We Exist: Dr. Kishonna Gray on the Gendered and Racialized Culture of Gaming
by Alexandra Fiorentino-Swinton
UChicago’s Weston Game Lab was pleased to welcome Dr. Kishonna Gray to speak about her work on intersectionality and social issues as within digital media, particularly in the gamer community. Dr. Gray has been a groundbreaker in the digital studies field, with work featured in publications such as the New York Times, Engadget, The Guardian, BET, and Sociology Compass. She spoke on how black bodies are configured inside of technological structures and the steps being made to create equity in these spaces. UChicago Arts sat down with her after the presentation to learn more about her experiences and work:
Your passion really comes through when you talk about gaming and intersectionality. Where did your passion begin?
Oh, great question. Thank you for asking that. I think a lot of my passion came from my own personal experiences in the space. So, when games went online, it was the early 2000s. Xbox went live in 2002. And then in the lead up to that people were saying, "Oh, it's going to change the nature of gaming. You're going to be able to develop communities. It's going to be so great and so awesome," not realizing that they were really speaking to a particular demographic. And in my research, I call that the “default user.” The default user is, most of the time, a white masculine entity. So, they really had that person in mind when they thought about how amazing this experience online was going to be. Because when I went into the space and people like me went into the space, the space was immediately violent. It was me immediately racialized, immediately gendered. And we were instantly told that we weren't welcome in the space. I was also told to go back to the kitchen and to do any number of gendered activities, sexualized activities even. And those experiences were immediate in the space.
In your work you use the phrase “hegemonic framework” of gaming to describe how social structures act in gaming communities. How do social frameworks of race and gender translate into online spaces?
Look at the work of Anna Everett. She talks about the coding schema or the command schema of these computers is still rooted in the master slave narrative. It's still there. If you go behind the command screen, there’s the master controls and the slave. So she theorized that even at the core of it, there was manufactured domination and subordination. And you can't ignore the racialization of that master/slave language. It immediately makes you think about the racialization inherent in our Western societies and slave economies, and also these colonial narratives as well. Because then we started talking about the internet as this ‘digital frontier’. Narratives are just being transplanted from slavery and settler colonialism. As much as people want to say digital technology is neutral, these narratives are still being transplanted onto our realities in significant ways.
'“The Walking Dead” video game opens with protagonist—and college professor—Lee Everett getting arrested. Dr. Gray’s presentation examined why this was our first introduction to him, configuring him as a criminal rather than grounding the character in his humanity or intelligence. Image via.
Do you see any instances where these frameworks are transformed by nature of acting via online platforms?
Absolutely. I think we have to recognize that there are real people behind these technologies. We often want to look at technology as just existing as an entity in the void somewhere, but there are actual people behind them and they are transplanting their own biases into the things that get created. Some of my work focuses on the significance of who a person is and their adoption of technologies, and how these technologies diffuse onto the populace. These things are racialized and they're gendered and they're class-based. Folks who have disposable time to just sit and learn a new technology or go through reviews online, those are the folks who dictate the direction that the technology and culture goes. And we don't realize that. So then they create something called the “digital divide”, which I think is one of the worst frameworks that we have. I understand that there are issues of access, but people don't even realize that we need to go back to the beginning of the conversation. Who was left out of those conversations? Who are the people in the computer science and engineering programs? Think about the leaky pipe, in STEM, how girls are weeded out.
When you think about the digital divide, you have to think about how that culture as a hegemonic entity was created for a particular subset of the population. It wasn't meant for girls, it wasn't meant for people of color, it wasn't meant for people for whom English is a second or third language. And I think once we address that deficit model we have, we could create some meaningful change. And the same things are still happening now. People ask "where are all the black streamers?" Well, they're there. You're just ignoring them. You're not paying attention to them because you don't think that they're contributing in ways that makes sense for you. You have invalidated their cultural production. You have rendered them illegitimate in these spaces.
It seems like the gaming sphere is ripe for social analysis, but that it isn't studied as much. Do you see that there is a growing presence of studies around gaming and the culture of the community?
A lot of times academic studies are rooted in people's comfort level and what they're used to and what they know. So I often get questions where I've said a whole bunch of things but people aren't able to make sense of everything that I said. So they'll ask the question that's rooted in their own knowledge. And so if they're not able to receive the information I just gave them, they can't make sense of it, it's a way that they haven't thought before, I think it might make some folks uncomfortable. People have often said, "Kishonna, you should have a comparative approach. What do white users do?” I'm like, "I don't really care what they do. I care about what these folks are doing because this is significant in its own right." We don't do that in research. They always have these sections where they're trying to make sense of something, like in undergraduate classes on “the psychology of African Americans,” but they're only making sense of this in comparison to the white male. The “norm.” So these folks are only validated through this particular lens and I want to disrupt that because I could care less about this lens. But there are also some other things happening, where I understand people want to be comfortable, want to bring people to their area of knowledge and to what their own epistemology is. So you want to make sense of this phenomenon, but you also don't want to be complicit in what's happening.
I'm always thinking, who am I doing this for? What's the next step? I really felt that I was just profiting off of pain, padding my CV with these stories and these narratives and then I couldn't make their spaces better. So I said if I can't make it better, then going to transform the narrative. I'm going to show people that black gamers are out here doing dope things. They’re developing communities, they're protecting folks who are being harmed in these spaces, they’re organizing protests. And those are the kinds of things that I really want to highlight in my book.
Dr. Gray’s presentation looked at “Battlefield 1,” which was promoted as focusing on the black Harlem Hellfighters in WWI, only to unceremoniously kill them in the opening minutes of the game whereas the white avatars were given full backstories and lasted longer. Image via.
What differences do you see in the way that racial dynamics play out in the gaming space versus on social media?
One of the things that I like to explore is to see how different folks are in the different platforms. I don't see the level of activism in the gaming space that I might see on one’s Twitter stream. A lot of them realize that they have a very limited reach in the Xbox Live gaming space in particular, whereas they have a lot more followers on Twitter and they'll have a lot more followers on Facebook. But a very interesting thing happened after the officer who killed Rekia Boyd wasn't charged and was let go. I was in a room with a group of women and we were all just gaming and somebody said, "Hey, let's go do something. Let me figure out what to do." So in the gaming space, she sent messages to some folks who she knew were in the Chicago area. She went to Twitter and organized a small protest. This is some of the trans-mediatedness that I talk about.
So she was in the game, she went to social media and then she immediately went to the local church. So the church allowed her to make copies of stuff. And so she started handing out flyers to say, "Hey y'all, we're going to take the train and we're going to go straight downtown and we're going to try to protest and let them know we're not okay with them just killing black women." And so I just thought that was fascinating because I remember in that conversation, she was like, "Should I do something or what can we do? She was empowered. She got empowered because we were all hyping her up. It was interesting because it led to a larger rally for Rekia Boyd in New York City. But some of the foundations started there. And that was also the moment where a lot of those women got connected with Black Lives Matter and they started to get organized around those kinds of things.
Has the notoriety of Gamergate shifted the narrative or change the culture in the gaming sphere?
It's going to be a hard question to answer because I first need to think about how I’m measuring change. So, what changes did I want to see? If I wanted to see reduced harassment, reduced racism, or reduced sexism then no, nothing's changed. But if I wanted to see people paying more attention to gaming, yes. But then what are they paying attention to? In streaming, they're paying attention to the loudest, most boisterous white men. And there is still no place to report racism in Xbox Live. So, if somebody calls me the N word, I can say that there's a violation of voice communication, but if they aren't naming and claiming it, then they don't care anything about it. The only thing I want Xbox Live to do is just put it in a space where you can say “something racist happened to me." They won't do it. In 2020, in the year of our Audre Lorde!
But things have changed. We're having a lot more features. There are more articles about gaming. I think it's good that we got the attention of folks, but then it's something I often critique within the feminist game community. I'm like, "Listen, we've got the attention of the world right now. What are we going to do with it?" But I think they were just in survival mode. They were just trying to survive the onslaught of Gamergate. They were just trying to survive and I completely understand that. And then we also let a lot of folks in the industry off the hook if they put out like a diversity statement. "Oh, we love women. We work with women.” So I think just pretty statements and some more women as protagonists in games, I think it's what we got. But those day to day realities are still the same.
What opportunities for black and enfranchisement do you see in gaming?
I really think there needs to be a black game movement. Now, what that looks like right now? I don't know. But for instance, we have the Game Developers of Color Conference that happens in New York every summer. There was an old game, The Black College Football Experience. It's such a cool game because you have the full experience of an HBCU football game. The band performs at halftime. I think we need to really highlight the contributions of black folks in games. It was a black man who developed the cartridge for us to play the earliest console games. These are the stories that we need to bring prominence. Maybe I can start tying the notes together to see how it's already existed. Maybe the seeds of a black game movement have already existed.
The fictional town of Sapienza, Italy from the Hitman game. Image via.
What are your favorite video game(s)? A knockout for the final question.
That's the hardest question you've asked. So I have to think about a game that's re-playable, a game that if I put it in, I can still play it all the time. I have to think about a game that brings me joy. It's not stressful. I know that it's holistically a great, beautiful experience. I have to think about that iconicity of it… The Hitman, the entire franchise. Agent 47 is fantastic. I love the beauty of the maps. Sometimes I just walk around and I don't do any of the missions. I'm not killing anybody because the maps are just so beautiful. And as a kid from rural Kentucky, I didn't grow up seeing different parts of the world. So when playing something like the earliest Hitman gamrs, I was able to be transported to Italy in these beautiful cityscapes and countrysides and I feel that level of joy whenever I play the newer games.