#tj thomas

Spawn On Me Episode 50: The Narcisse Naissance

Very special episodes require very special guests and we oblige like only we can! Kotaku writer, Evan Narcisse makes his first trip to Brookago! We talk about Evan's provocative, but truthful article about blackness and gaming. Kah, Cee, Shareef Jackson and Evan talk honestly about race, gaming, representation and how we can, collectively, make things better.

Video Games' Blackness Problem

http://kotaku.com/video-games-blackness-problem-1686694082

Guest Info - Follow Evan here on Twitter.

Video games have a blackness problem. This has been a known thing for a while, and we do talk about it from time to time. But I'd like to keep talking about it. [Austin Walker]

Maaaaaaan, I think Watch Dogs could've had better black characters even if there weren't more black people working on it.

Lots of noise was made of how Watch Dogs' map of Chicago doesn't really line up with the real city. Well, the question for me is, what maps were the developers working from? Well, if their depiction of the inner city (and thus their only depiction of blackness) can be a clue, then their maps might have been the sensationalist TV tabloid stories of the early 90s.

In those depictions, Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects (clear inspiration for the Rossi-Freemont Towers in Watch Dogs) were a lawless battlefield where young black men sold crack and shot at cops and harassed neighbors. But these alarmist stories never actually linger on the neighbors, do they? They show the white chalk outlines on the street on the day after a murder, but not the block party held there just last week. We get photos of brothers in cuffs, but never holding open doors or helping folks with their groceries. Listen, Cabrini-Green, by all accounts, had lots of problems. But it was also a place where people lived their lives.

The boy looked about sixteen years old. He had black hair with an undercut and bangs that swept over his right eye. His skin was pale, nearly white, and his eyes were a fiery amber shade. He had a gold cross earring dangling from his left ear, and a golden stud nose ring on the left side of his nose. He wore a loose plain white t-shirt, denim jeans with a brown belt around his waist, white sneakers, and a dark brown aviator jacket unzipped on top. He had the tattoo of a pentagram on the right side of his neck. He had more tattoos, but they were hidden underneath his clothing.

go read the text of TJ Thomas’ Indiecade talk

A snippet of the text that TJ Thomas posted:

to say that “we’re doing better” is a facade. we are only doing better in some areas, in some sects of the community, within certain groups. the community as a whole hasn’t improved– in multiple ways, it’s…