Black Gamedevs in the Era of Black Lives Matter – Travis Williams

Today we have someone very special.

I recently sat down with Travis Williams, a seasoned games industry veteran of 30+ years standing. 

His resume and portfolio include a laundry list of AAA studios and developers like Capcom, Sony, and Acclaim. He was one of the main writers and developers behind Vampire: The Masquerade and Ars Magica. 

Throughout his career he has pushed to include the representation of People of Color in digital media.

Travis learned game development at DeVry University. When he enrolled in 1989 there was no academic path into jobs for game development at traditional colleges. 

“All through my teenage years I was a teenage hacker,” Travis said. “All through college I would ask myself questions like: ‘How can I do better?’ ‘How can I make games?’”

During his college years, Travis was pen-pals with Lion Rampant, a company known for making the Ars Technica pen-and-paper RPG games. He started consulting with them when the company moved to Atlanta, where he was living at the time.

When some of the founding members split-off to start Wizards of the Coast, the rest of the Lion Rampant team invited him to officially join.

“I decided I could go further into debt, or I could go make games,” Travis said. Needless to say, he chose the latter. And so began a long and illustrious career.

As a Black man in a predominantly white space, Travis felt like he stood out. Nevertheless, he still found acceptance in the geek community.

“When it comes to geekdom, it’s less what you look like and more what you know and what you love,” Travis said. “Especially in the 80’s and 90’s, nerds stick together. I used my position to make sure people like me didn’t feel as out of place.”

Me:

What were some of the games that influenced your work? How did they inspire you?

Travis:

I think about the games that really got me going, like the early ones, especially Zork. Infocom games didn’t have any graphics, you just read. But somehow they were magical.

I remember playing Zork 1, 2 and 3, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Just text games. I would play them for hours.

When I started making games just for myself, a lot of them were text adventures, because those were really easy to code for me.

In the beginning, it was more of the text adventure games.

The game that really got me thinking that games are much more than just timewasters really was Street Fighter. It was Street Fighter because it was real-life conflict resolution.

Someone would come up and challenge you to a fight and you were able to actually duke it out without hitting one another. You had to acknowledge “hey, you’re really good at this. I bow down to you.”

Being able to see different techniques, what bravado looked like next to someone, it was huge.

Just the rules like putting your quarter on the machine meaning “you’re next.” It was like typical male behavior but it was violent and non-violent at the same time.

Street Fighter, Elite: Dangerous, Zork, some of the Trillium games. All those games were really special to me.

Me:

A lot of the text-based adventure games you described have a lot of overlap with the pen-and-paper RPGs you helped make early in your career. Isn’t that the case?

Travis:

Oh yeah absolutely.

Your imagination can paint better pictures than any human being, even nowadays. My imagination is one of my greatest gifts, and one of my greatest enemies as well. 

When I go dark, I go dark. When I’m inspired, happy, that’s great too. Games provide that escapism, to be able to do that.

At White Wolf, one of the things I learned was worldbuilding. The “Why’s.” Why is this this way? Why is this that way?

That lesson in pen and paper was important. Being able to worldbuild, that’s huge, because it helps you build a more comprehensive world-state.

Me: 

What’s your perspective on what’s going on around the country right now? 

What are some of the ways you’ve experienced racism in your journey as a game developer? How did you navigate those situations?

Travis:

Black man born in the South. It’s not like I haven’t seen it growing up and even now.

Look, I’m unabashedly American. I don’t feel comfortable in any other country and have lived abroad.

No one knows like Black people that this country isn’t perfect, but the promise of America is that we have this ideal that we’re supposed to aspire to. As long as we’re moving towards that goal, it’s a journey worth taking.

The problem is that this country doesn’t know how to deal with its origins. If we could deal with those things and stop running from them, we could have real dialogue.

The way capitalism runs in this country, sometimes its more important than justice and equal rights. That gets in the way of a lot of things we should do better.

When the George Floyd incident happened, when he was murdered (and he was murdered. It wasn’t an accident. When you watch the video, people are saying “hey man, get off of him, you are killing him), it was yet another reminder of how little progress this country has in this area. And it’s a shame.

I pose this question to a lot of my friends: have these past few years convinced you that your Black friends weren’t imagining things?

It’s amazing how many people have woken up, and thought “I thought you were overreacting. Now I see it.”

You have to be willfully ignorant not to see things that get broadcast in 4k now. It is what it is.

What happens to a lot of people is that they start to abdicate reason to other people.

When you watch the news, they’ll show you a 30 second clip of something and spend the next 10 days analyzing that 30-second clip for you. Depending on what channel you’re watching, you’re going to get a different analysis.

Instead of people being critical and doing that analysis themselves, they offload that to someone else and say “why don’t you think for me?”

Enough people can’t just think for themselves because it’s easier to do it another way.

When you have a situation that is so blatant, people just don’t wait for someone else to analyze what’s going on. They immediately see it for what it is. There’s just more people know who say that.

It shined a light on what everyone else was saying where it was just irrefutable.

It feels different. It really does. It feels like enough people see it for what it is, and that’s encouraging. Because it means that if nothing else, we can start having the proper dialogue.

Me:

I’m encouraged by the new dialogue we’re seeing too. But historically, for every step forward we make in the name of progressivism, we tend to get a backlash from the forces of the far-right.

And it must be said, geek spaces are not immune to this either. We saw this in 2014 with the rise of GamerGate, and later in the 2016 election when they metastasized into the Alt-Right.

How do we prevent that from happening? How do we stop the backlash?

Travis:

I don’t think this level of consciousness is going to easily abate to be honest with you.

It’s all about representation. It’s about making the uncommon or the unfamiliar more so.

Whether or not you’re seeing more ethnicities represented in products and media, you being able to show people how people who are not like them or look like them have to navigate.

I always ask game developer friends of mine: “isn’t it bizarre how we can make you feel like a werewolf or someone with superpowers, but how come we can’t show people how it is to be marginalized? To be trans, or gay, or black? Why don’t we tackle those issues, so people can see what it feels like?”

Movies show you, even great movies that make you feel. But with interactivity you can go so much further than that. 

Fortune favors the bold. Being able to make someone walk a mile in your shoes as a person they’re not familiar with is a step in that direction.

We have the power as people who control interactivity that we should focus on that. It really does give you a different perspective.

I’m not so bold to think that we can change the world. But I definitely think we can put a dent in it.

You’ve seen the proceeds that come from gaming. There’s no reason why we can’t create products that help people see that. It really is the unfamiliar that people get afraid of.

Am I afraid of the Alt-Right? What I think it is, is that they feel threatened. Some people just don’t like change. It threatens their power structure, even though they’re not really part of the structure. It’s the perception of being in charge. 

Being able to show people the things that separate us aren’t as powerful as the things that connect us. I think we can do that with games.

Me: 

Final question. Favorite DnD class and why?

Travis:

It’s definitely a magic-user. I always thought that rules don’t apply to me. (Laughs)

I’ve always thought, “rules are for people who don’t know better.”

So whenever there was an opportunity to be a different class of person, I always chose the person who would break the rules. And magic-users break the rules.

Magic-users, all day every day.

When I was at White Wolf, the last game that I did there was Mage: The Ascension. My character, my black, male character, is on the cover of that game.

I don’t think that Phil, or Stewart, or anyone else at White Wolf really knew how really important it was for me to have a Black man on a cover of a fantasy game. I’ve met several people who comment on that all the time. 

Because you don’t have to follow the rules. And so I don’t.

Conclusion

It’s humbling to think that while the rest of the world is marching towards the future, America is still struggling to come to terms with its past.

Here in America our leaders openly mock protestors fighting for their dignity, slaughter Black people in the streets, tear children from their families and put them in cages, violate women with impunity, and dismiss the warnings of climate change scientists out-of-hand.

Meanwhile, Africa (Nigeria, South Africa) and the Caribbean islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Curacao) are becoming new epicenters for entrepreneurship and tech innovation. The Bitcoins and Twitters of the future are at this moment being built in places like Lagos and Kingston, cities in what our president would deem “shithole countries.”

While White, Middle America is pulling the world down into darkness and death, elsewhere in the world Blackness is a shining beacon of hope and light.

Something to think about as we watch the protests unfold.