social justice | Polygamer

Kishonna Gray is a visiting scholar at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing department, where she teaches Women & Gender Studies. She comes from Eastern Kentucky University, where she founded the Critical Gaming Lab; and from Arizona State University, where earned her Ph.D. in justice studies. She is the author of Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live, in which she examines deviant behavior in online gaming.

In this episode of Polygamer, I ask Kishonna about the correlation between justice studies and media studies; how her relationship with gaming evolved from being a gamer to an academic; why games became less diverse after the 1990s; whether entertainment media shows a rise in violence toward women, and the ways in which that is paralleled in online harassment and offline violence; her goal in founding EKU’s Critical Gaming Lab; what her time at MIT has allowed her to do that she couldn’t do at EKU; and the hope to be found in indie game development.

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Chris Barney is a game developer who sees games as an engine of social capital. As a maturing medium, video games have the potential to reinforce, shape, and influence societal norms and values toward sexism, racism, upward mobility, and other constructs. How do video games do this, and how can game developers balance this responsibility to their audience with the responsibility to their shareholders? Can video games truly make us violent? Can a single video game change the world? Reprising his BostonFIG presentation on "The Nature and Purpose of Games: Toward Social Justice", Barney speaks on these topics, answering many questions while raising others.

Download the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 55:18 — 28.9MB) | Embed