Video Games - Black History Month 2023

By: Vanessa / PleasantlyTwstd

This is my first year working in game dev.

One of the most daunting things to do, in my tenure thus far, was roll out a full Black History Month activation. What if no one likes it? What if people think it’s performative? What if people think it’s corny, or not enough, or too much, or…..there was a lot of fear and uncertainty that came from rolling this out. And hell, I’m Black and was nervous. Our team did 28 Days of Black cosplay, and I got to link up with dope artists, cosplayers, the creator of 28 Days, and even put on a love stream panel about Black Joy. I wrote a good bit as well. It was a lot of labour but I wouldn’t roll any of it back for a second.

So imagine my disappointment when I only saw a small handful of gaming companies do anything to celebrate this year. BHM 2023 sucked. Hard.

It didn’t just suck because companies didn’t do anything. Some companies did the absolute, utter bare minimum. They may have shouted out that One Black Person they worked with. Or they showed that One Black Character they created. For all of the strives and pushes that we’ve seen to date, this year was just lackluster. Sleepy. Boring. It’s like companies and brands across the board made an attempt in 2022, pinned it as ‘we did it!’ and walked.

Instead, Black History Month was marred by a weird and ugly conversation by A Specific Game, highlighted by gamers being angry about a game release window, some not great interviews dismissing Black concerns and representation in games, and plenty of people telling us that Not Everything Is About Race. I scoured for something-ANYTHING-that delivered on promises companies made about wanting to be better about celebrating Black people year round. It’s as though George Floyd happened at the start of the pandemic and people Felt Bad™ about that, but that has come and passed, and so has the care. Black people continue to be the least listened to and most disrespected groups in many spaces, and when that is brought up, it lays at our feet still as ‘our fault’ for caring, for being human, for feeling, for wanting people to carry that spark of recognition through, fully.

Now I will say that not all parties are guilty. Again, Insomniac took a big gamble by trying to also include panels, blogs, and many other things. They got pull quotes and thoughts from staff speaking to who influenced them for BHM. 2K Games spotlighted Black staff and gave them space to talk about why they love working there. Twitch made changes to their Black History Month programming to ensure that more people could easily access their Black Brilliance shelf and tried to tighten up based on feedback from their last activation. Specifically, all of these examples not only focused on the Black people but on their JOY. There were no questions or commentaries about ‘what should we do better’, asking us for free labour. There weren’t panels deliberately asking us ‘so how bad is Black hair in 2023 gaming?’ or ‘Many people say that you shouldn’t cast Black people as villains. Discuss?’ Rocket League featured beautiful skins from GDeeBee. These examples just….let us be, which is critical when we live in a world that profiteers off of and commercializes Black pain. I realize that putting on a full month activation is no light or easy feat-I just did my first one and I’m exhausted. I highlighted that this is my first game dev job because I was scared, I was nervous, I was afraid people were going to refuse to work with me on principle. But I’m green behind the ears and did it, so why didn’t others? Where were the big hitters? The companies that have a massive presence? The accounts with millions of followers?

Maybe I had missed something. It could be operator error, that happens a lot when I stream right? I can’t be all seeing, right? Nope, there was just not much going on from what I could find. I saw plenty of content creators who felt the same way, wondering if maybe we could just get a reroll. The love was just….not there. At all. Even the Humble Bundle for BHM pulled in light donations for a Humble campaign, which shows me that not only were companies not really spreading the love, but people-consumers-who said they care weren’t really sharing it, either.

I’m hoping that moving forward, more efforts can be made in earnest. I don’t think we’re asking for full scale activations like what we’ve seen before: it doesn’t need to be our face on a billboard, it doesn’t even need to require being flewed out somewhere to say we did it. What many of us want more than anything is recognition. Recognition for our endeavors, our wins, our work, and we want to feel like brands WANT to work with us. Companies WANT to celebrate us. I want it to feel less like when BHM comes around companies have to have their arms twisted and pulled to get something out, and that it’s settled on the bare minimum. I want to see action behind the desire to ‘be better’. And that’s across the board. I want to see more companies, when they see our work being the thing that spearheaded change, acknowledging that and engaging accordingly. Because right now?

It’s giving BHM 2019.

A return to the era where you may or may not have said ‘Happy BHM’ and that’s it, because there wasn’t enough social equity and responsibility (that in and of itself was forced) for any one prior to George Floyd to ask ‘is there a reason we do nothing?’ In 2019 it was because ‘no one said anything’ (when I’m pretty sure Black people did), but in 2023 it’s transformed into ‘we tried and it didn’t go well’ or ‘we did something last year though.’

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