Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist based between London and Berlin, working predominantly with video games, animation, and sculpture to create interactive museum- and gallery-based installations. Over the years, Danielle has developed a distinctive aesthetic in their games by using a mix of lo-fi animation and sound that harks back to the early days of video gaming technology. We spoke with Danielle about the significance of gaming to their early years as a young Black trans person, how they have collaboratively developed gaming environments across different game engines over the years, and the ways in which they are future-proofing their creations and exercising greater agency by looking beyond the art world.
Tendai Mutambu: You’ve mentioned gaming being part of your life from a young age. What were some of the games or consoles you were playing in your youth?
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Dragon’s Dogma was a big one for me. It’s this game in which you have to create two players, and I created one player that was me at that time, and one player that I wanted to look like—one that I was too scared to look like. It was the first time I’d really visualized my transition, and I did that using a character-creation engine. So, although I don’t remember completing much of the game, I would run around as this imagined person while the person I would consider my dead name, or my dead body, followed me. At the time, I felt like I was doing something dangerous, even though it was all in a game. I cared about that character. I wanted to be that person because it was like I had admitted something to myself.
Other games [I played] were Blade for the PS1 [Playstation], Legacy of Kain, Grand Theft Auto, and Metal Gear Solid. I remember playing Metal Gear Solid at my friend’s house; I’d never seen anything so cinematic. It was one of the first games I thought of as art, not simply entertainment, because it made me reflect on my actions while playing and how they said something about me as a person.
Tendai: How did you start making your own games?
Danielle: With a program called PhotoAnim, I was able to change images into 3D objects. I was using Blender, a free 3D-rendering program, to look at these 3D models, rotate them, and make environments for them. And in those environments, there was a built-in game engine called Blender Game Engine. I started to tinker around with that. It was a very quick process because it wasn’t code based. It was a visual scripting language, so you got a node that said, “When the W key is pressed, make the object move forward.”
I made this first game, which no one’s ever seen—this terrible game called Resurrection Lands. When I showed it in public, as soon as people tried to walk around they would fall through the floor. I knew then I had to get someone to help me make it, and I also knew that maybe this engine wasn’t the best because there was a lot going on when you tried to play the game. Using the whole keyboard was a lot for people to take in. They didn’t know what to do with it.
When Science Gallery London commissioned me to make a game in 2020, I tried to look at different engines and different techniques that games have used to appeal to a more broad audience. One of these was game movies, like [Black Mirror:]Bandersnatch, which plays a short movie clip, and then offers you a choice. That was something in my wheelhouse. I knew how to edit a lot of videos quickly. I just needed someone to help me put them together and figure out how that could work online. That first game was made with JavaScript.
That was the beginning of my relationship with planning games: how to plan a game within a flowchart and get it technically made by someone else by handing all the pieces over. Then after making, I think, three of these game engines, the process started to become a bit frustrating because a lot of the games were very similar. You would come, you’d sit down, you’d hit a button and you’d watch, then you’d hit a button and you’d watch. I wanted to get rid of the waiting and consuming. I wanted a big part of it to be making the choice, not watching the outcome.
I tested Twine, which was a much more accessible game engine for me to work with and understand the backend, but also to play, put online, to tinker with a little bit more than just having a choice and a video play. There were a lot more things that could happen and could be coded in that game engine. Then, my problem for a year was trying to figure out how to get the choices to be a little bit more persistent, and how to make that pressure of choosing a little bit more constant.
That’s when I started working with Unity and exploring a lot more than just the game engine but also playing a lot more with the controller method. We made a game that required you to aim a gun at the screen. In order to do this, we adapted the Nintendo Wii Remote to be used as a aiming reticle, in a new engine.
So now, the cinematic aspects of the older .com series still very much exist,1 but the second-by-second, more anxiety-inducing, harder-to-know-if-you’re-doing-the-right-thing-at-the-time interaction has become a mainstay within the newer works. Now I work with a lot more technical game engines that can do a lot more, and the backend is a lot more complicated. I need a lot more help to understand exactly what’s going on, what engine is the best fit for the effect we want to achieve, and, in turn, the emotions we want to evoke in the player. The engine is a medium in itself, so you would never settle on one video game engine to create all of them.
Recently, we’ve released our first real-time 3D online game called Black Trans Revolution, which is the first game we’ve released that is also a rhythm game. [Laughs] Oh my god. It gives you anxiety because the rhythm is slightly off; the game feels like it’s going to crash all the time but never does. The whole thing is about a revolution and a system coming to an end, but the leader of the revolution ends up subjugating those that needed the revolution to happen. You’re then faced with the decision to kill the leader to allow his followers to lead the revolution; otherwise the leader clones themselves and makes their followers copies of them.
Tendai: Where is this available to play?
Danielle: blacktransrevolution.com
Tendai: Has your work been sold to any museums, and if so, how is it stored or preserved?
Danielle: I’ve sold one game to the Victoria and Albert Museum: Black Trans Air, or I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need You. It was great to think about how you preserve something like that. We had conversations about whether or not the domain name is part of the work, and whether or not we needed to emulate the domain name popping up.
I gave them all the video and sound files, as well as the code. Then they looked through all the code to make sure they understood it, and they made sure they could package it and run it locally without a browser. They also made sure they could also emulate it locally, so instead of it playing online, it can play offline on a computer and emulate the environment that it needs so it could play later on a computer, in fifty to a hundred years. As well, I gave them the Blender file for the actual environment itself, in case they wanted to run around, or whatever. We had a walkthrough of the game and a conversation that we wrote up, so they have a bit of context around everything.
Tendai: How do you find ways to be in control of the infrastructure that supports the work you make and the way it is distributed?
Danielle: One of my things is that you should host some of your own stuff. There’s also a reason everything I do is called “Black trans” something. It is because now when you type in “Black Trans Air,” or “Black Trans Archive,” or something like this, the works come up. When we’re thinking about internet real estate, all the corporations build on top of you because they can pay to have the things wherever they want. So if we as artists are taking very clean, obvious domain names like blacktransair or cancelme, we can then have the possibility for someone to chance upon it just by searching something similar.
That’s something that I think is very important, rather than just aiming to have your work on Netflix, Instagram, or Facebook. If you know the code and that site goes down, you know how to put it back up again; you’re not beholden to the terms and conditions of a particular site that you’re on; you can control when you present work online, and where. The problem with relying on the art world alone is, you will only show when someone offers you an exhibition—which means if no one’s asking you to show, you don’t do anything.
Something we’re trying to move towards now is building an exhibition outside of Unity. This is an idea from Florian Brueckner, an amazing coder I’m working with. As we continue to work with different game engines, we could always use the architecture that we’re building, regardless of what we’re making.
So let’s say after ten years, we might have a massive database of items that can connect to any game engine, rather than being beholden to a particular one. So if a game engine shuts down, it doesn’t matter, because we’ve already got everything we need in our own thing that we’re making.
We are thinking of making an actual game and publishing the game alongside other titles [sold in stores], or hosting game jams during which experimental games are made over a short period of time to test a particular idea, and things like this. We want to be part of a wider gaming community, rather than just an art community. If that starts working, we’ll start getting money; then we can publish games we like by other people and pay those makers, while maybe working with galleries alongside that journey.
Tendai: Let’s talk about the visual character of your work, in terms of the aesthetic that you’ve gone for. Why go for lo-fi and clunky when it’s becoming increasingly easier to make animations that are sleek and seamless?
Danielle: When you work with these more clunky characters, there’s a lot more guessing that players have to do. They can’t always make out how many eyes this person has, or that the hand doesn’t look like a hand. Having to add all these things together with their imagination gets them thinking creatively about the character. It can also make someone quite uneasy—this ambiguity that they can’t resolve. The player has to push things in one direction or another and say, “Well, I think it’s this.”
As a creator, you have to be a lot more creative when making them; because you’re trying to work with 400 polygons, which is nothing. When you start texturing objects, things go wrong and don’t quite match up. You have to make a lot of artistic decisions and solve a lot of problems. Will you be able to wrap this texture correctly? Will it fit around that face properly? If not, how are you going to manipulate it?
Tendai: Autotune has become such a distinctive part of the sound in your work. What’s your approach to sound design and making it work with and against the images you create?
Danielle: I usually make the sounds in a single sitting, without revising things later. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work; I make another one.
It’s a very quick process in which I’m trying to capture the mood of what I’m seeing or wanting to elicit in the player. If I need people to be uneasy, I’m putting as little as I can into the sound to create this effect. It might be that there’s an audio on my phone of a baby laughing, and I slow it down and it sounds terrifying, for example.
I use Audacity, Fruity Loops, or Voloco. In the beginning I used autotune a lot because I was very self-conscious about my voice and I didn’t really like it, but I didn’t have any other option, so I had to use my own voice. I think because of that, I figured out a load of ways to transform my voice. Back then, I used to do all the character voices and everything. Now I have a bit more freedom to choose who does what, but a lot of the autotune still remains because it’s just become a texture that I add to the sound to pull the player away from the humanness of it all. I want to create tension between the world as they’ve come to know it and the world in my games.
1. Designed to be played online, each game in the series was named according to the pattern “blacktrans[name].com.”