Thank you for joining me today for the presentation
of A Seat at the Table--
Black Feminist Thought as a Critical Framework
for Inclusive Game Design.
This work represents a labor of love for me,
especially since I am a black woman at CSCW.
Black feminist thought is an ideology first introduced
by Patricia Hill Collins in 2000.
And I quote, "For African-American women,
the knowledge gained at intersecting oppressions
of race, class, and gender provides the stimulus
for crafting and passing on the subjugated knowledge of Black
women's critical social theory.
As a historically oppressed group,
US Black women have produced social thought designed
to oppose oppression, but the purpose
of Black women's collective thought
is distinctly different.
The need for such thought arises because African-American women
as a group remain oppressed within a US context
characterized by injustice.
Black feminist thought consists of six primary principles.
There are three that I'll talk about briefly today,
the first one being Black feminist thought in the United
States.
Here you see a picture in which black women--
college graduates who just obtained their bachelor's
in their respective fields--
are celebrating their hard work, their perseverance
on an all-female historically black campus
in the southeastern United States.
This is known as Spelman College,
and on this institution's campus,
we learn of the rich history of Black women
and their contributions to the United States,
to society, to the world.
And so it's the place which affirms
our value, our humanity.
Now this work is situated in the context of game design,
and so what we're doing here is engaging Black women
with different perspectives and with different roles
or responsibilities in this game design
process, which took place over an eight week time frame.
So for the first five weeks, we have the game design team
which consists of Black women who
are college students, myself, few other researchers, students
who are not necessarily in computer science
but have an interest in gaming and learning
how to create games-- and some have experience making games.
The picture on the right is our expert Spanish instructor,
who has years of living and speaking
Spanish in Spanish speaking countries,
and so we relied on her expertise
in helping us to design a mobile game that helps novices
to develop their Spanish vocabulary skills
in the context of cooking.
But that's fine.
Do what you can do.
But I think that there's Black Spanish people
and I feel like there is never any representation.
So I think that would be interesting.
Can you make your own character, maybe?
Here we go again.
That's another request we got before.
So you want to make your own NPC.
I really like to do that on games.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Like how Sofia is a character in there,
and her father owns the restaurant.
Let's say, a situation could be you create a character
and you're helping Sofia make something
for her father's restaurant, and she says, grab the azucar.
And then you can move your phone around, like that.
And there's a kitchen, and you can look around the kitchen.
And it says to grab what is in the corner.
There could be a question mark.
And you click it--
I don't know-- and it would say, "azucar equals sugar."
Thank you.
Excellent, thank you.
So could it be done where we could
start making the dishes from the perspective from the character,
like you can just be hands and pour something there.
All right, that's one idea so you just--
first person perspective, I don't have any body,
I'm just doing it.
OK, you're going to have this problem here
that get to a point where so many different people are
playing from other schools.
So to me, the character can have different races
and different everything, like phones and different--