The Brilliant Scholar Who’s Challenging Racism In Game Design

... [Dr. Kishonna Gray] connected with a group of Black teens who agreed to meet her in Grant Park to show her how the game works. However, the young men were rebuffed by security in the area, their numbers and their Blackness disruptive, Gray said, to the white sensibilities of that part of the city. So the teens began heading back home to the predominantly Black neighborhood of Englewood.

Dr. Gray instead headed out to Englewood to meet them. After all, couldn’t Pokémon Go be played anywhere? Wasn’t this one of its selling points, part of what made it so exciting? “I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Gray told the conference. “When I went out there to try to find a [Pokéstop], there were none around.” She shows a slide contrasting a cluster of interactable points in the game in and around Grant Park with the dearth of them in Englewood. Well, okay, she admits, there were not quite none. “There was one,” she says. “It was a statue in the park. And it was a Confederate statue.”

. . .