WHY DO GAMES STRUGGLE WITH DIVERSITY?
Few people have looked at this immense question from more angles than Latoya Peterson.
Over a dozen years ago, she turned her sharp eye on video games as critic and editor at the groundbreaking blog Racialicious, writing and curating pieces at the intersection of pop culture, technology, race and politics. Since then, she’s been a journalist, an editor, a documentarian and a news producer, investigating various facets of games, esports, and the culture of play.
In 2019, she took on a new kind of challenge: co-founding Glow Up Games and navigating the business of the free to play industry while becoming an accidental narrative designer on the soon to release Insecure: The Come Up Game. Join us as Latoya seeks answers in the roots of the struggle for better representation at all levels of games.
Latoya Peterson lives at the intersection of emerging technology and culture. Named one of Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 rising stars in media, she is best known for the award winning blog Racialicious.com – the intersection of race and pop culture. She is currently cofounder and CXO at Glow Up Games, a game studio working on their first title set in the world of HBO’s Insecure.
Previously, she was the Deputy Editor, Digital Innovation for ESPN’s The Undefeated, an Editor-at-Large at Fusion, and the Senior Digital Producer for The Stream, a social media driven news show on Al Jazeera America. In 2018, she soft launched AI in the Trap, a collaborative art project that explores the future of artificial intelligence and predictive policing through a hip-hop lens. In 2016, she produced a critically acclaimed YouTube series on Girl Gamers that was highlighted on Spotify.
Known for bringing a hip-hop feminist and racial justice framework to technological and cultural analysis, Latoya’s perspectives have been widely published in outlets like Wired, Teen Vogue, NPR, ESPN the Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Essence, Spin, Vibe, Marie Claire, Kotaku, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, and The Guardian. She was a contributor to Jezebel.com. Her essay, “The Not Rape Epidemic” was published in the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (Seal Press, 2008). She also contributed “The Feminist Existential Crisis (Dark Children Remix)” to the anthology Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism (CCPA, 2011).
She is currently on the advisory board of the Data & Society Institute and the board of visitors for The John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships. She is a US-Japan Leadership Foundation Fellow and a USC Civic Media Senior Fellow. She served as a Harvard Berkman Center Affiliate, a Poynter Institute Sensemaking Fellow, and one of the inaugural Public Media Corps fellows.
She is also part of the selection committee for the Museum of Play’s World Video Game Hall of Fame.
Poster art by Shannon Wright. Find more of her work here.
The NYU Game Center would like to thank our event sponsors: Fresh Planet, Take-Two Interactive, Empire State Development, and Parsec. Their generous support makes our events possible.
Free and open to the public. Streaming live on twitch.tv.