Frontiers, Pioneers, And Pace Setters: Leading While Black In The Innovation Economy With Latoya Peterson
The Digital and Innovation Economy is in the midst of a technological revolution—one in which Black people have the best chance of not only getting in the water but also on the front side of the wave. Emerging Black technologists face new terrains as pioneers among pioneers, as well as old habits and beliefs that aren’t welcoming to the possibilities of an inclusive digital landscape. Nevertheless, breakthroughs happen, thanks to trailblazers committed to not being the only Black visionary in a still very undiversified world.
Join From Chains to Links and guest Latoya Peterson, Cofounder, CXO, and Director for the Culture at Glow Up Games, as her pioneering journey in new media and gaming provides major keys for how rising talent can succeed in the digital economy while still being authentic to themselves and the culture.
Frontiers, Pioneers, And Pace Setters: Leading While Black In The Innovation Economy With Latoya Peterson
Welcome back to the show. I am your co-host, Kelly Burton, and I’m here with my other co-host, Ife Ike, the author of the newly released The Equity Mindset. We are here with our guest. I’m so excited about this episode with Latoya Peterson, who is the Founder and CXO of Glow Up Games. Welcome, Latoya.
Thank you so much for having me.
We are in Washington, DC. You live here.
I do. I’m a local.
You’ve been a little busy because?
I have been everywhere. It’s that game studio hustle life. I was at an investment summit in Canada, and then I had to come to Baltimore for an HBCU meetup. I got like two nights at home. Now, I am here and running through events. It’s so lovely to be here. Always awesome rocking with the Black Innovation Alliance.
I love that and I appreciate it so much. I want to give the audience a little bit of insight into our origin story. You were connected to us by a dear friend, Tamika Key. If you are out there, what’s up? We brought you on to speak to our audience about the BLIDE initiative, Black Liberation In the Digital Economy. Our very first virtual conference when we were still in COVID. You were one of our keynotes and you dropped the mic. You were so dynamic.
In my mind, I did a little pin in my brain like, “We have to pull Letoya in however and wherever we can.” When we are thinking through the guests for this show, you are among at the top of the list of folks that we wanted to bring because your story is so dynamic and what you’re doing is so important and inspirational. Thank you for accepting the invitation.
Thank you for offering. Again, I’m a huge supporter of what you guys do with the Black Innovation Alliance. We need it. I’m out here. We are over here in game dev. It’s less than 3% of us. We all struggle. Anything I can do to be like, “Where can I be? Who could we support? Do we have a crew?” That is how I’m always trying to move.
That is the spirit of this show.
Identity And Heritage
Speaking of being, because we’re getting deep, if we had time for this. This is a question that Kelly loves because she is nosy. She already mentioned that this is home for you. She likes to ask the question, where are your people from? Where are you from?
Before I answer that question, Stephanie Dinkis, who is this fantastic AI artist, if you don’t know her. We found out there was a Black robot. Her name is BINA. It’s a whole thing. We wrote about it. It’s in WIRE. There’s a whole thing.
I read about that.
That’s the question Stephanie asked, BINA48, the robot. She went, “Where are your people from?” The robot couldn’t answer because the robot wasn’t programmed by Black people so it didn’t know how to say anything. This is a whole project, so anyway. This is where we start.
That’s deep.
Was that in the article?
I think so because Stephanie has now done this like a multi-generational AI project.
I read about BINA and I had mixed feelings about it.
There are so many in it.
We could talk about that.
Real Black BINA and digital BINA. They’re totally different robots.
It’s a whole thing.
We’ll discuss this, but you went, where are your people from? I was like, BINA question because robots can’t answer. This is what problem in AI. Anyway, where I’m from? I’m from here, from the Urea, as we would like to say. It’s interesting because I don’t have the usual vocal tells from DC because I grew up in Montgomery County. I went to school in Silver Spring, Maryland, and my dad lived in Southeast. I was back and forth for more capital years, lots of interesting memories.
I was in Oregon, and I was talking with Nataki Garrett, who at the time was the Director of the Oregon-Shakespeare Festival, and she’s from here. I was talking to one of her cousins and she was like, “The amphitheater.” I was like, “Carter Barn.” She was like, “You said Carter Barn.” She was like, “You didn’t say Carter Baron. You said, Carter Barn.” It’s one of those local things the same way. I was listening to something on TikTok. They had a DJ. He was like, “Go. Go. Somebody must be from DC.” I was like, “It wasn’t me, but whoever that was, respect.”
I have a follow-up then to that. When did you realize that you were Black in America?
I have this whole thing. I was taught from a very early age that you are not playing with no White barbies. You are not doing these things. You need to have a healthy self-image. I read Farai Chideya’s Don’t Believe the Hype back when I was like nine. Me and her our friends now, so I don’t tell her to how old I was when I read it, but she’s in the area too. Anyway, her mom is from here.
It’s interesting too being from the DC. area and being Black. I realized later when I was doing Civil Rights studies and Civil Rights work that they have a thing about Washington Negroes starting from Harry Belafonte who had said and Cast Your Buckets Where You Stand, what’s his name? Not W.B DeWal. The other guy. You know who I’m talking about.
Was it Booker T?
There you go. Also had a whole thing on Washington Negros and how we think about ourselves. This idea that you can have a thriving Black middle class, we could be smart and creative. We can be anything that we want is specific. I did not realize to DC. and how they raise us up. I have cousins in the South. I have other folks. We’re all on the train lines. My other people is from Greenville, South Carolina. We’re on the Carolinas.
When I went to other places, I was like, “We don’t have this. We don’t do this. We all live on the other side of the tracks. What is this?” There was a series of realizations that there wasn’t an issue with my Blackness, but the world was not going to be fair. In this area, it’s like a little bit more tampered down because there are so many of us.
They’re used to seeing Black people with different levels and different stats but when you go somewhere like San Francisco, they act like you are two seconds from Robin and Duane Reed. I’m like, “I hate it.” I had to live in San Francisco for a year and I struggled that whole time because they’re not accustomed to Black excellence in the way that it is here. I’m like, “I can live in LA, DC, and New York and everywhere else.” I got to start thinking about overseas after that because I’m like, “Maybe in Chicago.” There has to be a place where we are known.
That being known and growing up for me was more like a class struggle because I grew up underclass. I came up where we were working class to poor then I transitioned to being a professional. All of a sudden, Washington opened up because before that, I just lived in DC, then Washington opened up and I started working in Washington. It was just a different life and just seeing those things was a little bit more real for me. The Blackness was always foundational, but the class jump, being here, was different. When I go to other places, you just get reminded. They’re like, “Oh.” It’s one of those.
Thank you for introducing at least in this space, the concept of like the series of Blackness. Especially when you put regionality behind it like DC. The greater DMV area is very unique because it’s not that big but there is a unique Black experience that I’ve learned having lived here for a few years at one point in time. Also, the first time I met a “Native Washingtonian” because that’s how like the nativeness and knowing which streets and what part. I remember when the Nine Lives of Marion Barry came out.
I love that documentary.
I love it. Let me tell you something about it. It is a classic and we don’t revere it enough because it’s showing this individual. I love the way it starts. It shows him starting like spritzing his hair. Remember that? He’s spritzing his hair with soul glow and getting it nice and oily because he’s about to run again. He’s there with his great-grandson who’s walking down his street, “My grandfather Ben, the hero of the.”
I met Marion before he passed out. I was testifying in DC. The sharpness of who he was made me understand greater Washington even more, how the world outside can have this narrative of this one individual. The people who live here also hold stories of each other in a very intimate personal way. They weren’t going to let you talk about Marion any old way.
Anyway, as you talk about the series of Blackness and I think about the Nine Lives of Marion Barry, it’s a testament to all of our experiences with Blackness and how there are different parts that open up to us. There are also other parts that people think and perceive of us. It’s up to us as to how we connect those narratives. Thank you for sharing that.
The other favorite documentary I have from this area, by the way, is the Legend of Cool Disco Dan, which is the other. That premiered a few years ago. I still have the T-shirt. That was a few years back. Again, there’s a uniqueness because you’re right, DC is small but think about the tapestries. Also, too, when I go to other places, people are always like, “What is this very diverse upbringing in childhood that you have or what’s going on with the Salvadorians? What’s going on with the Ethiopians?”
It’s like, we all are here. This is a lunch. Are you trying to get a star lollipop from the Asian market? It’s just where everybody was. Salvadorians came here after the war in ‘75. It’s just this area. This is the area where people come to seek asylum and where we have more Ethiopians outside of the continent. The way that New York is with Puerto Ricans, we are Ethiopians. It’s a tapestry of us all together and just understanding things. It is fascinating. Again, the Native Washingtonian is amazing to me because that’s a class thing. I know of Native Washingtonians but those were other Black people. Those weren’t necessarily us.
Career Journey
I love this thread and we’re going to explore a little bit about where you have landed in terms of your career, but I want to get a better understanding of that journey, understanding of the journey. You grew up in the Metro DC. area, and then?
I didn’t leave.
College and early career, talk us through it.
It’s always interesting because now I have enough background. I don’t have to worry about things. Before, you’ve got to put a good front on and you’re like, “I did this. I did that. Do you know who I am?” Now I’m like, “I’m a hood. It’s fine.” I don’t worry about it anymore. I grew up in the area. Mom lived in Silver Spring, and Dad lived in Southeast. I went back and forth. At seventeen, I moved out. It’s like, “I can do this on my own. I’ll be all right.” I moved out and did not go to school. I did not go to college.
After I graduated high school, I was working jobs. The job sucked. I was like, “I should probably go back to school. It seems like a bad idea. I don’t want to steal my life like this.” I had this critical decision to make because I had moved out. I was renting a room in a house where my other friend had lived. They were running out of different rooms because their daughter had cancer. They were running out of room to raise money for the cancer treatment.
I moved in next to her, so me and my friend had this frat house-style lifestyle. The landlord, Aunt Lulu was from Indonesia and he was working at Venehana, but he also used to be in Hollywood. It starts to be crazy. He was in one of the scenes from White Men Can’t Jump. We watch it and his back on the little behind. His back on it and we’re like, “Blahblah.” Anyway, that’s what we were living with. I was like, “I got to get my life together. What am I going to do?”
I only have like $400. I can get a computer or I can get a TV. I graduated from high school in 2001, so this was 2001. I was like, “I could only afford one. If I get a computer, I could do extra stuff. Let me get a computer. Let me try this.” My first computer was a Dell. It was back in the day when you were getting a Dell era. It was delivered on September 11th, 2001, which was super weird because we watched it. Everybody’s on there we’re like, “What the hell’s going on with the towers?” There’s a knock at the door and it’s the UPS guy with my Dell. That’s weird.
I spent a few years just messing around on the internet. I wasn’t doing anything specific. I was downloading Sailor Moon episodes from Limewire. I was reading webcomics and webtoons. Before then, I had been like a stellar student and AP classes. Everybody assumed I was going to go to college and I just didn’t. I was like, “I fucked my life up. This is what I got. That’s it for me.” There was that astounding thing and nothing was going to come with this.
I spent a lot of time playing around the internet, being on forums, arguing a racist, and doing all kinds of different things. On a Wednesday, just doing dumb shit on the internet. Nothing that I thought was going to be anything. I was working at a market research company at the time and they sent me to this remote part of like a very White area of Massachusetts so much so that they would like to stare out the car at you if you were a Black person. There was nobody. You were an instant celebrity. They were like, “Who is this?”
I was sitting there in that hotel room alienated and I started searching for conversations about race and interesting things because I was bored and I remember this was probably about 2005. At the time, up popped a show, which was brand new. Very new that Apple hadn’t gotten to the show game. There was some of this thing called Podcast Alley. There is this show called Addicted to Race. I was like, “Interesting.” It was run by my friend whose name then was Carmen Van Kerckhove.
It was just this interesting, dynamic, and flowing conversation. I was like, “I like this show. I don’t know what it is but sounds pretty dope.” I became a regular reader of the blog, which at that time was called Mix Media Watch. It was on a platform called Xanga. We moved it to this new thing called WordPress. Again, this is like the dark ages of the internet. I feel like, “It’s back at GeoCity’s time.” At this point, when I’m talking to my little Web-3 Gen Z kids at the game studio. I’m like, “Back in my day when we had dial-up.” The old stuff.
I started contributing to the blog and to the show. I got to know Carmen. Carmen was like, “Why don’t you just become a contributor?” I became a contributor, and then a writer. All this time, I never thought I could be a writer. I thought you had to go to college for that and do professional school and things like that but blogging was new. It’s this nascent thing. By that time, I was working in federal procurement for the Library of Congress. Again, I don’t know, local. These are the jobs you get in DC.
I keep telling people that some places have factories and we have a government. You go work for the government. I worked in federal procurement for the Library of Congress writing grant reports or procurement reports and putting stuff in Fed biz ops then I would go interview people on my lunch break or try to write a blog post real quick before I had to clock back into work. At some point, I was like, “I’m busy. I have work, school, and this blogging thing. Let me take a semester off from school and do whatever I’m going to do with this blog thing. Who’s even reading? Who cares? We’ll see what happens at the end of it.”
I never went back to school. I ended up getting writing gigs. At some point, I started making more money from writing outside than from the actual work I was doing. Remember, the first time I think I got a check from Slate for $500 for me writing about vampire sex. It was so stupid. I was like, “How did this happen? This is my life and this was that era.” I started writing for Jezebel. I started being a contributor and started doing all the stuff. The blog blew up. It ends up becoming racialicious. At some point. Roger Ebert started reading our blog and Juno Diaz knew it. Literary, celebrities all of a sudden.
I was on NPR all the time. We were doing different things. People started asking me to come host. All of a sudden, I had this media and literature career. That was super weird. At that time, I was still working a shift at Kramer Books. I would go work a brunch shift, come back, and write. It was hilarious. I saw some of my coworkers because my friend was doing a book signing there. I went and I was like, “I used to work here.” People were like, “What? You used to work here?”
One of my friends came out of the back from the old days, like, “I heard you live in large now.” I was like, “You’re right through size. I’m in the bookstore now.” I was always a good writer, but I just didn’t see a path for that and it just emerged through the internet. After that, I was like, “There’s no real rules to this professional shit, apparently. I could just do what I want.” I just kept moving.
Over time, I was doing a lot of work with the show on Al Jazeera called The Stream. It was like the first-ever social media news show. That was wild. We were doing that during the air of spring. That was wow. The stories. It was one of the most impactful and direct news to the people things. I love being a part of that. I ended up doing like a night fellowship at Stanford because I went and applied.
I was like, “I got a bachelor’s degree.” “Are you sure?” They were like, “There’s no degree requirement to come do this program. Go for it.” I got in. I was the youngest fellow at the time. I was the first fellow that was not from a news organization. The first independent media fellow that they had ever put in a fellowship. Now, I’m on the board of that fellowship. After you go to Stanford, nobody asks you questions about your resume anymore.
You don’t have to worry about it. They just see Stanford and stop reading. I didn’t graduate. I was just sitting here but they’re just like, “Fancy.” By then, I was speaking at these larger universities and stuff like that. I was like, “What else can I do?” I came out of Stanford and ended up looking into media production. I ended up going into media management, so I ended up back at Al Jazeera for their launch of the America channel.
I got poached out of there to go to Fusion which was ABC and Univision and their joint venture. I got poached out there to help relaunch ESPN’s The Undefeated, which is about race and sports. I did a whole bunch of stuff and they’re Andscape now. It was undefeated at the time and I was there. I did a whole bunch of crazy stuff. I worked for Disney. Disney put me in the ARVR group and the AIML group. That’s where I got my initial training in artificial intelligence. I realized I wanted to go faster. I found Blacks in AI.
I was like, “I need to be down.” They were like, “There’s 1,100 of us. Come on. What are you waiting for?” Timnit Gebru who was famously the person fired from Google. It’s much more than that, let me tell you. Timnit ran the group. They were trying to get a group of us to go to NeurIPS, which is this big neural information processing systems conference. I was telling people, I was like, “I got this project called AI in a trap. It’s just like a little side thing. I think it’d be cool to think about like different social norms and whatever through music.” They were like, “You should submit this paper to NeurIPS.”
I have never done an academic paper. I don’t even know what this is yet. This is ridiculous. I was like, “Thank you so much. It’s a cool project but I don’t think this is right for me.” Timnit must have been listening to everybody. She sent this email to the listserv that was like, “Do not count yourself out before. Let people say no to you. You need to take this shot.” I need to go find it and put it on my wall.
Timnet was basically like, “If you don’t bring your asses to this thing. Do you know what I have gone through?” Later I found out the amount that she was in. She was fighting the Canadian government to get people visas to come to this thing. It was ridiculous. I ended up sitting here with like Yann Lecun and all these like AI luminaries at this thing. I still never made an academic poster so I made a movie poster. Think about that culture shock moment of like all these PhD students and my ass. I was like, “This is my project.”
After that, I went through an Nvidia training. I deployed a neural network and I started realizing that I was like, I loved working for Disney. It was one of the most fun experiences in my life. Working for ESPN was interesting as hell because I’m not into sports but it’s like banging with the bros. That’s what we’re going to do. It was very fun and team-oriented. It was a very intense three years then I was like, “I should do something else. What else can I do here?”
My good friend Mitu Khandaker who is my Cofounder at Glow Up, is our CEO. Mitu was like, “We should start a game studio. You write about games and you love games. You’ve been playing since you were six. We should do something.” I was like, “I don’t know how to make a game but okay. Maybe. It’s like brunch bullshit like just drinking mimosas and stuff. We should start a company. We’re going to take all this shit over. We’re going to do this.”
That is the level of conversation. You’re like ate mimosas in, so everything is possible. We were like, “Yes, bitch. We’re going to do it.” The jokes were on us because we had another home girl who worked for HBO. Mitu must have said something and all of a sudden, we got this call from HBO that was like, “We’re looking for a studio to pitch for Insecure. Can you guys pitch?” We were like, “Shit. We got to take this shot. They’re not going to give it to us. We’re a brand-new studio but let’s do it.” Years later, we launched Insecure, the come-up game in November of 2021.
We had to live through a pandemic first of the whole everything. We worked on another project for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival called Hella Iambic. They had a hip-hop version of Romeo and Juliet. They meet like the first meeting scene in the garden. They did it to two shorts blow to whistle. It was the Blackest Shakespeare experience I’ve ever written. I was so happy to be a part of it. We launched a live event version of that. We did a prototype with Niantic for what we’re calling Game Three, which is like our project Hela Outside and we’re working on Game Four. That’s it.
What’s refreshing for me is the way you kept reminding us that you didn’t go to college and following your journey, the world in many ways, especially to Black people in this country tells us this like a doomsday outcome if you don’t go to college. All these reminders of staying in school and what that would mean. When you get to this latest part of your life and you ask this question like not only first make the statement, “I want to do something different,” then ask the question, what should it be?
On Innovation Today
I feel like there was this freedom in your life, whether you knew it or not, always had this freedom of recreation. I want to get a sense as both a producer and an innovator, of what your thoughts are about innovations now and what maybe we need to do differently with like not so much thought process. Maybe if it’s not different, what is it that you’re recognizing now about your journey that maybe others need to hear about that creation is processed?
Even seeing themselves as a creator or reinventing themselves right at any point in their life? I felt it was so refreshing to hear the freedom that you had to ask that, which I think, as somebody who was multi-degraded, not because I want to but because of the way society in many ways plays with all of us. I feel like that’s a scary question to be like, “I’m going to do something else.” I wanted to get your sense of that. I’m still playing with that in my head.
I love this question because the grass is always greener. The first half of my life was brutal, not having a degree, especially being Black. I always tell people like, “I never got a job the real way.” I got jobs through the side door, always. Somebody vouched for me and then got me in that door. My resume is not going anywhere through. Now it is, but back then, it was not happening outside of somebody vouching to being like, “We think Latoya should do this.” It is a little bit of a harder road.
I’m like, “I’m off doing this now.” That’s what it is because it’s interesting. There are other programs. People have been like, “Will you go back? Are you going to finish?” At this point in my career, I’m like, “I don’t know.” I want to be a librarian when I retire. That’s the other goal. I’m like, at some point, I will return to the stacks where I was born. I was going to go die here and help kids find books. That’s one I’m going to be dying. In my late 50s, early 60s, I’ll come to the libraries and do this stuff here.
You see you’re running the Banned Books Library.
Librarians are the coolest people. They’re so cool. I used to be a circulation desk associate. Again, I had like 30,000 jobs. I remember in the Vecolor, like, “Hey, Mom.” My friends would be like, “Toy.” Especially in the old days. I would be working 3 to 4 jobs at the same time and picking up brunch at Sheriff Cramer’s. I was hustling trying to get up out of here.
It’s interesting because school gives you structure. They tell you what to learn and how to learn it. When you learn independently, you don’t have that structure. You don’t know. It’s random. I have big gaps in my knowledge because I learned stuff when I felt like learning it or when it was presented to me. It’s not necessarily something that was structured. You don’t have advisors checking your work and telling you what to do. I came up on the blogs. That’s how I became a writer and that meant people just attack you all the time. Until at some point, you write well enough that they just attack your message and not your structure or your grammar. That’s how I learned how to write. I was like, “Okay.”
That was your classroom.
It was the classroom in real-time, live. It was also like that era, specifically because it could have easily worked out a different way. A lot of my friends were like strippers.
We like sex workers.
We didn’t have great job options out of high school all the time. I was in the AP program, so they expected me to go to college. Let me tell you something, if you’re not an AP program, they do not expect anything out of you. You can just sit there. I went to three different high schools, so you go to different places and what they expect of you varies depending on what region you’re in or what schools you’re in, Montgomery County, PG, and in DC. It just depends. It’s a weird one. Asking that open question, though, again, do you know that joke about Snoop Dog where they’re like, “Snoop has completed the game of life and now he’s doing side quests?” Snoop just be doing the most random stuff.
I love it. It’s my dream.
Every time I hear a new snoop story, I’m like, “I need to read his memoir. What were you doing at all times?” That’s how I feel. If you’re following a path, you know what the path is. It’s like, “If you want to be on the hill. You’re doing these internships. This is where you need to get to. You’re studying Poli-Sci. You’re going to get your Masters.”
In DC, they got the status JD. I don’t want to practice law, but I’m just going to go get my law degree. You know how we do. Especially on the educated Black girl is set. I have a friend now, who went through a breakup and went back getting another Master’s. I’m like, “What? Another Master’s?” Went through a breakup, she’s mad and now she’s going to get a Master’s. That is the way. Remember, when you grow up in this environment, not going to school feels like a deep failure. DC’s in income inequality. There was a study that came out a few years ago.
For high school diplomas, you make $13 an hour. College degree, you make $33. It is a banana’s like this weird hack of the internet was a thing. That wasn’t a career path that anyone understood. You couldn’t have told me when I started doing this that they were like, “Later, people want to interview you and you’re going to be in all these academic journals. The National Women’s Museum is going to call you to consult your perspective on being and doing stuff.”
For me, because I’ve always just done stuff, I don’t know sounds cool. I’ll try it. That’s generally my attitude toward life. That is how these opportunities have appeared. It would be nice if things were more structured. I also didn’t realize game development was like learning at a 90-degree angle. I felt like I was going up a cliff face the first three years of the amount of stuff we didn’t know was getting stomped into you. Why is stuff wrong? Why doesn’t this work? Nobody knows. It’s just insanity. I found out later that there are no rules in game development. Everything’s outdated in three years. Nobody knows anything.
Everything is getting made up as you go along anyway. What was a hit last year or 4 years ago or 5 years ago might not be replicated. There’s no formula. Gaming is more so than media and journalism, which I was in first, and more so than television. Any kind of linear, gaming was this this chaotic matrix of jazz. It’s worse than jazz. I gave this back at NYU. Before I got to gain development, I thought it was a science. You just get the input and outputs and you figure it out.
Now I realize this joint is alchemy. You are like, I got a bunch of stuff in this pot. It may be gold. Maybe not. It could be led. We don’t know. It is just humbling, brutal, amazing, ridiculous, and addictive. It is just weird. All of the weird not having a structure prepared me well for these areas in innovation where there is no road map. We built a rap rhyme mechanic that was composed because we were dumb. Again, this is also innovation.
That was a bar, though. That came out like hip-hop.
You have to be foolish or neither like stay hungry, foolish, or naive. Those things are basically like, if you know how bad this is going to be when you go into it, you will not do it. It’s not going to happen. We were meeting with the investors in the beginning because we knew we were pitching Issa’s game and everybody loved the mirror wraps. We knew that had to be a mechanic, but there was nothing on the market.
We were like, we could do rhythm action where you just push the button at the right time. We were like, “No, we want people to be able to write rhymes. We should be able to do this.” My cofounder is an engineer. She’s just as crazy as I am. She was like, “We can do this. We got our friend of Enongo. She’s a rapper. She’s a rapper named Sammus. We were like, “Sammus, are you down? Can you do this?” She was like, “I can.”
We’re sitting there and trying to work on it. We’re figuring out this system and it’s like, how do we systematize rap? Which, again, had we been slightly smarter and done a little bit more research. We would have been like, “This is impossible.” How do you even explain how to write a rap song? What is the difference? I was talking to somebody who worked at Def Jam and worked on the Def Jam games.
We were talking because he’s a music person. He was like, “I can’t even articulate the difference between new metal and metal rap. These are two subgenres of metal.” He was like, “I listen to him all the time. They don’t sound the same. I know they’re different but if I’m like, ‘This song is,’ there’s always an exception. There’s always something that changes that rule. I know what Busta Rhyme, Jay-Z, and Lil’ Kim sound like. If you try to make that a system, which is what game design is.”
You’re making this human thing legible to a computer and then setting it up to be scored. We’re doing stuff that English doesn’t make sense as a language. Again, any non-English speaker or any language learner knows. They’re like, “English doesn’t make no sense.” We’re trying to use slang, which changes, adapts, and is different era-to-era region and region. There isn’t a standardized spelling like the Guap Wars. We had an entire session at the studio where we were like, “Is it Gwop or Guap?” Are we going with Big Sean or Big Crit? Which Guap? It is sanity.
You’re on the back, so I’m talking to game designers who are all mathematicians. I’m not a math person, which is a whole weird thing because if I’m a math person, I’ve got to do math all the time. You’re sitting there with a bunch of game designers and they’re like, “You got to think about the combinatorics.” I’m like, “I don’t even know what that means. What is combinatorics?” It’s basically like they built it like a card game.
Again, when I started more in the game design, I started to realize like the elegant. You’re playing spades but you can play spades with the same deck of cards, you could play bit width, spoon, and poker. There’s all different games and all different things. That same 52 cards are just being utilized in different ways to make hundreds of games. That is genius-level design. You can go anywhere in the world and pull out a pack of cards and people will have a game.
I was playing this one of my favorite games is Persona5, this Japanese RPG. These bananas. I am obsessed with that game. It’s ridiculous. It’s a running joke at the studio at this point. Someone says, “What’s your favorite game?” Everybody says, “Persona5.” I was like, “No, it is not. I have other games I play.” This one just happened to be the one that was amazing and I happened to try to make my first game at the same time I was playing it.
Now it’s a running joke because every time I have a game design problem, I can look at what happened in Persona5. We were doing the play with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and I’m like, “How do we convey this video game thing that’s happening in a live production?” It turns out that Persona5 had a stage play in Japan and it’s on Crunchyroll and they had it. Persona5 is the best. Anyway, whole tangent but Persona5 has a card game called Typhoon.
Shoutout to the creators of Persona5.
At Atlas Studios, my son was like, “Mommy, I’m going to graduate from globe and go work at Atlas.” I was like, “Gavin, that’s not how this works,” but thank you for assuming that this is what we’re going to go do. It’s a movement. This bad journey took over, it’s an amazing game. There’s a card game that they stick in the Royal called Typhoon, which again, is that same 52. I never played Typhoon but you’re sitting there playing with your friends playing a game of cards. Hanging out in this little lounge.
I’m like, “This is genius. All of this stuff coming together is insanity.” With our team, we’re coders, rappers, and artists. Half of us had never worked in game design before and we’re all like, “We think this makes sense. This feels good. From a rap perspective, I would do it this way.” That foolishness and naivete that we could do it, meant that we made a system that worked in a place where other larger game companies weren’t able to do it.
Now we’re in year four of this new system we developed. It’s probably going to be good around year eight or so. As we keep refining it and figuring stuff out. I’m over here talking to like medieval cookbook enthusiasts who make game languages of, “I saw this problem. You got to just strip out the consonants and make metronomes.” There’s all of the stuff. I’m looking at the spreadsheet Enongo made and I was like, “What’s a lemma?” She was like, “Lemma is,” and we’re going into like obscure pieces of grammar because, at some point, we have to tell the computer what is this, what value does it have, how do you weight it, and how do you know the right word was deployed in the right way. There’s all of these things.
Anyway, staying foolish and stupid is great because you think that you can do something and you will eventually find your way through it if you keep working at it. If you know too much sometimes, you’re not going to attempt it because it’s too ridiculous. Would I do this again? Hell no. Why did we decide to do that for our first game? That was so dumb, but we did it so now we’re here.
This is such a great conversation and I love your story and your storytelling. I can listen to you talk all day for real. Going back to how we first connected with BLIDE. We are rolling out the second iteration of the BLIDE report and we’re so excited about it. For the folks who are reading, in the first BLIDe report, we outline the eight domains of the digital economy. One of which was gaming and eSports.
With this most recent iteration, we have interviewed approximately 900 digital entrepreneurs to get a better understanding of the ways that they were leveraging the internet and the digital economy to make money. One of the early takeaways is that digital entrepreneurs, Black digital entrepreneurs are outperforming Black entrepreneurs writ large.
Introduction
To your point, there is something about the internet that we assume would be potentially a leveler because there are certain barriers and hurdles to entry that are removed within the digital landscape. I’m curious about your thoughts on the potential of the digital space to close this racial well cap. What are the opportunities? Where do we need to lean in?
I appreciate you asking it. I also want to say I appreciate you guys gathering data because that’s the biggest gap that we have. When we started Glow Up, there were no cons. They were like, “Do Black women even play video games? What are you talking about?” I came from TV. If I’m making a show, you wouldn’t have a show with no con. They’re like, “People who watch Insecure probably watched FRIENDS, Family Matters, Fresh Prince, and this. They definitely watch Girlfriends,” but we had nothing to go on from video games.
Videogames had less data because they didn’t break out Black consumers. They don’t see us as a market that is worth doing. There are some issues around data. There are some data restrictions around how they even gather. Generally, when they’re gathering race data, they’re using it to discriminate. Their restrictions are like that, which make it very dicey to even ask somebody like, “What is your ethnicity?”
Ethnicity as you know is normally determined by zip code. They look at your zip code and they make a proxy judgment. If they’re trying to say, “This is how many Black people.” They look at your zip code. Very many things that we’ve learned on this journey, but in terms of digital wealth creation like 100%. The tools are democratized. This is what happened in the blog world. Back in the day, you had GeoCities. You had to build your own web page and then build the content on it. I was dull. I was on there. I had an angel fire page and put my little blank tags. I felt good by myself.
You had to do a lot of labor to get to the meat of what you wanted to do then blogging democratized that. Web 2.0 democratized all of those things because, all of a sudden, it was like, we already got the framework. You just got to come and put your content in it. What are you looking for? I see the same revolution happening with TikTok. Where, all of a sudden, you can just do anything. You don’t need them. It’s all on your phone. Hit the button a couple of times. You don’t need a whole crew and a whole setup.
When you’re at the professional level, you do. For the average person, all of a sudden, it became like you didn’t need editing skills anymore in the same way. You don’t need those things to be able to sit and put your show on TikTok or do whatever you want. That leveler of the playing field, that access, that doesn’t require going through a gatekeeper is big. A lot of games are funded through publishers or venture capitalists.
There’s a small group of people and various White groups of people. It’s like specifically certain folks. If they weren’t feeling you, that was it and it used to be. All of a sudden, it democratized. Even like mobile games. A lot of the big game companies were slow to mobile. They’re like, “Who’s going to even play on this?” It was literally Apple not even trying to do anything. It was like, “What else can we put in this App store?” Games. That birth this huge market with mobile gaming and allowed for direct publishing and Apple developer licenses is $129 now, but it’s like $99 a year. When we started, it’s $100.
It’s not the same level of investment it used to be. You can do all of these different things then you have access to YouTube University. The amount of stuff you can learn if somebody puts it on YouTube. You’re like, “I don’t know how to,” and it’s anything. I don’t know how to fix my sink or this thing in a blender or what a shader is and how to calculate the Fibonacci sequence. All of those things are on YouTube.
I can just look. Somebody did something with it. It’s created all of these places that allow you to not have the overhead and not have to put things together. Think about Black Broadcast, BET, and Channel One. Think about like the end of it because again, from this area. Once again, how do of these things happen? We are all here, but thinking about what it takes to mount a television channel and the billions of dollars that takes, the staffing, the marketing, and all of the licensing. All the things you have to do to make a TV channel work.
Now everybody has broadcast capability from their freaking phone. It is a phone. My favorite stat about phones, the average phone has more computing power than what we use to send the astronauts to the moon for the first time. The moonwalk had less computing power than your average cell phone now. That is insane to me. I was like, “I was just out there in space with a calculator. How did this happen?” Again, foolish. You’re like, “We can do this. We can totally run this calculator and make everybody go to space.” Everybody’s delusional. That’s how we all work.
You can’t tell our people all the statistics. Where is Nana? Why is Nana going to Mars? What did you do? Why did you create this ship?
Why not? It was there and there’s probably a dance trying to go with it. That is how we do everything but there’s an opportunity there. As you’re seeing this, I participated in this Black and Crypto study. That was interesting from Cradle. This is like a crypto research lab. They found that African-Americans are higher adopters of crypto. We’re putting slightly less into it, but more willing to look at these other avenues for wealth building because so many of the traditional paths are difficult and denied to us.
There is a tried and true method. Again, like that going to college, working your way up and getting to be the top of something, and getting to be able to be an angel investor and do these things. There’s also all these new weird economies that pop up. Remember, TikTok was Musical.ly. Musical.ly didn’t exist more than five years ago. This entire creator economy, all of these careers have been launched, all the stuff that has happened all the ways in which we do like a brand market. People are like, “I do content on the side because this is my side hustle now.”
All of those things happened in the last five years and if that platform goes out, something else will happen. That, to me, is always the potential of digital. You never know what’s going to happen. You couldn’t have told me I was on this blog. We used our real names. We didn’t think anybody was reading. How the hell did we know what was going to happen? How did I know all this stuff was about to happen? People are going to like, “This is historic.” What the hell? This is me and my friends being dumb, talking about dumb shit that happened on America’s Next Top Model.
There was no road there. The road just emerged. I think that is the potential for Black digital creators in the economy. There is no road and stuff scales because it just does. Folks who are well positioned to ride that wave because a lot of is also luck. People don’t want to talk about like luck. It’s like luck plus platform. That’s what it is. I followed all the folks on Vine. I love Vine. Rest in peace, Vine. Vine was a few years but a lot of the Vine creators are on TikTok struggling and fighting for their lives.
I followed LegenDarius on Vine. LegenDarius ended up going on the Amazing Race and doing all the stuff. He works in Hollywood now. My friend Francesca Ramsey. Cheska did what shit Black girls say to White girls back in the old YouTube days. Got them checks and quit her job. Ann Taylor now writes for Hollywood. She’s in the tag after. She’s on the stark lines.
These were things that we couldn’t have seen and they like to go, but a lot of it is luck and timing. When you got in, what happened? The good part is that those new opportunities are coming all the time. There’s always a new platform coming up and new stuff but you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to be in the fight to be there to have all these things come together. I think that’s where the potential is, particularly for Black entrepreneurs.
We tend to be the trendsetters and be able to see good opportunities. Again, most of these platforms would not function without our creativity. Look at TikTok dances. When the Black creators went on strike, shit was dry. Dry like a chicken sandwich with no mayo. I was like, “What were you all?” It was terrible but this is the potential that we have. It’s not always equal. I think that’s important to say, but the potential is always brewing.
Last question, because you have a plane to catch.
We got lost in the conversation. I’m like, “It’s 3:30. I got to go.”
Any final thing that you are on your soapbox about that just burns your biscuits?
Everything burns.
Everything burns biscuits.
You asked a person who used to rant professionally on a blog. What is your problem? Inequity and startup funding. I will just go ahead and throw that bomb.
You’re going to have to come back for another episode.
I know.
There’s going to be a whole new episode on that.
We need to talk about it. One of my favorite things, I gave a talk of GDC about this. Have you all read this book called The Color of Wealth?
It came out. It was just delivered to my house.
I love that book.
I haven’t read it yet.
I made a whole GDP talk about the tax code, video games, and systemic racism. I was in that book just like everything. Everything is this because again, there are so many things that are set up for us to fail in this society and this economy. One of the big ones is that startup equity. I’m in this fund. It’s a big video game fund. It’s a bunch of successful companies and people have exited and all the stuff. There are, I think, three entrepreneurs of color in the fund.
Now, there’s more because they have funds too. They’ve added more folks but in our original cohort, there were three of us. There’s only one other Black person. Mitch kept being like, “You got to meet Alan.” I’m like, “Who’s Alan?” She was like, “You’re going to know who Alan is. You got to meet Alan.” I was like, “Who’s Alan?” The other Black person, the Ghanaian Belgian, Alan. He was like, “There’s not enough of us.”
We were talking and we realized that we’re here, we’re in the room, but we raise the least. We got the smallest amounts on the cap table. We got the most people on the cap table. When you go to Black celebrities, Black investors, and Black angels, the checks are smaller. They’re $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, and $20,000. We are doing a lot with our money. When we have it, we are doing a ton so it’s smaller. What happens is like, that’s too many people on your cap table for the stage. I’m like, “This is who came. This is who showed up. This is what we have to do.”
We’re sitting there and talking. We’re talking about the lack of data. I go on my rant about how data is not neutral and because also people always try to check me because they’re like, “Oh, yes.” Whatever, AI. I’m like, “Don’t make me take off my earrings now.” I don’t flex on people like that, which I have deployed a neural network. I got a certificate from Nvidia. You’re not going to tell me about the shit I use. You’re also not going to tell me about something that’s built on the back of racist tech. If you’re scraping 4chan and Reddit, you’re getting a bunch of racist stuff that you’re putting into ChatGPT for these outlooks. What are you building?
It’s not going to give me anything that is worth using for me. It’s not going to give me faces that look like mine because it’s not trained on that but we’re going to leave that for another day. When we look at the inequity of funding, it means that Black entrepreneurs have less runway. We have less time to fail and pivot and make mistakes. When I look at what we’ve created a Glow Up on our 1.3 million rates. We’ve made revenue and other things to keep stuff going.
We have literally been making a dollar out of $0.15 the whole time we’ve been doing this. We’ve created a new mechanic and launched three games. People raised money. There was a startup that was super hot and they raised like $20 million. They folded with nothing in the market but those are the mistakes that you’re allowed to make if you’re White. If we’re here, we’re over here and everybody trying to put stuff together. Maybe I can’t get funding this year or I could put my game studio on part-time. Did you get this maybe this person might fund me too. How’s it happening?
You talk to Black celebrities and they’re like, “We all got stuffed up in COVID, but maybe I can get you $5,000 or $10,000.” I talked to the founder of the Gathering Spot, Ryan, who’s fantastic, by the way. Ryan was like, “You know where our money is. You can see where our money is. You know who has it.” We’re all impacted by the same things. I always feel like it’s critical to talk about this funding disparity because I don’t want you to sit there and compare me to the White guy who got $45 million with a concept on a napkin.
I also think you’re raising something interesting about not just the disparity between the resources and the higher ability to fail. Silicon Valley always gets talked about as a successful space. I feel like that’s Death Valley. More things die in Silicon Valley with the resources that they have. This is a report that I would love to see more of. Even if it exists, I haven’t seen it. I would love to see more reports that show not just the raise that you all had, but based on what you all produced, what the value is of what it is that you all produce in comparison to the raise.
We don’t talk about that Black Jesus gap that makes people see the end product. If you look at that in comparison to what we had, it’s fish and loaves. We are literally creating miracles. We praise the miracle. Often make them unicorns, but we don’t stop to be like, “How much is it that this team has created?” I feel like that is part of the narrative that people need to see, especially funders. Like, if this is what people are doing in lack, then we have to redefine what a success story looks like. I’m curious about what that valuation is. That, to me, is the gap that I’m interested in.
I want to get Latoya on her plane.
I know, we got to get on the plane, but let’s do a part two because we got to talk. Part two could be just the money of this and the money ball. You see it happen so many times when you see these people playing with your face. All these times, they’re like, “We need to see more.” I got a back pocket. I was like, for when we fame this conversation of sitting there and talking to some White investors and seeing who they funded then getting that person’s deck and sending it to our tech stars because we went through tech stars. He’s like, “There’s not even a product here. What was getting funded?”
Letoya, you got to go get your plane. If you start this, how much gets funded on concepts like White concepts and like Black double dutch still have to?
We mentioned this at the panel, but we would love to see a hearing in Congress, bringing the top five CEOs of Silicon Valley to do a hearing to explain to us why 96% of venture funding goes to White men. That’s what would love to know and understand and make it make sense.
They will always say this because again, with us, it’s proof. “Prove it. What are your numbers? What are your metrics? What is going on?” With them, it’s a good feeling. All you need is a good feeling. It’s that benefit of the doubt. That’s the way that it breaks all the time because I was like, “A lot of people funded us. We had a good feeling.”
A lot of bias.
Again, that buys you a lot of time. Anyway, we’ve got to end it here, but we could talk about this for days.
Thank you so much for joining us for this show. Your story is so inspirational and what you’re doing is so powerful. I wish you all the money. I was about to say luck and good. I wish you 7, 8 or 9 figure checks in your life.
That would be fantastic but you know what? Sometimes, you realize that you don’t get something for a reason. You got to be in a position that the Lord want you to be in a position. There’s a whole thing. Sometimes, you’ve got to be like, “Jesus, if you want me to keep doing this. It should make no sense but we still here.” Let’s play this out. Sometimes you got to play it out.
I’m like, “Lord, can I get a different hand in this car game? Can I get a different hand? Can I get some aces and some Queens and Kings in here?
However you feel. Jesus was the King of making no sense.
When you walk these journeys.
You know what I’m saying. It will make sense. You don’t want to get on the plane. I’m not going to be going to be lame for it.
This is not a promotion of any faith, but we’re just saying Black Jesus as a person was Black. Real person for me. Believe what you need to believe. I’m the most unlikely church lady. I understand.
I put the church finger up as we exit this conversation.
These two saints are liars and they literally just brought in the whole Holy Spirit but thank you for joining us.
Latoya, where can they find you? If you want to be found, because that’s another thing.
You can always find me at Glow Up Games. I’m at @LatoyaP on Instagram. I don’t know what is going on with Twitter. It is a hashfire. I still check messages sometimes. I’m not even acting like that. I’m allegedly on Blue Sky. If you look for Latoya Game Development, you will find me. Latoya@GlowUp.games, you can come talk to me directly. Google the work. I’m around.
Thank you, Latoya. Very grateful for you. Thanks, everybody for joining us.
@GameDevMom on TikTok. I don’t post anything. My kids are over here like, “Mom, we got to start streaming.”
“Mom, get with it.” Thanks, everybody for joining us for another episode. We will see you next time.
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