Abolitionist and Afro-Futurist Game Design Pedagogies (Poster 4)

• In Event: Designing for Racial Justice Through Speculative Pedagogies: Learning to Build Liberatory Futures

Abstract

This poster invites viewers to playfully imagine unpoliced future worlds and learning environments. We narrate an ongoing collaborative curriculum and game design process informed by abolitionism (the contemporary movement for the abolition of police, prisons, and carceral educational policies) and Afrofuturist Development, (Tynes, et al., 2023), a theory and design lens that supports Black people in using technology to prototype their own liberation. The poster illustrates the relevance of abolitionist pedagogies (Love 2019), Afrofuturist development, and gaming in the design of learning environments that challenge racism/white supremacy.

Through text and images, we will demonstrate how we have been using game design methods to prototype liberated future worlds, from a) abolitionist organizing and high school teaching, through b) the design of one of the first abolitionist video games called [title redacted to ensure anonymity of proposal], towards c) the creation of a Critical Game Jam (CGJ) where young people are making their own games about liberated worlds.

In particular, we analyze a key theme in this design process: scaffolding Afrofuturist world-building. When the first author was a high school teacher, they invited their students to imagine and prototype future worlds without youth incarceration, and the worlds they built informed community organizing advocating the closure of the city’s youth jail. This worldbuilding also scaffolded the development of games that prompt players to imagine unpoliced futures, including the video game [title redacted] two of the authors designed. The game invites players to role-play as young people learning and falling in love in the reclaimed ruins of an abolished youth jail in a liberated Afro-future. We reflected on our design process around this video game, and realized that starting with the world the first author and their students had built provided scaffolding that allowed us to learn critical and abolitionist game design skills. Based on that insight, we developed the curriculum for a Critical Game Jam where we invited young people (mostly queer and Black people in their early 20s) to learn to make their own games through a series of design prompts and activities that prominently featured Afrofuturistic worldbuilding.

Based on these experiences, we conclude with recommendations for how educators can scaffold abolitionist and Afrofuturist game design learning experiences in their classrooms. The poster will serve as a practical example of how communities can implement forms of speculative education that have been theorized in recent publications (e.g. Garcia & Mirra, 2023).

Authors

• Matthew Coopilton, University of Southern California

• Brendesha M. Tynes, University of Southern California

• Olivia Peace, University of Southern California

• De'Andra Johnson, University of Southern California