‘Imagine talking about politics in a kids’ game’: Making sense of #BLM in Nintendo’s Splatoon 2

On Twitter and other established digital social networks, references to the Black Lives Matter movement almost doubled after George Floyd’s murder (see Giorgi et al., 2020, ‘Twitter corpus of the #blacklivesmatter movement and counter protests: 2013 to 2020’), alongside a similar rise in references to the counter-protest terms ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter’. Around the same time, the authors found online players of Splatoon 2 (Nintendo) expressing Black Lives Matter sentiments when using in-game design tools. These messages quickly disappeared in the game space to be replaced by longer-lived political content relating to LGBTQ+ activist sentiments and other non-political messaging. This visual essay provides documentation of memes captured by one of the authors between 6 and 14 March 2020 and discussion of their significance as data. The authors conclude that, despite being digital artefacts, Splatoon posts may be better understood using Cramer’s ‘What Is “Post-digital”’ (2014) reading with different characteristics from normal digital activism artefacts. The visual form attempts to underline the visual character of these post-digital artefacts, which contain no machine-readable textual content or metadata. Nevertheless, they represent a form of community discourse that is little examined and that the authors suggest should be documented and researched despite its awkward data structure.