“The more diverse voices we have in the room, our games are only going to get better.”

A veteran PlayStation developer discusses MLB The Show’s Negro Leagues mode and how projects like that have made development teams stronger

MLB The Show 24. Screenshot: Sony Interactive Entertainment, Major League Baseball

Sony PlayStation developer Ramone Russell hopes that people who play the Negro Leagues mode in next week’s big baseball game, MLB The Show 24, will find it educational, maybe even inspiring.

“We wanted to celebrate Black joy here, and also tell these stories in an uplifting way,” he told me when we recently spoke at Major League Baseball’s Manhattan headquarters. 

With a controller in hand, he was showing me The Show’s second annual inclusion of interactive history lessons that highlight the Negro Leagues, the separate league for Black players that emerged during American baseball’s segregated past.

For video game developers, Russell is hoping the mode offers an additional takeaway: It’s a case study in the value of having more diverse development teams—of building teams that look more like their player bases.

“Everybody plays video games,” Russell said. “But as soon as you turn that lens around and look at the game development teams, it's not a lot of women, it's not a lot of people of color. And we have a long way to go.”

That’s changing gradually, he said, and it’s being helped by efforts such as The Show’s Negro Leagues mode and another PlayStation effort, the inclusion of Miles Morales in Sony’s marquee Spider-Man adventures from Insomniac Games. 

A creative case, and a business case

Russell’s assessment isn’t strictly him cheerleading for the company where he works. Instead, through an interview that veered far from just promoting the mode in a new baseball game, he shared with me a frank assessment of where progress has been made in game development and where more is needed.