Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic–the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.

I find this month’s topic challenging. It’s not that any of these difficult topics don’t interest me; quite the opposite, in fact. It’s not that I don’t believe these topics should be dealt with in video games in a mature manner. It’s just that the question I keep asking myself when I sit down to try to think of something is “what the hell do I know?”

You see, I’m a woman of privilege. I’m typing this blog post on computer equipment assembled in Malaysia, sitting on furniture made in China while drinking a mocha containing coffee farmed in South America. [1] I come from an affluent family, which allowed me to go to university [2] and acquire the necessary credentials to have a well-paying job in a creative field I enjoy, which in turn allows me all of these first-world comforts. Many people would say that my success is well-deserved due to my hard work and creative talent. While I’ll acquiesce to the fact that yes, maybe some of the work was my own, I can in no way deny that I had a lot of help getting there. As for creativity, well, the very fact that I’m even in a position to tell and share my stories — stories that draw upon the stories of privileged people of centuries and millenia past — really does say something about my own privilege, doesn’t it?

But wait! There’s more…