what is "playing ideas?"
an idea :)
• videogame creation
• conversations with independent videogame developers
• hosting game jams1 on ideas/themes
• online archive
1 A game jam is derived from the musical practice of grouping with friends and playing instruments to create unique music. Game jams are events that allow individuals to bring their skillsets to build a video game on a specified theme (https://indiegamehaven.com/what-is-a-game-jam/). Most Game jam events are often short, lasting few days or a week.
Anti-blackness and settler-colonialism2 are machines. Videogames offer pathways of inquiry and refusal that changes dominant machines' circuitry as well as imagines beyond it. Videogames can be a medium for dialogue and a space of advocacy. Furthermore, videogames allows us to play with an idea; thus, the projext name, "playing---ideas."
2 Anti-blackness and settler-colonialism are new words? The meaning differs depending on the context and/or whom you are speaking with. For clarity, check out our three open-source screenplays within part iv of Pencils Down: Conversations on Humanizing Education. The topics of the screenplays (written in a talk-show format with various artists, activist-scholars, poets, comedians as guests) are decolonization; settler-colonialism/ organized crime; and, anti-blackness.
Settler-colonialism and anti-blackness are technologies that maintain machines
of domination, which conspire to destroy Indigenous and Black life as well as the radical Indigenous and Black traditions. Thus, it follows that liberatory
futures involves building community to collectively "hack," refuse, and undo the circuitry of these technologies. One of the ways of doing this is through
the interwoven, accessible thread that connects digital and novel technologies, power, and social justice --- videogames.
Videogames can provide a story and language to discuss the tensions, the "Black Mirrors" of the nefarious and potentially positive effects of injustice
in our communities. Speaking with independent videogame developers, creating videogames, hosting game jams, curating online archive of critical theory
and videogames --- all offer conversations to reflect on the relationship among technology, power, and justice. Playing and creating videogames is a
practice of worldmaking. We look forward to collectively worldmaking liberatory past, present, and futures.
If we think about settler-colonialism and anti-blackness as machines, then we can notice the ways in which these technologies
are part of the dominant "master" source code of social structures. These machines conspire to destroy Indigenous and Black
life as well as the radical Indigenous and Black traditions. A just society involves building community to unravel technologies of
settler-colonialism and anti-blackness, which informs multiple forms of entrapment that are nicely labeled as "innovation."
Raised in a single-parent household in Harlem, New York, we (it is no longer "me" for I will collaborate in community)
recognize the manifestation of these technologies in housing policies and educational opportunities, which, at times, only
reinscribes the dominant source codes. Settler-colonialism is like the structure of a “smart” watch as anti-blackness is the
latest software that position Blackness away from the possibility of being human. Witnessing the ways in which settler-colonialism
ascribes all things Indigenous as "forever past" and all things Black as "forever present as subhuman" to support a future of
white supremacy, we have been investigating ways to collectively "hack," refuse, and undo the circuitry of these technologies.
Engaging in conversations about these machines, while collectively imagining ways of healing is essential to the dismantling pursuit.
As an author, gamer, entrepreneur, facilitator, and co-producer of the vol.I mixtape "Journal" of Black Educology, we look for ways to
build solidarities across spaces to engage in critical conversations about ways to undo these machines of domination.
In these journeys, we recognize not only the multiple manifestation of settler-colonialism and anti-blackness within communities but also the
various modalities that people use to dismantle these machines. Books, virtual talks, poetry, essays, academic articles, podcasts, blog posts,
magazines, coloring books – all of which we have been part of creating are some tools to express knowledge and build solidarities. Another tool, not
expressed often, is videogames.
What does videogames have to do with fighting the technologies of settler-colonialism and anti-blackness?
Well, videogames can provide a story and language to discuss the realties that we experience to build understanding in our decolonizing pursuits.
Grounded in Black feminist thought and counter-storytelling, which offers new tools to refusing masters codes as well as centers marginalized
experiences to inform how we consider, analyze, and approach systems of structural inequality, we view videogames as a site of advocacy and mobilization.
We are reminded of independent videogame developers such as Deconstructeam, who created "Red Strings Club," an interactive narrative experience to
discuss the nuances of surveillance capitalism, and Will O Niel, who developed "Little Red Lie," which elaborates on the roles of "lies" in maintaining systems
of economic oppression and its consequences on mental health. Playing and creating videogames is a practice of worldmaking, which is essential to envisioning just society.
Independent videogames can also be tools for hacking the circuity of dominant technologies.
We wonder about the ways to combine Indigenous and Black critical theory through creating videogames that continue build community to resist dominant
technologies of anti-blackness and settler-colonialism. We continue “playing---ideas.”