Insecure: The Come up Game (2023)
Set in Los Angeles and inspired by the critically acclaimed Issa Rae created HBO television series Insecure (2016-2021), Insecure: The Come Up Game follows the social life of a player-created character who interacts with the cast of the hit tv show. The mechanics are built around social interactions and hip hop—rap in particular. This game has a robust character creation system that allows players to represent Blackness in a variety of ways, and it engages hip hop both in terms of cultural representation and in terms of the game’s core lyric battle composition mechanics. In this critical video discussion, TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Samantha Blackmon talk with one of the game’s designers, Latoya Peterson about the game’s origin story, development process, and some of its unique design features. Additionally, we also discuss the ongoing necessity for archiving Black creative works given the pervasive challenges of developing and supporting Black creative projects in general.
Rap Godz (2020)
Rap Godz is a rich and elegantly designed game that follows the rags-to-riches journey of competitive rappers. In this critical gameplay analysis, Aaron Trammell, Eric Park, and Reginald Gardner play and discuss the deck building mechanics that are geared toward music production, resource management, battling, winning rap beefs, and generally establishing creative dominance. The game’s development includes the labor and talent of Black designers. The game also includes playable Black characters and NPCs, it directly references hip hop as a Black cultural tradition, and it is relevant to the archive in its realization of Black culturally significant gameplay mechanics. The critical conversation also includes a discussion of the game’s enjoyable use of humor, its complex dependence on stereotyping, and a few of the game’s shortcomings.
The Walking Dead (2012)
Is there something compelling and/or culturally relevant about being a Black professor riding in a police car at the beginning of a zombie apocalypse? Samantha Blackmon and TreaAndrea M. Russworm argue that this 2012 Telltale game is significant for the ways it references aspects of southern and professional class Black families and for its empathetic exploration of Black paternity. As all of the Telltale Games The Walking Dead titles in this franchise are significant to Black culture and Black subjectivity in some way, this first game in the series is notable for the ways in which it stereotypically represents an assumed Black masculine criminality and for the ways in which it imagines how Blackness survives or fails to survive the end of the world. Blackmon and Russworm also discuss what Russworm has theorized as “the limits of racial empathy” in dystopian video games.