Dr. Kishonna Gray, an External Faculty Member of the GI, has recently been interviewed by the gaming review site Kotaku in “The Brilliant Scholar Who’s Challenging Racism in Game Design.”
Her research on race and gender makes her a sought-after consultant within the industry, and in the past, she has previously presented on these topics at the GI as a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Games and Narrative in 2021 and 2023, and a speaker for the Just Relationships for Research Panel on April 25. Her work on the intersections of race and gender within games has been explored with her contribution as an author and editor in the 2018 book Feminism in Play, an entry in the Palgrave Games in Context series. In 2020, she further explores these ideas in Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. This book explores how marginalized populations are limited to stereotypical narratives in games and how this affects players of those games.
In the Kotaku article, written by Carolyn Petit, Dr. Gray used games like Pokémon Go and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to explore how colonial narratives are reproduced in a digital gaming experience. Her experience with Pokémon Go led her to notice how the organization of Pokestops inadvertently reproduces a sense of redlining, a practice of housing discrimination in which services are withheld from certain neighbourhoods that was common in the 1960s. She noticed this while teaching at the University of Illinoi in Chicago. The only Pokestop in a predominantly black neighbourhood brought her to a Confederate statue. Her reflections on instances like these made her criticize game developers and designers for not consciously taking these forms of discrimination into account when designing their games.
The article includes Dr. Gray’s history with gaming, her experiences on Xbox Live as a black woman, and her current research trajectories of looking at how gaming trends reflect and reproduce cultural and societal biases. Stay up to date with Gray’s research by checking her out on Twitter.