Blog #8

Blog #8
In a piece published by Vice magazine by Brian Crimmins titled Why Does HAL Laboratory Only Make Nintendo Games? the article follows the story of Hal Laboratory a Japanese developer that was founded on 21 February 1980 that is closely affiliated with Nintendo.
The articles begin talking about how Hal laboratory started out as an independent Japanese game developer that found early success in its video games and slowly hit a wall as their sales dropped eventually not being able to offset their game development expenses.(para 1)
This is where Nintendo came in and pretty much saved HAL laboratory from filing bankruptcy. I thought this was pretty cool of Nintendo to do but, I feel like now Hal Laboratory is forever in Nintendos debt this is most likely the reason that HAL only makes games for Nintendo.
The second article we will take a look at a Blavity piece titled This Black Woman Gamer Didn’t See Black People In Her Favorite Game, So She Put Them In Herself this article starts ours by talking about how Sims is a very popular game titled that allows you to build your character’s appearance from scratch. (para 3)
The only downfall is that there was only one tone of black for available and two hairstyles when customizing a black sim character. Which when you think about it, its a little disappointing for a game as popular as a Sims to not make such a simple customization available.
Because of this Virgil created The Black Simmer an online forum where gamers can share and download custom skin tones, hairstyles, mannerisms, clothes and body types that reflect actual communities of color.
This was a cool concept for a website and I appreciate Virgil taking the initiative and making something like this happen to give Sims a better representation of the black community.
The next article we will take a look at is one published on the conversation website titled Video games encourage Indigenous cultural expression This article the compares games like games like Age of Empires that focus players’ attention on “discovering” or “claiming” land on a map (a very colonial approach), they are inherently reinforcing colonial views of the world. (para 3)
By doing, Those game developers are ignoring Indigenous approaches to mapping waterways and placenames, as seen in the Indigenous singing game Linguistics. Popularizing these discover and concur type games result in a squad one-sided view of a two-sided story.