Antonio Roberts
Artist, performer and musician Antonio Roberts works with technology in innovative ways, exploring authorship, gaming, digital and reproduction.
In the Spring of 2024, his Vivid Lab research residency focused on developing an experimental narrative fiction game using Twine software. This work was showcased from May 3rd to May 11th 2024 in a solo exhibition at Vivid Projects titled A Boy is a Gun; an exploration of stereotypical roles within video games, black masculinity and the artist’s own experiences of growing up as a black British boy and teen. These themes are explored through the vehicle of the character Skate Hunter (from Streets of Rage 2), reimagined by Roberts, presenting a new fictional narrative to better reflect his own life, blending a gaming world with an all too real experience.
Streets of Rage 2 was the first game to feature the character Skate, and in his artworks, Roberts extracts from the original narrative and existing fan fiction to interrogate the ways in which Skate’s characterisation draws on stereotypes of Black masculinity. In the new game created for A Boy is a Gun, Skate is rendered as the ‘child’ – or teen – that his interactions with family indicate, rather than the combative adult male familiar from the original game.
This reimagining of roles within gaming followed on from Roberts’ 2021 work Heavyweight Champ, which critiqued the stereotypical portrayal of Black men prevalent in early video games.
Alongside the playable game, the exhibition also featured a ‘choose your own adventure’ game book and a series of animations superimposed on his own photography of real locations featuring Skate, a text based video and an audio-interview between himself and Dr Ian Sergeant exploring the work which can be accessed here, and a real life appearance from Skate in the form of a cosplay by Roberts, even down to the roller skates.
Project Reading list:
A Boy Is A Gun -Weaponising Black Gender in video games
The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video
The History of Black Video Game Characters | NowThis Nerd
‘Catch These Hands’: The Black Boxer Trope in Fighting Video Games
Writing for Games -Hannah Nicklin
