Nordic DiGRA 2025 conference presents a keynote speaker blog-series. This three part series begins with the first conference speaker Professor Kishonna L. Gray from School of Information, University of Michigan.
“Joker. Joker. Deuce. Ace.”
What does this phrase mean to you? Well, it might depend on your culture and your relationship to the popular card game “Spades.” While it was popularized in the United States, it spread globally during World War II when soldiers needed a game that could quickly end, unlike Poker. But while this phrase might seem simple and straightforward enough (for some), there is a hidden code inside these words and they illustrate a particular way of engaging with this game that is not learned – but experienced.
Take UNO, another popular card game, for example. Their official Twitter channel responded to Black folks suggesting that they were playing the game wrong and didn’t know the rules. Of course, Black Twitter responded collectively by basically saying UNO doesn’t know how to play their own game.
In these two examples, a few things are clear. First, Black play exists independent of rules, structures, and formalities. And secondly, Black folks play way too much and are operating on another level when it comes to leisure and recreation; and they are protecting it at all costs. And this play is always done collectively and communally. As the Twitter call outs to UNO illustrated.
If UNO had factored Black folks in any part of their audience equation, they would have already understood Black play praxis. I have never witnessed Black folks reading rule books or manuals. And no matter when they adopt a technology, they are early adopters because they do it on their own terms and in their own way.
And I argue that this is the core of Black Game Studies.
One might ask, “breaking rules” is Black Game Studies? No. In fact, quite the opposite. Black gaming cultures are very fond of rules and they articulate them early and often. The phrase “Joker. Joker. Deuce. Ace” is a clear articulation of rules, just not the official ones. So they created their own world; so worldbuilding is the core of this rule breaking, thus, a basic tenet of Black Game Studies.
Drawing from Afro-pasts, presents, and futures, Black users, gamers, developers, creators, streamers, and fans, offer different perspectives on gaming. And scholars like TreaAndrea Russworm, Andre Brock, Lindsay Grace, Samantha Blackmon, Aaron Trammell, Akil Fletcher, Javon Goard, Jihan Johnston, Nyah Beck, and others cover Black Game Studies from a broad range of disciplines including the humanities, social sciences, and computation.
Drawing from over two decades of scholarship, Black Games Studies focuses on tensions in designing Blackness to the transmediated and techno practices of play both in physical and digital spaces. Broadly, I focus on the tenets of Black Game Studies to see their potential to imagine new worlds.
I go beyond mechanics, genre, and platform in exploring Black Game Studies. Instead, Black Game Studies offers an “addendum” to explore gaming and gaming culture through the nexus of Black digital praxis. Within a landscape of technological and cultural innovation, Blackness is implicated in the building and maintenance of gaming culture because Blackness has always been on the cutting edge of technological creation and innovation.
There is an entire ecosystem around Black folks’ play and gaming practices. And this ecosystem includes leisure, recreation, and reclaiming time. But so often when we talk about the ecosystem and structure behind gaming, we are often engaging in the most visible extensions of the culture (what we can see and touch). I offer that Black Game Studies is like a map, or a compromise between people, places, time and space, and constantly negotiated to create a constellation of engagement with history to make sense of our present, to reimagine our futures.
Kishonna L. Gray, Professor, kishonna@umich.edu, School of Information,University of Michigan