by Candria Slamin
It’s summer and Sony announces that Miles Morales, beloved Afro-Latino Spider-Man, is getting a video game. The Black joy I see online is tangible. Electric. Tweets fly to the timeline fast as hummingbird wings. Our boy (our boy) has a brand new design, crisp art done in the newest Unreal Engine; fresh new line-up, a fade Brooklyn can be proud of. The collective pride is immense. Our boy is continuing to get his due, starting all the way from Spider-verse. The future for him and other Black characters is bright, open, and hopeful in a summer of grief.
The next morning, Sony releases a clarification that Miles is not getting his own solo game. What they announced is an expansion on the back of the first game centered on Peter Parker. The hype, the joy, turns into sticky disappointment. Black folks know it like family. Of course he isn’t getting his own game. Of course it’s just an expansion. Just an afterthought. Like normal, same old, same old. Hours later, Sony releases another clarification. Miles is getting his own full-length stand-alone story. Not a sequel. Not just an expansion. Somewhere in the middle. The next breath the Black Twitter takes is slow. Hurt. Confused. The excitement picks back up eventually, after several hours. But something has changed. Something doesn’t feel right.
It takes me much longer to realize the name of this discomfort. It’s not enough. Even with his game out and playable on the rare Playstation 5, it’s not enough. A game that is little more than an expansion is scraps. These scraps may be larger than what Black people have come to expect from video games, but they are still scraps. And Black nerds have fed ourselves on them for too long. In the climate of 2020, we are ravenous for more and this hunger moves us to rage. We storm the kitchen and demand our fill. I see more and more calls for Black game developers, writers, artists. More calls for indie gamers done by Black creators. We promise ourselves Miles will be the last scraps we eat.
And I pray it is the truth.
Candria Slamin (she/they) is shaking and baking from Virginia, USA. When she’s not being a poet, they’re busy being a giant nerd on the Internet. Find them on Twitter at @candyslam_.
