Gaming for understanding - Brenda Brathwaite

Now when we think of games, there's all kinds of things. Maybe you're ticked off, or maybe you're looking forward to a new game. You've been up too late playing a game. All these things happen to me, but we think about games a lot of times. We think about stuff like this: first-person shooter games or the big, what we would call triple-A games. Or maybe you're a Facebook game player. This is one my partner and I worked on. Maybe you play Facebook games, and that's what we're making right now. It's a lighter form of a game.

Maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in Thanksgiving situations. This would be one of those tragically boring board games that you can figure out. Or maybe you're in your living room, you know, playing with the Wii with the kids or something like that. There's this whole range of games, and that's very much what I think about. I make my living from games; I've been lucky enough to do this since I was 15, which also qualifies as I've never really had a real job.

But we think about games as fun, and that's completely reasonable. But let's just think about this. So this one here, this is the 1980 Olympics. No, no, where you guys were, but I was in my living room. It was practically a religious event. This is when the Americans beat the Russians. Yes, it was technically a game; hockey is a game. But really, was this a game? I mean, people cried. I've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of Monopoly. And so, this was just an amazing experience.

Or you know, if anybody here is from Boston. So when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series after, I believe, a 351 years. When they won the World Series, it was amazing. I happen to be living in Springfield at the time, and the best part of it was that in the book, you would close the woman's door in the bathroom, and I remember seeing "Go Sox." I thought, really? Or the houses you'd come out because every game, while I think almost every game, went into overtime, right?

So we'd be outside, and all the other lights are on in the whole block. Kids like the attendance was down in school, and kids weren't going to school. But it's okay; that's the Red Sox, right? I mean, there's education, and then there's the Red Sox. We know where they're stacked. So this was an amazing experience. And again, yes, it was a game, but they didn't write newspaper articles. People didn't say, you know, "Really, I can die now because the Red Sox won," and many people did.

So games mean something more to us. Absolutely, they mean something more. So now just this is an abrupt transition here. There were three years where I actually did have a real job, sort of. I was the head of a college department teaching games. So again, it was sort of a real job, and I just got to talk about making them as opposed to making them. I would say that part of the job of it when you're a chair of a department is to eat, and I did that very well.

So I did it dinner with this guy called Zig Jackson. This is Zig in this photograph. This is also one of his Instagram photographs. He's a photographer, and he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself. You know, you can see here, he's got "Zig's Indian Reservation," and this particular shot is one of the more traditional shots. This is a rain dancer, and this is one of my favorite shots here.

So you can look at this, and maybe you've even seen things like this. This is an expression of culture, right? And this is actually from his degradation series. What was most fascinating to me about this series is just look at that little boy there. Can you imagine? Now, let's think, we can see that that's a traditional Native American. I just want to change that guy's race. Just imagine if that's a black guy. "So, honey, come here! Let's get your picture with the black guy." Right? Like seriously, nobody would do this. It baffles the mind.

In so zig being Indian, likewise, it baffles his mind. His favorite photograph, oh, my favorite photograph of his, which I don't have in here, is an Indian taking pictures of white people taking pictures of Indians. So I happened to be at dinner with this photographer, and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred. It was on an Indian Reservation he'd taken his camera up there to photograph him, but when he got there, he discovered he couldn't do it. He just couldn't capture the picture.

And so they were talking back and forth about this question: do you take the picture or not? That was fascinating to me as a game designer because it never occurs to me, like, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not? Because we just make things that are fun or will make you feel fear or make it, you know, be that visceral excitement. But every other medium does it.

So this is my kid. This is Mesa. When she was seven years old, she came home from school, and like I do every single day, I asked her, "What did you do today?" So she said, "We talked about the Middle Passage." Now, this was a big moment. Mesa's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming. I wasn't expecting it at seven; I don't know why, but I wasn't.

Anyway, so I asked her, "How do you feel about that?" So she proceeded to tell me, and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here. So the ships started in England; they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean—that's the Middle Passage part. They come to America where the slaves are sold. She's telling me, "But Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, and now they're free."

Pause for about ten seconds. "Can I play a game, Mommy?" And I thought that that's it, right? Like, and so the, you know, thing, this is the Middle Passage. This is an incredibly significant event, and she's treating it like some basically some black people went on a cruise is more or less how it sounds to her. And so to me, I wanted more value in this.

So when she asked if she could play a game, I said yes. And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house. So I said, "Yeah, you can play a game." I gave her a bunch of these, and I told her to paint them in different families. These are pictures amazing when she was—God, it still chokes me up seeing these.

She's painting her little family, so they grabbed a bunch of them, and I put them on a boat. This was the boat. Lee was made quickly, obviously. And so the basic gist of it is I grabbed a bunch of family, and she said, "Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby, and you forgot the blue daddy, and you forgot all these other things." And she says, "They want to go." And I said, "Honey, no, they don't want to go. This is the Middle Passage. Nobody wants to go in the Middle Passage."

So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother. And as we're going across the ocean, following these rules, she realizes that she's rolling pretty high, and she says to me, "We're not gonna make it." And she realizes, you know, we don't have enough food. And so she asked what to do.

I say, "Well, we can either..." Remember, she's seven, "and we can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don't get sick, and we make it to the other side." And she, you know, just the look on her face came over. And she said, "I—after a month of this, it's Black History Month, right? After a month, she says to me, 'Did this really happen?'" And I said, "Yes."

And so she said, "So if I out of the woods—this is her brother and sister—if I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone." "Yes, but I get to see them in America." "No, but what if I saw them? You know, what, couldn't we stay together?" "No." "So daddy could be gone?" "Yes." And she was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, and I started to cry, and her father started to cry, and now we're all crying.

He didn't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage, but there it goes. And so he made this game, and she—she got it. She got it because she spent time with these people. It was an abstract stuff in a brochure, in a movie, and so it was just an incredibly powerful experience. This is the game, which I've ended up calling "The New World," because I like the phrase.

I don't think "The New World" felt too new to the people who were brought over on slave ships. But when this happened, I saw the whole planet. I was so excited. It was like I've been making games for 20-some years, and then I decided to do it again. My history is Irish, so this is a game called "Shia Khan Lot." It's peace be with you. It's the entire history of my family in a single game.

I made another game called "Train." I was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics. And if you're gonna cover a difficult topic, this is one you need to cover, and I'll let you figure out what that's about on your own. I also made a game about the Middle—the Trail of Tears. This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces. I was crazy when I decided to start it, but I'm in the middle of it now. It's the same thing. I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games.

The one I'm working on right now, which is because I'm right in the middle of it, and these for some reason choke me up like crazy, is a game called "Mexican Kitchen Workers." Originally, it was a math problem, more or less, like here's the economics of illegal immigration. And the more I learned about the Mexican culture (my partner is Mexican), the more I learned that, you know, for many—for all of us, food is a basic need.

But it is, obviously with Mexicans too, but it's much more than that. It's an expression of love. It's an expression of beauty. It's how they say they love you. It's how they say they care. You can't hear somebody talking about their Mexican grandmother without saying food in the first sentence. So to me, this beautiful culture, this beautiful expression is something that I want to capture through games.

And so games for a change changes how we see topics. It changes how our perceptions about those people and topics, and it changes ourselves. We change as people through games because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so. Thank you.