Celebrating Black games talent should extend beyond Black History Month
GamesIndustry Staff
Monday 14th February 2022
Black History Month serves as an annual reminder of the many accomplishments of the Black community, but also of how sparingly we celebrate those accomplishments the rest of the year.
It's common for Black History Month to prompt the publication of features and interviews that celebrate key figures and raise awareness of up-and-coming talent. Any efforts in this regard are welcome, but ideally this would be a year-round effort -- the barriers Black voices face in being heard don't go away when March arrives.
Certainly, representing diversity and exploring how the industry can improve in this regard is an increasingly important goal for this very site, so we decided to round-up our coverage from the past year showcasing a range of Black developers and executives at various levels of the industry.
But when we actually compiled our coverage of Black talent in games, it wasn't as robust as we had hoped.
For the record, here's the selection we found:
We also collated the various write-ups of talks and panels, as well as our own Academy guides, that feature a range of voices including those of Black games professionals. Once more, we recognise that having a diverse array of people in such pieces is not an accomplishment; it's a requirement.
In addition to those, there were a number of Black industry figures celebrated in our year-end Game Changers feature.
It remains important for us to speak to a wider array of studios and developers about a broad range of products, and any piece we can produce in such a manner is a step towards better representation. But we also recognise we can do better. We will do better.
The games industry in general should do better, too. Black History Month can,
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