WELL PLAYED

One man’s mission to make gaming a little less white

- JAMAL MICHEL

THEY MIGHT NOT know his name, but millions of video gamers have encountered narrative designer Evan Narcisse's handiwork in Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which showcases more Black and Brown characters in its first few minutes than most popular games do in their entirety. The action-packed 2020 release opens on a Harlem street scene where our biracial Gen-Z hero (Miles is half Black, half Puerto Rican) makes the rounds before donning his Spidey suit and heading out with Peter Parker to protect locals against the evil Roxxon Corporation and its minions. "I definitely brought my own lived experience and philosophical energy to that game, where they're fighting corporate encroachment," Narcisse told me. But his coup de grâce was the emotional ending: Amid apocalyptic rubble, an exhausted, near-dead Miles has lost his mask, revealing his identity-his Blackness-to some grateful residents who then band together to shield him from the view of a prying TV news crew. "Who is he?" the reporter asks a muralist Miles knows from around. "That guy?" the muralist says, pausing a long beat. "He's our Spider-Man."

The line is classic Narcisse, whose writings have always struck me as bold, Black, and sincere-with personal touches that resonate because, as a fellow Haitian American nerd who revels in his roots, I see myself in them. "Every morning, I run a pick through my hair. It's important that I do this when it's still spongy and damp from the shower," he wrote in a 2015 essay for the gaming blog Kotaku. "After the picking out, patting down, and shaping are done, I always think to myself, 'Goddamn, I love being black."