Seraph 7 Studios Founder/President Jules Porter

“Video games are an amazing covert teaching mechanism,” says Jules Porter, founder of Seraph 7 Studios, a Minneapolis-based videogame development studio on a mission to fight racism and build empathy by creating diverse characters and games that show the BIPOC community in a positive light. The epiphany hit as she toured Rome for the first time and realized she knew her way around because she had learned the city through a video game. Porter was a law student at the time, a path she decided to pursue following a troubling string of shootings of Black teenagers by white police officers. “I just felt so powerless,” Porter says. She listened to a Tedx Talk given by Dr. Artika Tyner, a University of St. Thomas law professor who said: “Law is the language of power.” And that solidified Porter’s decision to enroll. But midway through, Porter began to question whether it was enough. “The law can provide consequences, it can help set policy. But the issue, if a person doesn’t even see us as human, there’s something in the heart that the law can’t reach. How do we build empathy from the inside out?” Porter’s answer: video games. “Eighty percent of Black youths play video games, but only 3 percent of the protagonists look like us and they’re not even good guys. It’s so rare to find positive Black characters,” Porter says, pointing out that the number of BIPOC individuals and women who work as gaming programmers is negligible. “The decision makers are white men…in order for us to change the narrative and put more positive images out there, we need BIPOC folks to be part of the creative side.” Porter started sketching out game ideas while finishing law school. For a while, she clerked for a judge by day, and worked on her startup by night. Being accepted to the Finnovation Lab accelerator allowed her to finally focus on the business. Additional mentorship and funding comes from the American Express x iFund Women of Color 100 for 100 program. Porter’s first console video game, due out later this year, is called El