gets in the way of having those conversations. But sometimes, when you bring people into a place of play and they get to act a fool a little bit, those walls go down. It's like how you can tell a joke and people laugh a little bit, and once you've all started laughing, you can start talking about things that aren't funny.
... I feel like play is a place where we confirm culture, right? As little kids, people play dolls, and they play "Cowboys and Indians" and "Cops and Robbers," and these are all culture stories. Some of them are stories that tell you what your gender roles are. Some are stories that tell you where your social roles are, that tell you who the bad guys are, who the good guys are. And we kind of reenact these things over and over until we buy into the culture, right?
But we start doing that in our play spaces. And so I want to create play spaces that encourage people to think in other ways. Right? That says that the way forward isn't necessarily about lifting myself up as high as I possibly can while stepping on everybody else.
The way forward is by creating spaces where I can bring as many people over into that space as possible in a way that allows them to be who they are. And they can do that safely. And that will activate other people to be who they are. And it just keeps getting — it just keeps expanding.
