In this interview Kishonna talks with Kahlief Adams, host of Spawn on Me blog and podcast and creator of #Spawn4Good, about race, games, and activism.
KG: Give us a little bit of your background. How did you get into gaming? What’s the first game you remember?
KA: My name is Kahlief Adams, I was born and raised in the Bronx. My love of gaming came about from a very young age, I started playing when I was three. My grandmother who raised me gave me the gift of gaming so that I would have something safe to engage in and to keep me off the streets in my adolescent years. The first game I remember playing was a mini stand up Pacman machine.
KG: Favorite console? Favorite game series?
KA: I LOVED my Bally Astrocade. It was a system that used these cartridges that looked like audio cassette tapes and had a super funky interface and controller. It was basically a trigger with a jog dial on the top of it. You couldn’t really play anything super intricate in terms of gameplay but I was like 7 or 8 so I had no idea what that actually meant.
My favorite current game series is the Metal Gear series. It’s like a para-military Telemundo novella (Spanish TV channel soap opera). It has wacky and zany characters and a basically incoherent story but it scratches this certain absurdity itch while having really interesting gameplay mechanics that continue to be built upon. I can’t wait for the newest iteration from Kojima-san.
KG: In your opinion, what are the experiences of Black gamers in larger gaming culture?
KA: I think for the most part they are forgotten on the consumer side. We are only looked for when it comes to the usual suspects (Sports) and stereotypical aspects of black culture. But as a whole, black gamers aren’t looked at as a demographic that deserves attention. This just feels like the same reflection we see when we talk about most parts of American culture and its relationship to black people.
KG: Why do people assume that Black people don’t play video games?
KA: I think these same assumptions come from the same place the idea that Black people don’t cosplay or like the fine arts or know how to speak eloquently come from. There is this idea that Black people are this monolithic entity that only is allowed to move or live within the constructs of the time tested stereotypes that have always been here. Black gamers make up a significant segment of the larger gaming market but a VERY small amount of the developer space.
KG: Talk to us a little bit about the Spawn Point Blog. How did it come about?
KA: SpawnPointBlog was totally a cry for help, I hated my IT job and felt like my brain was turning to mush because I had way too many discussions with users on how to right-click their mice. I needed an outlet to feel smart again and writing about something I loved seemed to do that. I started the site way too late for it to get the amount of traffic it needed to grow but at the end of the day it felt like I had a voice out there that could both help me and other people of color if they needed a platform to write about aspects of gaming culture that only we experience.
KG: Your hashtag – spawn4good – explain that to us.
KA: #Spawn4Good is an initiative that will let gamers use videogames and game playing as a platform to express their feelings about social issues. To bring awareness to injustices and to spotlight things they feel are harmful to greater society. Our first effort were to spotlight the disproportionate amount of Black lives lost to police brutality over the years.
KG: What inspired you to do this – Gaming for a Cause?
KA: So the idea of #Spawn4Good came about after our Mike Brown episode on our show Spawn On Me. It became something that needed to happen once GamerGate and Ferguson happened. I felt like both the gaming space and the real world had hit this level of toxicity that was unsustainable and for the first time in a long time I didn’t know what or how to express how I felt about them. So I sat down, thought about what good could we do in the gaming space and how we could affect change in whatever small way we could as an entity. Then the Eric Garner incident happened and it was the proverbial back breaking straw.
KG: Would you consider what you in Xbox did activism? *Note (our marathon was played on multiple platforms, Xbox, PS4, PC WiiU)*
KA: #Spawn4Good totally has an activism foundation, I personally don’t believe that you can decouple politics and games or anything that happens in a civil society for that matter. We see this want to do this in the game space and instead of running away from issues we want to look at them, analyze them and hopefully speak about them in an informed way.
We gathered some really awesome folks from all over the gaming diaspora to join in the efforts. Folks like Catt Small who runs Brooklyn Gamery & is a founding member of Code Liberation. Tanya Depass who made #INeedDiverseGames, Shareef Jackson creator of #ScienceLooksGood, Kevin L. Clark from Don’t Lose Your Day Job.com.
KG: Will you be planning more of these?
KA: Absolutely, being able to speak to issues that most gaming sites, personalities and members of the gaming community feel either afraid or unwilling to talk about is the reason why I think #Spawn4Good was so well received and will be successful in the future. Like our podcast, no one is talking about gaming and gaming culture from a Black perspective while saying “YES, I’m Black and YES I might have a different viewpoint on the games I play and all the things surrounding them. I want people to take a good hard look at that Venn diagram and acknowledge that it’s a real thing.
KG: Thanks so much!
