Boston Indies: “Black Stories and Digital Narratives: What do Black lives look like in gaming?”

Sponsored by the MIT Game Lab

The MIT Game Lab is happy to host the Boston Indies group this April for their monthly meeting. This month features a lecture from MIT visiting professor, Kishonna Gray:

Using the lens of racial project, I examine popular console video games for their (in)ability to capture Black stories in a holistic manner. The mediated story of Black characters is limited and situated within buffoonery, crime, or violent contexts. Video games, as part of the larger media ecology, have created essentialist notions about Blackness and what it means to have an ‘authentic’ Black experience.

Kishonna L. Gray is currently the MLK Scholar and Visiting Professor in Comparative Media Studies and Women & Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also serving as a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard and as a Faculty visitor at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Her 2014 book, Race, Gender & Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from Virtual Margins, has been referred to as a groundbreaking text by gaming and internet scholars. She has published in a variety of outlets and her work has been featured in public outlets such as NYTimes, LATimes, and BET. Follow her on twitter @KishonnaGray.

RSVP via Boston Indies’ Meetup page.

About Boston Indies (www.bostonindies.com):
Boston Indies is a community of dedicated independent game developers in Massachusetts and the surrounding area. Boston Indies works to foster a sense of community among Boston’s independent game developers, facilitate monthly meet-ups and other related community events, encourage developers to create games independent of large budgets and large company ties, provide a safe environment to obtain critical feedback on game development works in progress and serve as a brain trust for important information sharing among local independent developers.