I interviewed Maisha Wester about Coded Black on Monday, November 17, 2025 at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So today's episode, we're looking at an interactive cinema piece that was at IFA DocLab 2025 called Coded Black by Dr. Maisha Wester. So this was one of my favorite pieces from this year's program. And I believe it received the runner's up for the digital storytelling at IFA Doc Lab. And so this is a piece where it's kind of like open world exploration. So it's using like video game mechanics, but it's more of like a immersive open world walking simulator where it's kind of using the genre of horror to be able to explore kind of the horrors of the black American experience, the black British experience. To explore like 200 years of history. And so you're basically exploring around this world. You start on a plantation and that you're basically interacting with one of four different types of things. You can either have like an interaction with this kind of charred burning plant. Members of the community that are kind of sharing these oral history testimonies that are translating some of these historical elements into more of like natural language where you're kind of learning around the world by having these kind of like different testimonies that you're hearing. There'll be things that you can expect. And then as you inspect them, you kind of learn around the deeper aspects. context of that. And then there's these white glowing orbs and these green skulls. The green skulls kind of represent examples of institutional racism that is basically like different ways of oppression that are documented through a variety of different contexts. And then the glowing white orb is an opportunity to see an example of black excellence. And so it's kind of lifting up the pressure valve of all the other bearing witnessing to the traumas of all the different experiences of racism and slavery and the kind of intergenerational traumas. But it's a really amazing piece just because you kind of have this spirit of wandering and going around and exploring. But it's got an incredible amount of like scholarly research that has both clips and podcast clips and photos. And so it's kind of aggregating all this historical information and putting it into kind of a video game open world exploration context that even has like these kind of more meta narratives and cut scenes as you go from chapter and chapter. And so it's a really, really rich experience. You can download it for free on Steam if you have Windows. And it took me around four hours to play through it. But if you're a faster reader, you might. go through a little bit more quickly but it's a really incredible experience i highly recommend checking out she's got some vr components that are like much more short experiences that are that's still in the film festival circuit it's not been more widely distributed or made available but you can go to to steam and download coded black now and start to play through it and Yeah, it's a really interesting look to see how to use the mechanics of video game to kind of explore these deeper narratives and stories. And like I said, it got the runner up there at Iffidoc Lab Digital Storytelling Competition. So yeah, it's a really strong piece and really quite enjoyed it. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Maisha happened on Monday, November 17th, 2025 at IFA Doc Lab in Amsterdam, Netherlands. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:32.873] Maisha Wester: So I am, I suppose I'll use my title, Dr. Myesha Wester. And I am the creator, curator, lead writer for Coded Black, the game for PC. We also have a 360 video for headsets. That's not public yet. It's finishing up the festival circuit. So that'll be released for everyone for free next year as well. Yeah.
[00:04:01.024] Kent Bye: Nice. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:04:06.267] Maisha Wester: So I am a weird one. I am neither a gamer nor someone who was researching in new media. My research specialty is racial representation in Gothic literature and horror film studies and social and political appropriations of Gothic and horror tropes and discussions of... And so as a teacher, I'm always looking for ways to, new ways to engage students and the wider public on issues, especially on something as important as social justice. And it was in 2016, in the midst of Trump's first presidential election, my students, I was teaching a very large lecture course called What is America? It's about 150 students. And, you know, my students were saying some of the most heinous, horrible things about people of color, things that I would have expected out of the mouth of people my grandparents' age, not people young enough to be my children. And when I kept insisting, well, no, there's this information that shows you what you're saying is wrong. I can take you to the FBI stats that shows you that the majority of white deaths aren't because of black violent perpetrators. It's actually typically within the same racial community. No matter what I was saying, they wouldn't believe me because I'm a black woman. and automatically they assumed that I was working for the opposition. So I was trying to figure out a way to get the primary material to them. And to get them to engage in it and take myself out of the front picture. And so around that same time, the university I was working for was having a speed dating with technology event. And one of the booths was VR headsets because the university had invested in a ton of them. And speaking with the person, the representative, he swore that there was another professor on campus in art who had managed to recreate the entire Louvre for his students because he couldn't afford to take their students to Paris. And they convinced me that I, too, could create a video VR scene in three months knowing absolutely nothing about coding, Unreal, or Unity. And I thought, OK, well, if an art professor could do it, so can I. And off I went. Luckily, around the same time, I won a grant from the British Academy. And so I am one of the global professors for the 2020 class. And that really allowed me the space to compile all the research. But more importantly, it gave me access to significant funding. so that I was able to collaborate with Human Studio to make the project so much more impactful and beautiful than I could have envisioned.
[00:07:25.512] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I played this experience at home and downloaded it from Steam, and it took me about four hours to get through. There's a lot of reading, and it was really intense and amazing, and I'm really looking forward to digging into it. But before we do, I want to have a clarification question, because you said Gothic literature. Is there, like, a time period of what Gothic is? Or maybe just sort of describe, like, what is Gothic literature? I'm trying to connect some dots here. So just if you could sort of describe what is Gothic literature?
[00:07:52.501] Maisha Wester: So in terms of time period, it depends on if you're talking to a British Gothicist or an American Gothicist. Brits will say it was 19th century. It ends with Bram Stoker's Dracula. Americans, however, will say we were born in the midst of the Gothic boom and we never left it.
[00:08:12.415] Kent Bye: You mean like America in 1776? Yes.
[00:08:16.218] Maisha Wester: Yes. Right. So the Gothic Castle of Toronto by Horace Walpole was written in 1773, I believe. And by the time we get to The Monk, for instance, by Matthew Lewis, that's in the late 1790s. Right. So America is really cementing itself as a nation at this point, has recently won independence there. But whereas, you know, we might say the Gothic was a tradition born out of the Romantics, for Americans, really the tradition was grabbed onto because it helped us work through a lot of our anxieties and contradictions and hypocrisies. And most people know the Gothic without realizing they know it, right? So if you think Dracula, think Frankenstein. If anyone's a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, like he's the big Gothicist, right? But also Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner. Gothic is a very pervasive genre. And so my particular work looks at the black presence. In the genre, right? So, for instance, the fact that Frankenstein's creature metaphorizes the position of the enslaved, right? And allows Scheller to debate, you know, to meditate on the nature of the enslaved body, right? Is any horror that, you know, slave insurrectionists commit, is that nature or nurture, right? But again, if you look at Dracula, he's not a black presence, but he is a presence of the other, someone from the incident. He's the non-westerner threatening to invade Britain. If you look at Hawthorne, my favorite example is Young Goodman and Brown. It's a short story. And, I mean, it's super obvious in terms of its anxieties, right? The lead protagonist is literally young, good man, brown, and every man, right, who goes off on an adventure in the forest to meet the devil. And... What you see there is, again, this racial hierarchization that also occurs alongside questions of virtue, right? And so there are ways in which sin is measured against, for instance, the patterns and behaviors of Native Americans. But at the same time, the devil says that he was there with, you know, Goodman's ancestors in the midst of King Philip's War and burned the Native American village to the ground, right? So there's this real ambiguity and tension in Hawthorne, like, OK, so maybe the slaughter of the indigenous folk wasn't such a good thing. That might have been kind of evil. At the same time, though, they're not very virtuous themselves, right? So their mischief is only second to the devil. So, you know, we have, especially in America, quite often we use Gothic and horror to think about our hypocrisies, right? On the one hand, we have a Declaration of Independence that says all men are created equal, but the nation is built on the backs of enslaved labor. The literal White House was built by enslaved people, the founding fathers. owned people. So how can you say all men are created equal except for those people in chains that are working in my fields, right? And so this is a kind of hypocrisy that continues even to the contemporary moment. One of the jokes about Stephen King is he's always worried about some bit of property being built on Native American burial ground, right? And there is an important truth there, which is the extent to which America exists on stolen property, on property that is blood soaked by a number of black and brown bodies.
[00:12:21.380] Kent Bye: Yeah, it certainly sets a lot of the context for Coded Black as you go through this experience. And I wanted to also ask around some maybe more contemporary examples of folks like Jordan Peele and horror of like Get Out and Us. And then there's Sinners that also I think is kind of exploring ways to use horror to kind of reflect on the black experience. And so I'm just curious to hear a little bit how you contextualize that and if that was sort of an influence for how you're using horror horror genre game type of experience, but yet still kind of having documentary elements, but able to kind of like use the affordances of the medium to really provide a really compelling way of exploring this truth of the reality and bearing witness to all this trauma. So, yeah, but just curious to hear a little bit around like these works of kind of contemporary horror that's being recontextualized from this lens of the black experience. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:13:13.175] Maisha Wester: So the work that Jordan Peele is doing, Misha Green, Nia DaCosta. Oh, I'm awful, but I'm blanking on the name of the director of centers. But the work that they're doing actually isn't new. Right. You've had black writers. using the Gothic to speak to the real horrors of existence as a racialized, oppressed subject. So you can trace this all the way back to slave narratives. For instance, Frederick Douglass uses the example of ghosts, uses the metaphor of ghosts to talk about what it's like to see ships in the distance, these spectral figures that you can never, ever touch and never be carried away by. but nonetheless haunts you. He talks about the South as a place of screams that at a distance is absolutely beautiful, but up close you realize it's a place of brutality and torture. Linda Williams' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an explicitly, tropes explicitly on the Gothic, right? But we don't think of it as Gothic because none of those tropes are created. She endures a living burial in her determination to escape from not just enslavement, but the sexual persecution of her enslaver. And she does this at a very young age, right? It has all the elements of a Gothic novel. And she points out the horror that she is the damsel in distress, even though her enslaver and pursuers making her out to be the dark seductress. You can look at Victor Sejour's The Mulatto, which is a story, but it rewrites the story of the Haitian Revolution as a Gothic tale. Why? Because you have people like Brian Edwards that were writing the story of that revolution as a point of Gothic horror story. in which this amazing brutality is engaged in by both the enslaved rebels, but also the French enslavers, right? Whereas Britain, you know, they're virtuous and off to the side, and our slaves wouldn't dare rebel because we're not nearly as awful as the French. But Haiti has made this place of absolute horror in which rivers of blood dot the landscape, right? Victor Sejour says, no, the horror is... The system that necessitated the revolution. And he writes it as a gothic, familiar romance that ends in tragedy. I'm not going to give it away because I highly suggest please go look up The Mulatto is the name of the short story. So there's a very long tradition here. You can even see it in blaxploitation films. People probably know the name Blacula. But you should also know Ganja and Hess by Bill Gunn, amazing vampire film that never uses the word vampire. It's that vampirism becomes a metaphor for being baptized into a capitalist oppressive system that teaches us to consume each other. You see it in the 1990s, right? One of my favorites is Tales from the Hood and Rusty Cundiff's anthology of black horror short stories. And so by the time you get to Peele, there's been a long history of use, right? And Peele, like me, grew up loving horror. And I assume he had the same moment of realization when he realized that those monsters were meant to metaphorize his body. If you look at King Kong, that ape repeats the process of abduction, the middle passes for transatlantic slavery and enslavement in the U.S. And what happens when he gets free? He kidnaps a blonde chick and wreaks havoc, right? That was the metaphor for blackness and black monstrosity. And so what you have... And it's become, I'm so happy we're seeing another renaissance of black horror. But what you have are people like Peele, DaCosta, saying, and I should also say, like Victor LaValle, right? Amazing graphic novel series, Destroyer, rewrites Frankenstein. Check out Tananarive Dew, her recent novel, Reformatory, is about the real horror of blackness. racial subjugation in the reform schools that are now coming to light, right? So there's this long tradition in which black authors are saying, no, we don't have to make up horror. We don't have to imagine monsters. There's already a monstrous system that creates and turns the world into a very real living nightmare. So essentially what Coded Black does is, again, it participates in this tradition in terms of resituating not just history, but the current systems of racial oppression, anti-Black violence, systemic domination, resituating them as a real horror versus aesthetic horror. Aesthetic horror, scholars have noted, is that constructed horror, the horror we seek out. We know the tropes. It is not a horror that haunts. It's a horror that can be cathartic because we control it, ultimately. We can choose to close our eyes and not see it, but we ultimately decide to go and see these stories. Real horror isn't chosen. It finds you. And it haunts because it arises unbidden out of nowhere. So Robert Solomon uses the example of 9-11 as a moment of real horror because he had been in those towers two weeks earlier and he was a frequent visitor there. And if his schedule had been a bit different, he might have been there during that attack. Right. And so watching those scenes of the towers collapsing as a point of of real horror because there, what's the saying? There but for the grace of God go I. That could be you. That could have been you and could still be you. And that realization haunts and it returns unbidden and there's no way to fix it. There's no catharsis. There's no relief from it. Now, Solomon's talking about an unusual and extraordinary event, but we're talking about existence as a black body in a racially oppressive, racially structured society that is overly constructed and informed by necropolitics. Everyday existence is a point of real horror. I saw an excerpt the other day. I read an excerpt the other day that argued that the depression you feel as a black person, the paranoia you feel as a black person, the anxiety you feel, these aren't symptoms of a larger mental health disorder. This is survival mechanisms and the consequence of living as a black subject. and a necropolitical target in the global north.
[00:20:33.648] Kent Bye: Wow. Yeah. Thank you for that. It seems like there's a long lineage that you're participating in. And I guess you mentioned briefly that you had some students that said something that sort of sent you maybe on the beginnings of this journey. And so I'm just curious if you could elaborate on the cultivation of the structure that you wanted to explore here and that if there's any other inspirations that you were taking from you know you mentioned a lot of different pieces that are part of this lineage of gothic horror but if there's any video games or other types of films or books or inspirations that you were using as a template as you were using this conceit of wandering through this kind of walking simulator open world exploration but having these kind of archival moments of being able to learn around the real horrors and the traumas of the black American experience. Not just American experience, but the black experience around the world, because it's not just conceptualized in America, but universal.
[00:21:27.236] Maisha Wester: Yeah. So the two sites I particularly focus on is America and the UK. Right. And I did that intentionally. One, because, you know, as an African-American, I grew up with this myth that Europe, but especially Britain, was this more racially progressive nation because the British helped abolish the slave trade and abolish slavery before the Americas. Right. And, you know, in the mid 20th century, you had a ton of black expats moving to France. All right. So I've been fed this mythos. And, you know, when I got to Britain, I was in the UK in 2017 for a Fulbright. And I encounter this young black woman. She was an educator. She lived in the UK. Her family had been there for generations. And she said to me, you know, as a black British person, I can never be English. Right. And what she was saying is I may be recognized as a British citizen, but I'm never recognized as native born. And so she said even though she'd been there for her family, been there for generations, people always ask, where are you from? I'm from London. No, but where's your family from? well, they moved to London from a little further south, Plymouth, Birmingham, what have you. And they're like, no, but really, where do you, in other words, there's no way you, as a black person, that you're actually from here. And as I started doing research, more research, I realized the patterns of racial violence were being reproduced in the U.K., almost, I should say reproduced, were occurring in the U.K. almost at the same exact moments as they were occurring in the U.S. So people know about, you know, the bombing of Tulsa, of Black Wall Street, right? They know about the 1919 race. Oh, I hope they do. I hope they know about the 1919 race riots, the red summer in the US. What most people don't talk about is that there was a red summer happening in the UK at the exact same time with very similar motivations. People talk about the Detroit race riots without thinking, oh yeah, there were all those race riots in Brixton too. And we see it happening right now, right? The US has gone uber xenophobic And it's particularly targeting brown people, including indigenous folk who they've just decided shouldn't be there. And what's happening across the pond? Hey, the UK is starting some insane immigration policies that, again, primarily target black and brown immigrants. So I wanted to bring those two into stark relief to help disrupt that mythos and to really force a moment of confrontation. Because again, as an American living in the UK, people are very quick to ask me what's wrong with my country. And I can just as easily say, well, what's wrong with yours? Because as crazy as we are in America, y'all are trying to follow along. So yeah. That's a long way of saying this isn't just an American story. And in truth, I wanted to make this far bigger. I wanted to talk about anti-blackness in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy. But, you know, as you can tell, just trying to tell 200 years roughly of that story across the U.S. and the U.K. is already massive. There's just no way to do it globally without it being impossibly unwieldy. Now in terms of influences, the idea that a game could really be an impactful educational resource that also encourages empathy, I got that from This War of Mine, which has been adopted into the Polish curriculum, and which has been hugely successful, even though players frequently note, this was not a fun play, but I feel compelled to finish. In terms of the form, I was really influenced by the popularity in narrative-driven games like What Remains of Edith Finch, which is actually one of my favorites, just beautiful storytelling, or Everyone's Gone to the Rapture. And so those made me realize I didn't have to try and meet the more traditional stylistics of a game, which is you're on a mission, you have to collect so many things, find a certain person, complete a quest, that you could really just use a game as a way of exploring a story. And with Eat a Finch, you see that it's a way of exploring multiple stories. And I really appreciated that. And so I think perhaps what's really unique about Coated Black is the amount of archival material that I've given people access to. And I wanted to do that because, again, unless you're a scholar in race studies or black studies or culture studies, you might not even know some of these sources exist. much less know where to find them. And if you do know they exist and know where to find them, then you might not have access to them. So I wanted to make these things accessible. So one of the things, and again, thank you, Bridge Academy, for the funding for this. The amount I spent on permissions and copyright was significant, even for a game that is not for any kind of profit. It's utterly free to play and access and use. But still getting those permissions was costly because this is content that is reserved access, right? Which is not what education is supposed to be about. Everyone should have access. So you can't use fair use for some of those stuff. Some is fair use, right? But even some of the older documents, I was surprised at what I had to pay for because people can purchase the copyright for it, right? So, for instance, you know, as a scholar, and I had to learn a lot about copyright and permissions policy. I worked with two phenomenal permissions experts in Canada, of all places, and they were really great at helping me navigate, you know, what needs permission. Because my assumption was, it's educational, off you go. But they assured me that is not the case in every country. And the UK has very different laws. So let's avoid a lawsuit and double check. But even if you look, even for instance, for those of you that have access to ProQuest, If you read carefully, many articles say you cannot reproduce it outside of your research institution, that it belongs to ProQuest, which is just the permission to reproduce it from the copyright holder. And for those, I had to go find the copyright holder and buy the permission as well.
[00:28:40.700] Kent Bye: So even the history has been colonized in a certain way.
[00:28:44.147] Maisha Wester: Completely. It's so maddening. You know, Alice Walker pointed out, and it was her novel Meridian, and she made a really interesting point, which is to say that all college campuses, especially in the U.S., but also, especially in the U.K. But in the U.S., we have these metaphorical gates and fences around college campuses. And if you think about it, they're kind of ridiculous because you can literally, and most people do, literally step over them. So why do you have this fence, this gate that doesn't actually keep anyone out? It's metaphorical. It's marking boundary and property. And what we're seeing more and more common across libraries, university libraries, not just in the US but also in the UK, is extremely gated access. You have to have a card to swipe in to access the resources. which means the public can't get in, can't have a look at those resources. Some might argue, well, that's what public libraries are for, but let's be honest, they're severely underfunded, and they're closing left and right. Universities do retain funding, continue stocking their libraries. If it's not in physical holdings, then it's virtual holdings. So these gates are just a way of marking that knowledge, information, education is the purview of the select few that have access to that institution. And in the UK, especially when you're talking Oxbridge, oh my God, you can't get over those fences. They are not only gated, they have guards at the entrances to make sure, one, you don't walk on the weird green space for whatever reason. There's always a green space that's no walking. but also to make sure that you don't go into any of the areas you're not supposed to that are for the students, paying students and faculty, and that you pay before you even explore, for instance, the chapel. Yes, that's maddening. Maddening.
[00:31:00.180] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I wanted to talk a bit about the experience itself and the structure. I mean, I absolutely love this experience. I thought it was deeply moving and quite profound. And also what I found was that, you know, if I were to sit down and just like read the source material, because there was a lot of reading in this experience, but if I were just like to read it without the context of a narrative or this world, I would have found it hard to get through. Not only because I am a slow reader anyway, but I think... having like a narrative context helps to sort of create some sort of hook. So you have like narratives for each of the four chapters that are help guiding you through, but also a special context that helps to give a place in time, but also like things that are going to amplify that. So things that are happening in around that time period and experiences, and you're getting like little eyewitness and oral history testimonies from these characters that are sort of black charred smoking characters that, uh, really evoking this kind of lynching of the different times in American history. And so you're getting these raw testimonials, you're getting inspecting objects, and then you have this kind of mechanic of like either choose a skull to get like another hard dose of reality of the traumas. But then you have these like glowing white orbs that are like examples of black excellence that for me felt like releasing the pressure valve of the story of like, oh, let me get some good news or some optimism here because, you know, for the four different options that you have of like the different cut scenes or the oral history testimonies or the skulls, you know, most of them are like examples of the trauma of the black experience. Versus something that's like an optimistic, despite all of that, there's still examples of black excellence that can be like a sort of resilience that made me really appreciate even more so given all the other additional contextual elements weighted against the odds, which is another great metaphor as you go through the experience. But I'd love to hear you expand a little bit on these different game mechanics of trying to deliver the information in different ways.
[00:32:58.973] Maisha Wester: Yeah. So, it's, I mean, the mechanics now I think about are a bit, are really theoretically informed, right? They're quite complicated, but I did it in a way that every element informs and helps interpret the history and the material you're dealing with, right? So, for instance, the world itself, and I have to admit, this project was looking very different in its beginning stages, right? Originally, I was thinking of a far more linear story, right? for headsets right in which you watch a body mutate into different monstrous visages according to what era it's in right i'm just going to take place in a courtroom and the judge is handing down testimony but what i realized is that the assault on black subjectivity is not that neat is not that orderly.
[00:33:57.682] Kent Bye: Can you elaborate what you mean by the attack on black subjectivity?
[00:34:00.936] Maisha Wester: So for instance, we can't say that at one point blacks were predominantly figured as these kind of mad Frankenstein-like creatures on a rampage and worried about, you know, what's going to happen if we're liberated from enslavement, right? And that was a very real concern, especially as Jamaica approached abolition. This concern that the freed slaves would just immediately take up arms and kill their masters. And of course that didn't happen. But, you know, the assumption that, well, okay, first we're creatures, and then later on we become these kind of dark villains. And then somewhere in the 20th century, we're more reduced to the place of the primitive ape, right? King Kong type figure. And I realized, actually, no, there was a constant... Negotiation, renegotiation, new metaphorization, return to an old, reworking of old metaphors. In part because racial ideology is not fixed, is not a stable fact. It's a construct that's constantly politically engaged and changeable depending on the political and social moment.
[00:35:14.588] Kent Bye: And so, you know, sort of like the many ways that black bodies were dehumanized to justify within the context of these different moral systems they have from Christianity. And, you know, in those schools, you have a lot of like white authors that you get to see the ways that they're justifying what's happening. And you see this kind of hypocrisy.
[00:35:32.498] Maisha Wester: Yeah. So the game itself is made of a range of different triggers. So there's most of them are invisible triggers. And I did that on purpose because I didn't I wanted to reproduce as near as possible the experience of encountering racism as a person of color, which is you never know where you're going to step in it. It may seem like a peaceful little road, but oh, I stopped for ice cream at the wrong stop. Oh, nuts. And to really relay how exacerbating that experience is, once you hit that trigger, you can't go back to it to re-explore it. And that's meant to reproduce the experience, not just of racism, but of what's termed a microaggression, which there's never anything micro about aggression, but that, wait, did Did that really happen? Am I misremembering? That felt a way. My body is telling me, my emotions are telling me that I've just been subject to a kind of violence. Did other people see this? And it's never possible. It feels so impossible without, you have to have such overwhelming hard evidence to prove racism. And so I wanted people to have that experience. Like, wait, wait, I think I must have misread that. Oh, I can't go back. That sucks, huh? Isn't that irritating? Yeah, welcome to my world. And then you have the green skulls. And the green skulls represent racial ideology that either occur at such a high level of authority and institutional formation, So, like, in terms of law, right, when you had the resurrection of the Black Codes, which essentially reinstituted slavery by another name, you'll see one of the skulls is Thomas Jefferson talking about the nature and characteristics of black people. So the green skulls signify ideology that are coming from... such figures of authority or such places within politics and society that they continue to impact and govern how we run our society at multiple levels, right? So for instance, medicine is still over-informed by some of Jefferson's notions about black health and black vitality, all right? That's a green skull to me. That's a, we need to pay attention to how this haunts, how this grotesquely haunts. And then you have the balls of lights. And, you know, part of that on a basic level is to provide the counter evidence, right? You have all this racist ideology. And again, in the back of my head, I had my students that were like, well, but yeah, if the president said it, then it must be right. Well, no, let me give you the counter evidence. Let me give you the illustrations of black humanity, black subjectivity, black intellect, success, power, community, resilience. Let me give you those examples to serve as counter evidence against all this ideology which we want to assume is true because of who it came from. and alongside that you know you have the shadow figures the the burning figures these relay additional elements of black narrative from history but they also relay de-jargonized theory that helps you process the evidence that you're encountering right so for instance you know i rewrite the theory of necropolitics somewhere in the second scene I frame the question of the racialization of black bodies in film. But I take it out of, again, theory, high theory, and put it in standard lingo. Because as a teacher, that's what I do.
[00:39:30.574] Kent Bye: And those those encounters felt like these oral history testimonies or at least opportunities to speak to an elder who's providing a bit of a history or story or gossip in the sense of like, how are you going to navigate this landmine of context and like tips to understand around what the situation was and what the history was and what happened? And so kind of mediating the trust, but also a capturing of the history that is coming directly from the people that were there at the time.
[00:39:58.163] Maisha Wester: Absolutely, right? That's exactly what they're meant to do. And so, you know, in terms of the scene itself, the actual environment, those are based on historical fact. I pretty much amalgamated a number of plantations to get the structure of the plantation, right? To settle on one that represented both the American experience, but also the Caribbean experience. So the American versus the British experience. But I also put in details to acknowledge other forms of resistance. So for instance, if you're looking at the crop field, there's a bunch of broken tools. Why? Because accidentally breaking tools was one form of black resistance. The slave cabin that you see in the plantation scene, that's an actual reproduction of a slave cabin that the Smithsonian makes available as a 3D asset on their website. The material quality isn't great, so Human Studio used the asset the Smithsonian made available and just recreated it as a game artifact. But that's an actual slave cabin you start out in. And so, yeah, the entire environment also tells a story. And it's the same with the second scene, right? Brits are always saying, that's New York. No, it's just on a grid to make it easier to get around. Because even on a grid, I get lost, which is why we have maps that pop up. Is this a chapter four you're talking about? Yes, chapter four, the city scene. Yeah. And so it's like, OK, it's on a grid, but you still get lost. So there's some maps there. but again that also that scene itself the environment is doing theoretical work right because you start out at a library and there's a lovely little day school across the street from it and then there's a museum nice cafes all these locations of culture and as you move along you hit the courthouse And then you start to get into less well-established areas until you're finally in low income area. All right. And it's really performing the deprivation of resources that characterize black and brown, predominant black and brown communities, especially if they're low economic communities. Right. And it's really talking about the other way necropolitics works, which is through deprivation, through systemic lack of resources. You know, and I'm totally giving away my age here, but I remember when Public Enemy released 9-1-1 as a joke. as a kid, and it's only now striking me how powerful that song was, right? Because the point is that 911 never turns up to the inner city black neighborhood. The cops turn up, they're always there, but when you need help, 911 never shows up in time, right? They show up to collect a corpse, not to sustain a life, right? That's necropolitics. And so I asked Human Studio to make sure. I gave them examples, for instance, in creating the school on the black side of town. I gave them examples from Detroit. I don't know if you remember the news about the Detroit school system. It was around in the 20-teens. The elementary school that was singled out in one newscast horrified me. There was mushrooms growing in corners. The ceilings were falling in. They had a playground with a slide that ended at a heat vent. And this was the playground for children. This was the school for children. Thank God that school district has been rejuvenated. But there are tons of others like that. And so I said, well, look, I'm just going to give you examples from real life. I'm going to use the tenements, the Grenfell tenements, as the model for the apartment buildings. Right? So that scene, all of its assets are premised on real locations, on the real experience of what it's like to cross over to the wrong side of the road, right? Because especially as Americans, we all know what it means to cross a bridge or cross a railroad or cross the turnpike. Like, oh, oh, I'm not in this, quote, unquote, safe area. I've moved into the inner city. George Romero is great for pointing that out. People weren't a fan of Land of the Dead. But it's a super on-the-nose metaphor for socioeconomic and racial oppression and segregation. Like, he performs it perfectly in terms of his landscape. So, you know, to some extent, you asked about the influence. That's another one, right? As well as the very real experiences I've had moving through various cities.
[00:44:59.946] Kent Bye: Yeah, what I really appreciated around the fourth chapter and the last scene is that you have this spatial context with all these different contextual domains of the school, of the legal system, the nonprofit, of the NAACP, to see activist pushback, but... It gives you a spatial context to be able to look at, oh, here are some examples of racism in the media context or in the school context. And so you're able to go to these different locations and then to see how it's almost like a world building of these experiences of racism that you're able to explore around. So just curious to hear a bit around the spatial design of how to categorize these different types of experiences to give this context. experience of wandering a city and encountering all these different examples across all the different domains of human experience?
[00:45:50.375] Maisha Wester: Yeah, well, I mean, part of that is inspired by the fact that when you talk about racist encounters, people assume it's, well, that's just that one person. That's just, okay, maybe that neighborhood is kind of racist, but that's not the norm, right? So what I was doing is showing how racism occurs Across various structural levels, right? Because we have to acknowledge the way systemic racism means producing these oppressive systems and methodologies across different levels. Just the way, you know, what we call anti-black violence is a form of racism that gets reproduced across different races, brown and black races, right? I mean, I could have very well told a story about indigenous disenfranchisement, oppression, slaughter, genocidal onslaught, right? I'm a cultural critic of blackness. This is what I know. But that's not to say this is a unique story. And so I wanted to show that this isn't just a question of a single person or a single region. We have this notion in the U.S., this mythos, that racism is a Southern problem. But if you know the song Strange Fruit, it was first recorded by Billie Holiday based on a poem by Abel Maripol. And he wrote that poem because of a lynching postcard he'd seen. The photo of that lynching, though, took place in Indiana. Marion, Indiana. That's not south. That's not even southern Indiana. So I wanted to disrupt this notion that racism is site-specific in any way, right? We have to say that it's, in being systemic, it reaches its tentacles into every sector of existence and life, right? And that's a hard thing to reckon with, but it's important, it's necessary because we can't say, oh, well, we've desegregated the schools, problem solved. No, not really. Because while the school may desegregate it, if the black and brown children that are attending this now formerly predominantly white school are still living in economically disenfranchised communities, are still being targeted because of the color of their skin, are still seeing films which position whiteness as the center for beauty... then we've only addressed one small portion of the problem. We haven't dealt with the question of lack of resources that follow them after the school day. We haven't addressed the emotional and psychological assault of popular media and the depictions of blackness and the standards of beauty. So it's important for us to recognize what hard work, but necessary work it is. We can't just say, well, I'm just going to fix this one area and then refine. It's not that easy.
[00:49:07.847] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to ask around this effort for these more white supremacist interests to erase the history. And as I finished this piece, I thought, I hope that people will be able to see this in a number of years. I feel like there's book banning and making history, accounting of the history, just illegal to dive into, or at least, if not legally, just a license to erase it in different methods through the different cultural institutions. And so... As you go through this experience, at the same time, there's asking the audience to really bear witness to these horrors and these traumas. And it can be quiet and tense. And there's an interaction at the very beginning where you're contextualizing the importance of this bearing witness, of why it's important to listen to and to know these stories. Just curious to hear how you start to like create an experience that's not hiding the truth, but also creating a narrative context that allows people the pathway to have a narrative hook to go through and continue. But also there's quite a lot of just opening your heart to a lot of really intense imagery and trauma of these experiences that I found really quite intense and emotionally moving and powerful, but also at the same time inspiring. It wasn't too much, it was just enough, but I felt like for some people it might be too much and that they can't actually bear witness to that. So just curious to hear around this design challenge of how to invite this opportunity to bear witness to something that people want to either erase or look away.
[00:50:35.055] Maisha Wester: Yeah. So... That's the other function of the balls of light, right? And again, I'm guilty of this too, because I love horror. So I understand why it is... I can sympathize with the impulse to just really traffic in the news stories of terror and violence, right? And if we think about how often we see a positive news story, it's pretty rare. Yeah. So one of my goals was to get people to think about how they respond to stories, to images of anti-Black violence in the media and in the daily world, right? I wanted them to go from just at most shrugging and saying, well, that's a shame, or at worst, sharing it as like, an interesting topic of conversation, a bit of titillation, I wanted them to start reacting with exhaustion and fatigue and frustration and rage instead of being able to passively consume it. And I wanted to specifically encourage people to start instead wanting to turn to stories of black success, of black virtue, right? Stories that celebrate blackness. And in doing so, you know, maybe motivate more people to be part of insisting on social justice because you want to hear more good stories and you're tired of hearing the bad ones. So that was just one of the sort of motivating ideas beyond having this like intense experience. Because when I think about what I've put in the game versus what it's like to read the headlines... I mean, for me, reading the headlines is as exhausting, perhaps more so because I don't have a ball of light to say, oh, actually, I'm going to go. Occasionally, you know, my feet are throwing the story of like a toddler meeting his puppy best friend. I am now living on these stories.
[00:52:39.028] Kent Bye: We all need to find our metaphoric balls of white light as we live in this world right now.
[00:52:43.089] Maisha Wester: Yes, yes. But I also... Because one of the important things is this isn't meant to exacerbate white guilt. This isn't about feeling guilty. This is about knowing what has happened and recognizing when it's happening around you and saying no. If you feel more guilty, then maybe it's... Well, actually, I've been... an accomplice, either passive or actively in enabling this to continue. But the goal isn't guilt. The goal is recognition, understanding of this history and a commitment to help intercede. And so I do provide also stories of white allies. One of my favorites is the story of Benjamin Lay, who was outrageous. in terms of his theatrics, right? But that's just one of them. So it's not as if I'm saying, you know, all white people are awful, no. There's this awful systemic violence that we're all encouraged to either passively accept or actively participate in. And aren't you tired? Because I know I am. Well, all right, let's try and be different and let's insist our system reform itself to be different. The other thing is, you know, as a teacher, even though I talk about a lot of difficult things, I always have a bit of dark humor about me. And I let that speak in the game as well. So both of our primary narratives, our two girls, one's a tween and one's a teen, our two girls are quite snarky. And honestly, I had both myself but also my daughter in mind. Like, what would she be like? Oh, yeah, this is what my child would probably do. Because she's already pretty resistant and stubborn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would tell her not to do something and then she'd find another way to go do it anyway. So I really wanted the player to have the experience of two people who are really in a disempowered position. They're women, they're girls, they're black. They're either enslaved or from a low economic side of town. And yet they're resilient. And yet they refuse to be victims. This is a game that reminds us that, you know, to go back to my original idea, which was thinking about the different mutations society has generated around blackness. One has been perpetual victim. And I wanted to dismantle that. We're not just, yes, yes, we have been victimized, but we're also resilient. We're also heroes. We fight. We survive. And so I want to give you two of the most vulnerable people. So yeah, I wanted the players to follow the stories of two of the most vulnerable figures in our populations and see their resilience and strength and refusal to be bowed down. And that's also part of that in... Montage, right? The re-remember conclusion. It's not just lines about horror and violation and suffering. It's also remembering the moment you see your first poem published, right? Remembering what it's like to be loved. Remembering a day out with your family. is also remembering black humanity because that's the ultimate takeaway is that we need to remember black humanity when we're seeing these events unfold, when we're reading these stories. We need to remember that these are people that suffer instead of asking, well, what did they do to deserve being accosted by the cops? Probably the same thing you've done. Maybe instead ask what gave the cops the right to do that to them.
[00:56:50.894] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you mentioned that you had a VR version, or is it the same experience, or is it different? What's the VR experience?
[00:56:57.218] Maisha Wester: The VR experience is more passive, so it's like more of a movie version, a film version of the game. It's significantly shorter, so it's like 11 minutes, 44 seconds at last clock. And so it's really just... We've selected parts of the narrative. We've selected some of the triggers. And it's more of a taster. It's like a longer trailer, right, in the headset. You get a little bit more of the story. You get to see a little bit more of the two environments. But you don't get nearly the full experience. And the other thing I should mention about the project is the invisible triggers are variable. So every time you play, you're going to learn something different from
[00:57:41.830] Kent Bye: That's good to know. I have to go back and revisit.
[00:57:44.733] Maisha Wester: And I did that, not just for people to revisit, but also as a point of conversation. So IDFA's theme this year for the new media part is off the internet. And for me, my hope is that people that know each other play this game and say, well, what do you think about this asset? What do you think about this article? I found it here. Oh, no, that didn't come up for me. I got this one instead. Wait, what? And talk about the different information they've encountered. Do more research. You know, we have a website that goes with the game, not just so that I don't violate the copyright. So it has the full bibliography of all the possible assets you can encounter, but not where. but it also has a ton of additional resources, items that we couldn't include because they just cost too much, items that we just didn't have space for. And again, that's still just the tip of the iceberg. So it really is an encouragement to converse, like, oh, wait, there's other stuff? Huh, what's the educational value in what we're seeing, right, the different things we're seeing? Let's talk about and compare, but also let's go do some more research.
[00:59:03.338] Kent Bye: yeah yeah I think it's a really powerful aggregation of a lot of that research and yeah the experience of it I just really appreciated what you were able to create with it really quite powerful um and so yeah I guess as we wrap up I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential for this type of interactive media and immersive forms in this scholarly content all these things coming together and what it might be able to enable um
[00:59:30.228] Maisha Wester: Ideally, I mean, I would love it if it just encouraged people to have more of a humanistic reaction when they encounter anti-blackness, to step in, to intercede, to say something. I would also love it if it was used to educate teachers, right? Especially considering that black history is now being criminalized and the history of anti-black injustice in the states is being criminalized. But in the UK, it's being cut from the curriculum as well, right? That was the first step in the US. Like, we don't really have time to cover this. We'll just do it in Black History Month. I wanted to give teachers access to a plethora of resources because... You know, working as a K-12 teacher, you are required to do a lot. It is exhausting. I didn't want to say, well, okay, now you know the stuff is out there, go do some digging. Instead, I'm saying, I know you don't have time. Here it is, organized by topic. please peruse i even give links where i can right so that people can more readily track it down i love to see this in exhibitions right and museums but most of all i just i want people to play it and to think about it right and i think gaming because it's so much more immersive than a film There's a way in which you're pulled into a game that a film doesn't quite do. Because it's so immersive, I'm hoping that it will really encourage the development of more empathy. That by getting pulled into the story, by getting pulled into these encounters, people will be more sensitive that you won't just cognitively know or process something, but you'll also process it with your heart.
[01:01:33.268] Kent Bye: Yeah. I feel like there was some moments in the piece that really kind of allowed me to drop in and, and to feel in a lot of like looking at social media, all the horrors, you just kind of get, I get dissociated and numb to it all. And so I think there was something around just the experience of the piece that there's moments that I really allowed me to to feel and process and cathart the horrors of all the trauma so yeah just really appreciate what you've been able to create and do you have any other final thoughts or anything else left and said you'd like to share with the broader immersive community
[01:02:04.375] Maisha Wester: Yeah. I hope many of you that are interested in social justice won't just play the game, but will think about like, oh, well, if this woman who was not a gamer had no sense of game design could sort this out, maybe I can contribute to social justice. Maybe I can do it better.
[01:02:26.220] Kent Bye: Because you want to play the games too, right?
[01:02:27.701] Maisha Wester: Exactly, right? Convince me around climate change. Convince me around the anti-war effort, right? Give us the games to help us make a better world.
[01:02:44.059] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Like I said, this piece really landed with me and it's going to stay with me for a long time. And I just really appreciate seeing an experience like this to see what's possible to see in other contexts, but to really dig into this topic in a way that really gives a full breadth of hundreds of years of history that, like Kasper Sonnen said, it's a story that has happened in the past, but it's still happening today. It's an ongoing story that you get to see the historical context and Yeah, just a number of times just reflecting on all the different discussions around white supremacy that's in the world today and giving this whole kind of historical context for how we got to this point. And so it's a long piece. It's an intense piece. And it's a piece that I actually was in VR playing with a virtual desktop. So I like to be fully immersed and not have any distractions. But yeah, it was for other people that have VR headsets and like that. This is a good experience to play on a virtual screen to feel that extra level of immersion. But yeah, just like I said, it's a really powerful piece and looking forward to see how it does here at DocLab and where it goes here in the future. So thanks so much again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[01:03:52.108] Maisha Wester: Thank you so much for having me. This has been fantastic. I've enjoyed having our chat.
[01:03:58.703] Kent Bye: That's all that we have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listen-supported podcast, so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. You can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
