Ending my thoughts on this with: we should be designing in ways that encourage our audience to think and experiment and a lot of these choices are often made for us by those higher up in the chain so… there is definitely work to be done.

And BY THE WAY... @adamdolin.bsky.social and I are giving a lecture about EXACTLY THIS PROBLEM at GDC 2026: schedule.gdconf.com/session/writ...

That looks the bomb, I wish I could have some!

There is a similar issue with the ways non-Black Indigenous cultures and other racialized cultures around the world are often appropriated too because of colonialism, orientalism and anti-Indigenous racism but anti-Blackness and the appropriation of AAE/AAVE are the main topics in this thread btw.

The African diaspora are the forerunners of cultures changing around the world, that's true but what should never be appreciated is the appropriation of Blackness and African/Black cultures. Being the forerunner involves consent, appropriation involves a power imbalance caused by anti-Blackness.

On Twitch the other day, someone literally came up to me and told me something like "you should appreciate that people are using all these words from your language because that means Black people are the forerunners of culture" and I had to respond like "should I?"

And one of the reasons Black people get frustrated about this is because yet another word from AAE/AAVE is being appropriated into something that replaces what the original word meant. Language evolves, but there's a difference between that and theft especially when elite capture is involved.

Like obviously the Game Key Card thing is a crap scenario. Nobody says otherwise, but the massive hyperbolising of everything and dismissing of everything is wild.

Everything has got so binary.

As a reminder, The Pokémon Works is responsible for the following games
Pokémon HOME
Pokémon Sleep
Pokémon Champions