She Was Fed Up With 'Killmonger Locs' Being the Black Hair Default in Video Games. So She Fixed It

When the life simulation game Paralives was released in early access, Danielle Udogaranya’s hand ached at the thought of making new Black hairstyles for it. Udogaranya, better known as Ebonix, has spent over a decade creating custom content for life simming games. She knows what it takes to craft the perfect digital coil, braid and kink—painstakingly long hours and tedious precision. “I thought to myself, why am I still having to do this?” Udogaranya, who has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on her social media and Patreon accounts, tells WIRED. The content creator, who has a degree in psychology, has always had a “keen interest” in the intersection of gaming and identity, and sees mod creation as a way to help players celebrate themselves. Fans of games like The Sims spend their time flipping through her sites, downloading custom hair packs inspired by real-life styles not otherwise available in-game. As of now, the Ebonix Patreon has over 115,000 members, and hundreds of both free and paid content items. The Loc & Kinky Strand Generator Tool allows fellow custom content creators to make textured styles that normally could take weeks in under an hour. In just a few clicks, a user can switch between a curl to a coil to a loc. Udogaranya trained her own local AI to assist with automating the processes she did by hand and to fine tune the code, but no generative AI was used. To use the tool, creators still have to design by hand and can’t type in prompts to generate their styles. Udogaranya hopes her tool will help eliminate the time, effort, and monetary barriers both content creators and game developers have when it comes to Black hair representation in games. “[There’s] limitations… on the exploration of your identity and self-love and self-worth when the tools that you need are genuinely just missing,” she says. “ I'm ready to get rid of all of that, and provide the absolute basic identity identifiers when it comes to games and animation.” —Reporting by Alana Yzola.