Blog Post Eight.

     For this week’s blog post, I decided to write about the Russworm and Blackmon article. In the article, the authors talk about the history of black women working in video games through music mixtapes. Before I get into the bulk of the information presented, I want to point out the authors’ stylistic choices. Rather than having a traditional breakdown with headers and paragraphs, the authors wrote the piece using chunks of lyrics to build their ideas. For example, they cite famous singers like Missy Elliot and Beyoncé before getting some of their interviews. I just found the formatting to be highly unique and worth mentioning. The majority of this writing shows the accomplishments of these black women through the mode of different interviews. In each interview, the women talk about their overall experience in the gaming community. It also talks about how they have impacted the development of gaming history.  While the article lists some incredible feats like developing game-breaking software and owning large arcades, a considerable argument is how these talented women are often excluded from historical records.

I wanted to focus on the historical exclusion part of the essay. Like I mentioned before, the gaming community often overlooks the contributions black women have made. The article states, “Just as the Black women who have labored with games—both in work and in play—are often excluded from the historical record, so too are we missing an archive of stories about Black women academics at work and play in video game history” (Russworm 100). To analyze the concept more, I did some research about what factors contribute to this exclusion. According to Karen Toulon and Bloomberg with the news company Fortune, the exclusion results from the gaming community being a field controlled mainly by white men. Their newspaper article talks about two percent of gaming professionals being black compared to the thirteen percent of the US population in the same field(Toulon 2021). While these percentages seem like small numbers, this is a massive discrepancy. The article also discussed how the black community is often sexualized in video games (Toulon 2021). The authors suggest a few solutions to solve these problems, but the main one involves taking over the design and monetization of video games.

From my own experience in the gaming world, black representation has always seemed to be overlooked by significant companies and video game developers. While it is incredibly sad to see, I feel like the problem has not been appropriately addressed by influential gaming figures. I believe that the Toulon and Bloomberg article is correct about having more diversity in the designing process of gaming. I feel like this would better representation and accuracy and lead to less exclusion in the gaming community. However, I am curious to hear if my peers have different thoughts on this issue. Do you all agree, or are there other modes that need to be taken to stop this exclusion?

Russworm, TreaAndrea M., and Samantha Blackmon. “Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 6, no. 1, 2020, pp. 93–118., https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2020.6.1.93.

Toulon, Karen, and Bloomberg. “Black Workers Find Little Opportunity in Growing Video Game Industry.” Fortune, Fortune, 16 Mar. 2021, https://fortune.com/2021/03/16/video-game-industry-lacks-diversity/.