Reimagining Gaming Blackness

In the fall of 2023, the cross-listed undergraduate course ANT 437/ AAS 437 Gaming Blackness: The Anthropology of Race and Gaming was offered to Princeton’s students. The course engaged with themes of Black identity, representation, and gameplay to advance an intersectional approach to understanding the impact of video games on culture. While the course would receive a perfect score on its evaluation, due to the limits on hardware and funding, the course was forced to leave multiple pedagogical experiences and questions on the cutting room floor. But what if these impediments were to be removed? What if the course could be redesigned not from a place of scarcity, but from abundance? Reimagining Gaming Blackness is a project that expands on the foundation developed from the original course freed from its restrictions. In doing so, the project introduces new equipment to the class and new themes that foster novel perspectives on games and education. To capitalize on this, the Gaming Blackness class of 2024 will travel to Tokyo, Japan, to engage with the international gaming community. There, the students will experience games and how games influence culture, economies, and communities globally.