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Support for today's podcast comes from Cricket Wireless. Are you looking for a way to end summer on a high note, They've got just the thing. Get ready for unlimited smiles, unlimited times four. Get four lines of unlimited data for a hundred dollars a month. Please note that Cricket Core is required on four lines. Datas be limited to three megabits per second. Cricket may slow data speeds when the network is busy. Additional fees, usage and restrictions apply. Now let's get into our show. Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, dt A joy Hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Black Girls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, thanks so much for joining me for session one sixty six of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. I don't know about you, but something I've picked up in order to soothe myself over the past couple of months is video games. I just couldn't resist all the cute pictures I saw online of people hanging out on their animal crossing islands. So I had to see what the hype was about, and now I totally get it. This led me to think about the relationships that other black women had to gain and how they've been able to build community in this space. For this conversation, I was joined by Dr Melissa Boone. Dr Boone is a senior Research manager on the Xbox Research Team, a team that conducts research to provide feedback and insight from our players around the globe. Melissa earned her BA in psychology at Spellman College and a pH d in Social psychology and public health from Columbia University. Since joining Team Xbox, Melissa has worked on titles within the Halo and Mine Crayft franchises. Currently, her work at Xbox focuses on managing research across Project X, Cloud Mixer, and Ninja Theory. She also drives xboxes research on accessibility, diversity and inclusion. Dr Boone and I chatted about why so many of us have turned to games like Animal Crossing during the pandemic, the evolution she's seen in terms of making gaming a more inclusive space, tips for parenting your young gamers, and she shared how our experiences as a social psychologist have made her uniquely suited for the work she does currently. If you find something that resonates with you during our conversation, please be sure to share with us on social media using the hashtag TBG in session. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Melissa, Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to chat about this me too. So can you just tell us a little bit about your background, Melissa, how did you find space for yourself and gaming? Well, so, I've been playing games my entire life. I mean literally as soon as I could hold a controller in my hand. I've been playing with my cousins uh in my aunt Spaceman's mostly fighting games. We passed the controller around tournament style and eventually evolved to playing other games with my siblings. Growing up. I have a brother in a sister, and I think the invention of the Nintendo sixty four is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to us, because it allowed all three of us to play at the same time, which most other consoles didn't do before then. My daddy used to get used consoles at electronics stores and rerank games from Blockbuster, and we'd all play together, and my mom and dad used to watch us, sometimes partially keep an eye on us, but also partially because they were just curious and interested about games and gaming. They were both geeks. They loved comics and all kinds of things like that. But I never actually imagine myself working in games. I never really thought about the people who behind the games, who actually made them. So I actually intended to become a researcher, a public health researcher, and work either in academia or the federal government doing health research that was gonna advance programs that would help support people of color and people from l g B, t q I communities, substance abuse, starke use, and mental health. And so that's actually how I started my career. I went and got my PhD in a field called socio medical sciences, which is a combination of social psychology and public health, and I did that research for a while I looked at drug use and mental health and people of color, I looked at HIV risk behavior, and I enjoyed answering these questions that helped people like I loved being able to ask and answer my own questions that I thought would really have a difference and make a difference in the communities of color that were like heavily impacted by some of these issues. But one of the things that always nickeled at me a little bit was the amount of time that it took for the research insights that I came up with to turn into action. If you've ever interacted with academia, you know that you know it can take a couple of years to go from the beginning of a research project even to just a paper, much less any kind of program that come out of it. And I wanted to see more immediate impact of my work, So I started looking for other careers where I could use my skills as a researcher but have a more immediate impact that I could see coming out in like days or weeks, rather than in in measure in years. So I started looking into user experience research and technology. But again I didn't really focus on games specifically, I was just looking at tech in general, and I found this job at Xbox on the Microsoft websites, literally just by chance. I didn't know anybody at Microsoft. I you know, didn't have any like network, my way in or anything. The closest connection I had and I've seen somebody speaking a panel and American Psychological Association conference who was on my team, and I was like, Wow, that job sounds awesome. I want to do that, but they'll probably never hire me because I'm coming from a completely different field. But I was wrong. They did hire me, and that's how I ended up here. It was kind of a wending path and a little bit of a non traditional one, but I'm really loving and enjoying the experience of being able to make gains and see what I call like my fingerprints on all of these different projects and games that I've gotten the chance to work on. That is such a cool story, and you know, really speaks to why I often describe psychology as like this field. It really opens all these other doors for you, because I feel like it just leads itself to doing that only one thing, but lots of different things. Yep. I think that's absolutely true, and I do volunteer college admission advising, and that's what I tell the students that I work with all the time. I'm like, you determine where you go and you can learn lots of different skills and other things that will help you get into the field. But there's lots of different ways that you can interpret lots of different majors, and there's such a need for people who understand social science and how people think and behave and interact with each other. M hmmm. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how your mental health background now informs the work that you do in gaming. Yeah. Absolutely. So there's kind of two sides to it. There's the research method side and then there's the actual content of mental health. So briefly, a lot of the methods that I learned in graduate school that I used when I was doing research on mental health, I now use the same ones when I'm doing research on video games and people's behaviors. All that research training that you get is going to be useful no matter where you go, and it's even useful when I'm not doing direct research because it influences the way that I think about things. I take a scientific lens to approach things, but specifically when talking about mental health. Mental health is all about people's well being. It's about how we make choices, how we handle stress, how we relate to others, and all of that is inherent in gaming. It's part of the reason why people game gaming is a social endeavor. Now, even if you're playing a single player game by yourself, lots of people join online communities to connect with each other to talk about that game or share screenshots, to share cool things that they've done in the game, and all of that is about social interactions, is about how people think, and the way that our emotional well being is, our psychological well being is will impact the way that we interact with other people as we play games. So it's it's really important and useful to have that lens and bring it to my work. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the idea of how social it is it has become because you know, my story in terms of like gaming is much like yours. Like I did not have the Nintendo six before. I'm a little older than it, so I had the original Nintendo um by Me Mario Brothers. But I feel like the social part was really like just me and my cousins. Right, it wasn't like that I was connecting with people all over the world, and now it is so much more of a community thing, and there is a whole identity really related to gaming. Can you talk a little bit more about that gaming identity. Yeah, absolutely, I mean I completely agree with you. That's the way I grew up to with like most of the social a theirs of the people I was related to, and gaming where people I was you know, people I was actually blood related to, like my cousins and my brother and sister. It used to be just limited to who you could physically connect with, and then when online multiplayers started, you could hear the gamers and talk to them, but you were still kind of limited to finding people randomly or maybe randomly stumbling across people online. But one of the things that I've seen consistently, both in the research that we've done and also just an anecdotal conversations with people, is that those early exp rances have formed really strong identities as like a gamer, a person who plays games, somebody who enjoys playful experiences. When I interact with other folks who started gaming, no matter when they started, where they started with the d s like you and I, whether they started with the ANT sixty four, whether they started with much later on in the ecosystem, there's this like joy and identity that talking about gaming brains. I always joke that it's like this grand unifier. I can talk to a person who seems to have nothing in common with me and it's completely different from me. But if we hit on a game that we've both played, we can just go off on a bench and talk for like many hours about that specific game and go off into other topics that are related to it. So it really brings people together and it forms this important part of people's identities where gamers and just something they do. It's something that they are, it's something that they live, it's a part of them. Mm hmmm. Yeah. And I think we often have like a negative connotation associated with gaming. Like I feel like a lot of the stories you often hear, at least historically, have been related to people feeling like people spend too much time playing games, or you know that there are negative experiences related to gaming. And it definitely feels like there's a bit of a transition in some of that information. Now, Yeah, definitely when I first started playing actually working in the industry, I remember hearing the stereotype that black people didn't play games, and I was like, this is brand new information to me. I never knew that there was a stereotype about this because everyone that I grew up with playing games with was black. So I was like, I don't understand where this actually came from. I think a lot of people's imagery of a gamer is like someone stuck down in their basement, probably white, probably male, probably young, playing games you know, online, or maybe first person shooters or something like that. But all of the research that we've done in gaming and all of the experiences I have just pointed that that's not true. Half of the people who play games are women. There are lots and lots of people of color who play and stream and talk about games and even create them. It's just a much more diverse role than I think most people expect, and once you start to really engage with that world, you start to see the broad strokes. The only thing that makes someone a gamer is that they play games. That's pretty much it, and people can be diverse in all kinds of other ways. And I guess, like many things, you know, like, especially in this country, like idea of most things is like maybe a white guy. And so you know, when we thought about gaming, like that is who we thought played games. But like you said, like we have all been playing games, But I don't know that I would like necessarily describe myself as a gamer. So I wonder if there's a point of it that feels like that culture is for somebody else, even though I might casually play games. Yeah, it's so interesting that you say that, because I remember having the same experience even when I was applying to this particular role that I'm currently in. I remember that the original job at either specifically use the word game or alluded to being a gamer, And I remember thinking to myself, am I a gamer? Like what they consider me to be a gamer? Even though at the time I was probably spending like ten to twenty ours a week playing games, and I played like the games that people consider to be in the core you know of of game types of RPGs, open world action adventures, even some first person shooters. So it's so interesting that people have different definitions of what gamer means, and it tends to all narrow towards this really narrow definition of a gamer, and a lot of people who play and love games, even if they consider themselves casual, which I put in scare quotes, we'll often say, no, I don't think I'm a gamer because gamers for someone else, that identity is not for me. Yeah. And it feels very much like people who like would maybe describe themselves as athletes right that they are people who are passionate about it and it's been a significant amount of time doing it, and it feels very much like gaming is the same way. Yeah. I think that's a really good analogy. There seems to be the separation that people have between like the behavior like I run versus like I am a runner. It's the same thing in gaming, like a game versus I am a gamer. And I think there's a lot of work that we can do in the industry to change that perception and bring more people in. Yeah. So you said that half of the people who play games or women. So I'm curious to know if you know any like stance related to black women in gaming and just how they maybe have been able to develop communities around gaming. It's really interesting. There aren't a lot of stats, like hard quantitative data on that and it's a lot of it is because the recognition of intersectionality is only begetting to grow in the gaming industry. I think we've sort of surmounted amountain of Okay, we need to start counting and looking at race, and we start looking at gender, and we need to start looking at disability status and all of these other things. But we're only starting to get into the idea of thinking about intersectionality. And so I don't know actual numbers for that, But what I can talk about is the identity and the gaming and the community is that black women often form around this. There are lots of black women gamers out there, and a lot of times they're in gaming groups or they're in close communities for a lot of different reasons, but a lot of the rise and new technology and gaming like streaming, like clubs, like online guilds, like social media have allowed people to form communities and find each other in ways that they never have before. And so you know, back in you know, when I was playing in a ten of sixty four, there was no way for me to go online and find like a group of black girl gamers, and it was probably hidden in some corner of the internet. But now there's so many different networks and platforms where you can do that, and that allows us to really see each other and recognize how many of us there actually are out there and start to wonder, like, are there more of us? Let's go find them and bring them into this space as well. Let's talk about the things that are really important to us, and let's also publicize those things so that the folks in the industry know, like, what are our concerns, what are pain points, what are our delighters, and how can people make things better for black women gamers? Mm hmmm. Yeah. And I know that one of the things that often comes up is related to like harassment in toxicity in gaming spaces, particularly around women, especially for black men. And I know you've done a lot of research around this. Can you talk more about some of their research and what it looks like. Yeah. Absolutely, We've done a research on my team in a couple of different ways. We've done some interviews, we've done some survey works. We have both these rich qualitative stories as well as this broad quantitative measure as well. And what we've found is that because of that reluctance that people have to kind of call themselves a gamer sometimes or that identity that they have. A lot of times, people feel like in order to play online they have to have what's called the thick skin. When we did interviews, people almost universally use this phrase thick skin, like in order to play online because harassment is inevitable and there's no way to prevent it and it happens all the time, you have to have a thick skin to protect yourself, and people put the onus on themselves. They take this responsibility on themselves rather than putting it on gaming networks or games to actually control how they react to harassment. But what that often means is that they create these scripts, these behavioral patterns to protect themselves, which sometimes means that they exclude themselves from entire genres of games. I've talked to people who are like, I don't play games and the first person shooters, or I don't play games and this other genre because there's too much toxicity there and I just don't want to experience that, so they exclude themselves from the narrative. I also know lots of black women who say things like I never play on Mike because whenever people turn on voice chat, that's when I'm gonna get harassed. I've heard people say that they get harassed fifty of the time where they go online. There's no hard numbers for that, but this is just kind of people's perceptions, and one of the things we know is psychologists that perception is powerful. Even if I told someone low it's only thirty percent of the time, that doesn't change the way that they feel and experience these kinds of events. So that often means that people are withdrawing from our ecosystems before they even really get deeply embedded in them, and they're withdrawing from different ways that they can engage and interact with other people in line to their detriment and also to the industries ttment as well, because we lose those really engaged and serious gamers who love the craft. So can you talk about any efforts then maybe are being made to kind of combat is yeah. Absolutely, So We've learned a lot from doing some of this research, and at Xbox and other people across the industry as well have made a lot of changes in the last couple of years to try to make gaming online a safer place for everyone to play, So specifically with an Xbox, some of the things we've done, we've noticed that when you talk to people and you tell them what not to do, it actually just makes what not to do more salia in their minds. Right, So we actually splip the script a little bit and talked about what we want people to do, how do we want people to behave, what are we expecting from people, because we and other gaming companies have done some research to find that when you tell people what you expect of them, they want to rise to that occasion. It's almost like a challenge, especially with gamers who love challenges and are very competitive. So there's been some positive work done both an Xbox and a couple of other companies about being intentional about telling people how we'd like them to behave and what we think the stand statific good community are. Some of the other things that we've done are making it actually more easy for people to report experiences that they've had. We made a small change in the place that the button, the report button is located on the Xbox platform, and that created a vast increase in the number of reports that we got, but it did not decrease the accuracy. So what that said to us is that before we were missing a lot of people who wanted to report some of these events that were happening, but they couldn't because they didn't know where the button was. So that allowed us to get a better view of what's actually happening on our ecosystem and then to put in some other things preventatively to prevent some of those experiences from happening. So it's kind of an ecosystem. There's multiple different things, and we're continuing to work on it and do a lot of research across the industry to find out more things that will help promote healthy gaming environments online. Mm hmmm, yeah, And I know, you know, I've seen recent like news stories about like platforms like Twitch, like banning people from the platform in different things like that. So are they're typically like real time moderators kind of like paying attention to what's happening as people are playing online. Yeah, it depends on the kind of play that you do. So for example, if you're on a streaming service like Twitch, a lot of streamers, do you have moderators that actually are in the chat and they're carefully moderating that community. Um, And what we find when we do interviews with streamers and we talk to them a lot of them, especially as their communities are starting to grow. I think moderation is like one of the key things that allows them to build a community because it allows them to set the standards for what behaviors are and actually enforce those with their community as well. So there's lots of moderation there. And then there are other places where we have different kinds of moderation, maybe not the traditional kind that people would think of. So for example, at Xbox, we have our Xbox and Passadors program, which are Xbox players who are there to help other people and support them as they play in their journey. So that might be things like helping a new player figure out how to navigate the Xbox ecosystem, bringing people into games, and supporting them along that, answering people's questions about how to interact with Xbox. So it's really like a supportive community, and we find that folks are motivated to join that program because they want to do that community support mentorship. So there's lots of different ways that people participate in this, like community stewardship aspect of gaming, where they feel like they're a leader and they want to make their community is a better place. Well, Lissa, I'm wondering if you can talk about any maybe other mental health efforts that have been kind of put in place by some of the companies. So we know that, like, especially younger people will sometimes like stay up until all hours of the night playing games, or you know, will miss meals because they don't want to like miss something in the game. And so we know the importance of like self care and like taking time to eat and you know, healthy sleep other things like that that have become more prevalent in the gaming communities. Yeah, I would say those are growing recognition of the need to help people balance their time amongst a variety of different things, and so there's different tools that people can use for that. So there's lots of different apps that you can use to measure how much time you spend doing specific kinds of things, so that you can be really aware of like how much time you actually spend online and when you're most active in things and and implement positive behavioral change if you really want to do that or need to do that. There's also a lot of tools that have been deployed for parents to help do that as well. So, for example, Xbox as the Xox Family App, which we just released not too long ago. Other gaming companies have similar apps. But that allows you to see all of this data about gameplay and your family, from your children and from yourself, like how many hours are people playing, when are people playing, what times are your children playing these games, and also to set some good limits for them as well. Of course, we always encourage people to have conversations with their children about these kinds of things, um, but that allows the extra enforcement to make sure that you're supporting them the best way and helping them make healthy decisions about how long to play, and when to play and when to take a break. Yeah. I'm glad you talk more about like the Paro self control because we know that that, of course is a hot topic. But I'm wondering if there are other things, you know, given the amount of research that you've done, that you can offer in terms of parents setting their kids up voice success as they started online gaming. Yeah, so, I mean parental controls is probably one of the bigger things that we talked about in the industry. Most consoles online gaming systems have different ways that parents can set things to restrict screen time, update their content restriction so that you can limit your children to playing things that you know are going to be good for them developmentally, to look at their gaming activity. So there are different tools that you can use to do that, but from working with children and parents and from the research that we've done and that others have done, honestly, the most important thing it's talking to your kids about the games. I used to work on a title called Minecraft. It's one of the most popular titles amongst young children, and I talked to so many kids who absolutely love Minecraft. And you can ask them a single question like show me what you're building, or talk to me a little bit about what you're doing in Minecraft, and they can just go on and on and on about what they're doing because they love the game so much. So I think that that's a great entry way for parents and other adults who love children in their lives to actually show them that they care about what they're doing, but also to understand a little bit more about how to protect them is to just enter the conversation in a really open ended way and just saying, show me a little bit about where you're building, or where you're going, or what you're doing in this game. Or sitting down with your children and actually watching them play, or watching a stream with them to understand more about the game and its mechanics. Because the more that you understand about the game, even if it's just a basic understanding from a couple of hours of watching, the better able you're out to have conversations with their kids about what they're doing in the game and how to protect themselves. M Yeah, my little guys are all into Pokemon and so so many questions about what they're catching. It was the next challenge and it's hilarious though, but I also recognize like how it has kind of helped like develop their vocabulary. Um, not just like playing the game, but then they're also like watching other tutorials of other people playing the game, and I mean, there really is this whole world created around the game. It's so true. I was talking to my nine year old cousin a couple of weeks ago about Minecraft, and he started talking about this ravine that he had found, and I was like, how do you know the word ravene? Like, but he had learned it from Minecraft. He had learned so many You hear kids talking about bios and bioluminescence and all of these and they find out that they've learned these words from Minecraft, and the team is very intentional. I love working with the Minecraft team because they're very very intentional about doing that and they think about it as a way for children to learn those kinds of skills in the game as well. Can you say more about that, like the intentionality, Like how long does it take in what kinds of like research and you know, all of those touches. Does it go into like bringing games and market Yeah? Absolutely, I mean, especially nowadays when games have much higher graphics, fidelity and technological requirements. A game and development into several years to make I think sort of the general average a lot of people throw around it's about two to three years, but it can be a lot longer than that depending on the game. But as a researcher, what my role is is actually bringing people into our research labs, either in person or right now virtually, to gather feedback from them about the game and some insight. So that can be things as simple as the controls and the mechanics of the game. So how do people hold the controller naturally? Where do their fingers reach the buttons? Does this control layout work? For the game, to how the characters feel, to move them around, to the music and the sound effects, the environment, like, all of these different pieces come together to create the feeling and the atmosphere of a game. And we test all of those in variety of different ways by bringing folks and having them play the game and give us their feedback. But specifically with the intentionally a reality around the Minecraft team and a lot of other teams that we work with. Um it's about knowing your audience and knowing who's playing your game, and that's a lot where the mental health and the social psychology come in. We do a lot of audience research with our teams to help them understand who's playing their game, who's going to be attracted to this game, and one are the kinds of things that they're looking for as they play and that they need for them. And one of the things that Minecraft is very well aware of is that they have an audience that spans a wide range of ages. Children. A lot of children play Minecraft, a lot of adults play Minecraft too. It just spans across I think the average ages around twenty eight actually, and so because of that, there's a lot of thought that the team puts in that we work with them to think about. Okay, so we know we have a lot of children playing this game, how can we establish some things that will keep them safe. I'll also letting them have fun. Even things down to the number of words that we show up on the screen and what kind of reading level people are required to have in order to read through things like tool tips and tutorials. All of those different details are thought of when games are being made. So there's a lot of different things. That's why I tell people, if you ever curious, go watch the credits of the game and look at how many people were involved in the making of that, and look at how many roles there were that contribute to that. There's so many different ways that you can get involved in the industry. Software engineering is very important, but there's tons of other roles as well. Yeah, and how do you find out about information like that? Like I'm thinking, you know, like back in college, like I don't remember anybody from like the video game places, like being able to talk about like all the different ways you could get into gaming. So what would be your tips for people who may be interested in like exploring these different options? Of course, So first of all, I completely agree with you. I don't remember anyone at my college is doing that either, but that is changing, and so we are doing a lot of recruitment on college campuses and sending people from Team Xbox, and a lot of our colleagues from different companies across the industry do that as well. So I went to a historically black college for under Guard, I went to Spellman College, and so I've gone back there a couple of times on recruiting trips to talk to students about getting into the gaming industry. Um. We also go to different kinds of events as well. So, for example, Team Xbox goes to the National Society of Black Engineers conference to talk to some of the engineering students there about what it's like to work in gaming. And we also go to big gaming events. So the Game Developers Conference, which usually happens every year in San Francisco, is one of the biggest industry events, and that's where you know, all of the big companies and most of the small ones go not only to do business and to trade ideas with each other, but also to recruit. And there are lots of people who come from all over the world who integrate with a lot of those companies communicate with them and look for open roles. And if you're wondering, like, okay, so conference is expensive, how do I get there? There are actually lots of scholarships that are offered to send students and young professionals to places like the Game Developers Conference, and so you can look around for g DC scholarships. I know we offer some through a variety of different programs, and there are a couple of other places that do as well. So that's one good way to to get connected to folks within the industry, got it? Okay? So I know, very early only quarantine, you know, I would see all over my timeline and we just heard a lot about people getting into game mean, like even myself. So, like I told you, I played Nintendo Mario Brothers and Mike Tyson's Plunge Out and all those things um as a little person, but probably have not like picked up a game like since then. And then I started seeing all of these pictures of people playing Animal Crossing, and so the little pictures were just so cute that I found myself like lured into that. And I feel like a lot of people like picked up things like Animal Crossing in the SIMS as a way to kind of create a different world than the one that we are currently living in. Um I'm curious to know, like any research that kind of supports that are just your kind of general perceptions about why people kind of ranto gaming in this time. Yeah, I I absolutely love Animal Crossing like I had a countdown timer to when a Kado because I love it so much. But I think it's it's exactly where you're hitting on it. It was escape fist in this current cultural moment that we're in the game, and all Crossing specifically is about building a community and took place for you to live and for others to live. And that is just like the heart and the core of what a lot of people are thinking about right now in this time, right about how do we interact with each other and relate to each other. So it's an escapest way to do and it's also a way that you can choose how much time you put into it. One of the reasons that I love Animal Crossing and that a lot of other people do as well, is because you can spend fifteen minutes in the game where you can spend ten hours playing in the game, like, it just really depends on you, and it's built for these short interactions where you can say, Okay, I only have twenty minutes today to go in, but I'm going to just redecorate my house today, and that's what I'm going to focus on, right, And there are also lots of different other ways to interact and play with others, so you can invite people into your island, you can take screenshots of what you're doing. People have made lots of silly videos of like the little animals dancing and make musing and Animal Crossing, right, So it's just a fun way for people to laugh at other people's creations and share together in this joyful way of like creating a community around something. And I think that because it's not competitive and it's colorful and bright and like it's really focused on community, I think that had a lot to do with the uptake of it. I mean, Animal Crossing has always been a popular franchise, but it was extraordinarily popular this time around. I think the moment that we were in had a lot to do with that. M Yeah, I think a lot of people and again I didn't even know that there were previous iterations of animal crossing. So I know the long time fans have been waiting, but I think the timing of when this new version was released really kind of just cool insided perfectly when everybody had a little bit more time anyway. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, So what is next for you, Melissa? Can you talk about maybe some of the you know, new research you might be engaging in specific around like diversity and inclusion in gaming. Absolutely. So. I am actually the research lead for accessibility across Team xox now um and so this is the area that I'm really delving into and building in, and it's an area in which I was able to uncover a large area of privilege of in myself, an ignorance of myself. UM. I started working full time and accessibility about a year ago, and as I began to do research in the area and interview players with disabilities, I started to learn so much about the unintentional ways in which we exclude people from gaming just by the way that we make games. Um. And in most of the cases, it's not malicious, it's just out of ignorance. We just didn't think about it because we have the privilege not to. But part of the work that I'm doing across the studios and Xbox and across other services as well, is actually starting to bring some of those voices into the conversation work with teams on accessibility, and one of the things that I love about working at Xbox is that diversity inclusion is an actual thing that people embrace. It's not just a buzzword that people say, they actually do want to make games for everyone. Every studio that I've talked to you, out of all of the sixteen studios represented with us, as well as all of our services and platforms, have been all in and super enthusiastic about making our games more accessible. The question is not what what, but it's it's how right, And so that's a lot of the research that I'm doing right now is focusing on what features and things do we need to including games to make them accessible to people of all different ability levels, and how do we include more representation for them in our games as well? How do we authentically and responsibly and ethically represent these folks in our games and include features that allow them to play it. So it's a big part of the work that I'm doing now nice well, we will be looking forward to all of those updates and you know, being having gaming become even more inclusive for additional groups. Yeah, me too. I'm super excited to see the work that's happening in the field right now. We're working on it, but so are many other companies as well. And one of the coolest things about it is that most companies don't see accessibility or inclusion as a competitive advantage. We trade tips with each other um and guidelines and advice and best practices so that we can continue to make our games more inclusive spaces. So it's wonderful to see the industry working together on something like this. That is I'm glad to hear that. Well. Is there anywhere for people to connect with you online, Melissa? Yes, absolutely so. You can follow me on Twitter at the Ruby Valkyrie, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm black girl with purple hair. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one with that name, so I easy to find perfect Well. Thank you so much for sharing with us to day, Melissa, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Dr Joy I'm so glad Dr Boone was able to join us this week. Don't forget to visit the show notes at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash Session one sixty six to connect with Dr boone, don't forget to share your takeaways with us on social media using the hashtag tv G and session, and please text two sisters in your circle right now encourage them to check out the episode as well. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into this topic and connect with some other their sisters in your area, come on over and join us in the Yellow Couch Collective, where we take a deeper dive into the topics from the podcast and just about everything else. You can join us at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash y c C. Don't forget that. If you're looking for a way to end summer on a high note, Cricket Wireless has got just the thing. Get ready for unlimited smiles, unlimited times. For Get four lines of unlimited data for a hundred dollars a month. Cricket Core is required on four lines. Data speed limited to three megabits per second. Cricket may slow data spees when the network is busy additional fees, usage and restrictions apply. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continue in this conversation with you all real soon. Take it care, n b WO