Video game designer Justin Moore believes that African Americans are underrepresented in his industry. He touched on this topic and others in a candid interview with Black Digerati.
"What's more remarkable to me," Moore says. "Is how underrepresented [blacks] are in places where employees will potentially have a large impact on the creative control of a game, and that's where I think the importance is."
Moore, 25, studied video game development at Chicago's Flashpoint Academy and has a mechanical engineering degree from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's a founding member and Vice-President at Metamoorephosis, an independent game development studio in Chicago.
Moore says a lack of African Americans influencing creative decisions at game development companies is visible in the many token characterizations of black video game characters and through the scarcity of black antagonists.
"In understanding that games are a medium like television and radio and literature, if African American's aren't present on the creative side of this medium, the medium is due to be skewed against them," says Moore.
He encouraged aspiring black video game developers to---pun intended---get in the game.
"Don't give up," Moore says. "If what you really want to do is game development, it's not going to be easy. Work hard. Never lose sight of your goals."
To Moore, video games are powerful vehicles for communication that can have a positive impact on the real world when well intentioned. He wants to make games that inspire thought but are more attractive to gamers than the typical educational game.
For example, he is developing a tower defense game that incorporates mental math and arithmetic into play.
"There are education games out there but they usually aren't that enticing to people. I want to try to make nerdy technology popular and fun, especially for young kids," says Moore.
The MIT graduate is speaking next month at the Association for Computing Machinery Chicago chapter meeting. He will talk about his experiences developing an iPhone game and his company's game development strategy, which draws on rapid prototyping and aims to be as flexible and nimble as possible. This strategy is meta-prototyping, a term coined by Moore.
The first rule to this method is the outlook that you'll throw out much of what you've worked on and only keep the best ideas.
"This is an opportunity to make the best out of everything you have to work at and improve on all you've done before," Moore says.
The second rule is being prepared to throw the first rule out.
"With games you can't always anticipate how it will turn out. Approaching [the process] with a certain mindset helps developers accept and move with changes."
Click here for more information on this Black Digerati and his video game development company Metamoorephosis. Visit the ACM Chicago website for more on Moore's Dec. 16 presentation, where he will elaborate on meta-prototyping and "show you how his intutitve team approach can cover game development on the iPhone, Android, and consoles like the Xbox 360," according to ACM.
Monday, November 23, 2009 at 06:37PM 
