The 80s were about integrating two families, discovering the extent of it.
The 90s were about me, discovering what I can do, what I like.
The 2000s were about discovering the outside world, how it works.
The 2010s just started and I guess they’re about making sense of all this. I can’t make sense of it. Between what I’ve been told, what I’ve learned, what works what doesn’t what society accepts or condemned, pretty much nothing makes sense and I see exactly where but what’s the point? It doesn’t change shit.
I mean it does in a way make sense it’s just that it’s way, way way less romantic than I thought.
I was reading this excellent article on Dave Chappelle. He is important to us black dudes because everyone loves him. He quit over pressure and the terrible feeling that he was doing things wrong. The author goes on negritude:
But the broader, more important meaning of Negritude has to do with a process isolated and identified by these poets. It is the process by which Black people, who have been cut off from and made to learn to know themselves again, come to accept themselves, and begin to believe in (i.e. to value) themselves.
I guess I am in that process too. When I’m looking at the game industry, I try to find some ways to feel comfortable and like myself. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Japanese culture influence so much, there was no black VS white, no rock VS funk. They were showing me that I can be free. That was on paper.
In the real world this is not how it works. This is where Dave’s story is important to me. He went up there and then he was like, “no, man”. The price to pay was too high: ignore who you are and become something you are not. When you are a black dude who had the chance to avoid any trouble, who had the chance to study, who had the chance to be free compared to 99% of other black dudes, the pressure in higher careers is unfathomable. It’s not even pressure, it’s 600 gigatons Blues.
Like Dave had to conform to Hollywood, I have to conform to the Videogame Industry and it’s very hard. I love and always will the solving problems side of game development and how much we can do compared to the real world. I feel genuinely connected to this. But I don’t know how to position myself within current mainstream game development culture. Mainstream game culture. Mainstream western culture.
QUESTIONS. SUSPENSE.