Lonny J. Avi Brooks

Cruelty and Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism combines science fiction and fantasy to reexamine how the future is currently imagined, and to reconstruct futures thinking with a deeper insight into the black experience, especially as slavery forced Africans to confront an alien world surrounded by colonial technologies. Afrofuturism is born out of cruelty, and that cruelty of the white imagination was a necessary condition out of which the African diaspora had to reimagine its future. Rhetorically, Afrofuturism aims to reclaim and transform the trauma of past atrocities against the black and Afro-queer diaspora. Think of the Middle Passage as a science fiction horror where black people were transported from western Africa, the home planet of the black diaspora, and where previously unseen technologies of transportation and bondage were used to dislocate, kidnap large numbers of people to a new world. In this world, they had to innovate, adapt, capitulate, succumb, and rebuild their former lives and traditions. The Black Panther comics, for example, reflect an Afrofuturist reimagining of African futures through its superhero T’Challa and the technologically advanced and secret nation of Wakanda. The white cruelty ironically served as the pathway to Afrofuturism and the imagining of more powerful futures for the black diaspora. Now, in the Age of Trump, we are confronted with a resurgence of patriarchal authority that seeks to deny and reverse advances in civil rights and restore a time where everyone knew their place in the hierarchy of white supremacy. Our current present recapitulates in part the cruelty of the last centuries, and demands that we recreate stronger alternative futures. Imagining new futures can serve as a strategy to understand the nature of cruelty, and how we negotiate with cruel acts as constitutive of our greatest aspirations. As Giorgio Baruchello states, “embracing the cruel character of existence might serve itself as a precondition for any meaningful life to be lived.” I argue that affirming pathways that use cruelty against itself can function as a fulcrum to reduce its trauma. In this essay, I integrate Afrofuturism and game studies as a pathway and route in supplanting cruelty and reducing the space it occupies. Specifically, I discuss the use of Game Jams to bring into existence new artifacts and strategies to embrace cruel truths while amplifying and developing better futures. The Game Jam is an event in which game developers, made up of designers, artists, social scientists, from amateur to professional get together, develop a game, and release it in an extremely short period. A relatively recent phenomenon dating back to 2002, Game Jams take place across institutions and communities (Fowler et al. 2015). Distinct in theme and composition of participant skill sets and outcomes, they all share the

From Territorial to Temporal Ambitions: The Politics of Time and Imagination in Massive Multiplayer Online Forecasting Games

In 2010, the online forecasting game Urgent Evoke, produced by Jane McGonigal, former Director of Gaming at the Institute for the Future and the World Bank Institute, elicited praise by gaming critics as a model for “serious gaming.” The game promised to show how players could think about long-term solutions to urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, conflict, and climate change using the African continent as its test bed. Players imagined future temporal outcomes through remixing media. In a qualitative analysis of actual game play during the real-time introduction of the game for teaching organizational communication, Evoke became a platform for student inquiry for questioning its underlying design as an expansion of territorial and temporal conquest. Evoke served as a springboard for building a literacy of critical time among students in accessing stakeholder power to determine the future. Students challenged, created, and followed the cultural capital of promissory visions in circulation. The curriculum design for using serious and forecasting games like Evoke must account for the conceptual development of what Sarah Sharma calls critical time or chronopolitics, a hidden politics of time that shapes our approaches to cultures, organizations, and innovation. By placing spatial and temporal dynamics center stage, we investigated how serious games produce a chronopolitics of time differentiating among people by class and ethnicity. Alternative Reality Games offer the potential for building a literacy of critical forecasting time to understand the practices for anticipating the future as temporal networks of power, different and uneven.

Collaborative research into Game Jams, Hackathons and Event-Based Teaching in Higher Education (Abstract Only)

The idea for this session is based on conversations with colleagues from computer science, art, communications, engineering, and biology as well as international colleagues from three continents at ITICSE-2016 on the use of Game Jams to increase participation of underrepresented minorities (URMs) in Computer Science and STEM education. High-impact practices are powerful tools in engaging students (NSSE, 2014), perhaps even more so for non-traditional, ESL/ELL, first-generation, and URM students in STEM disciplines by increasing peer and faculty contact, active learning, and high expectations (Goodman). We believe that event-based teaching, such as Game jams and Hackathons provide students with many, if not more of the experiences that are credited with those of commonly identified High Impact Practices (Kuh, 2008). These events also create peer and social networks among participants. While not conclusive - anecdotally the networks of peers and social capacity seem to make a difference in post graduation job search (Mouw). Game Jams and Hackathons are still relatively new in higher education, and while there is a lot of anecdotal evidence as to the benefits reaped by participants of these events, there exists little in the way of long-term studies in the literature that speaks to the academic value of these events. This session will create a conversation among faculty from computer science and other disciplines who are interested in creating these events and their institutions, and developing scholarship to fill in the gaps in the literature around the effects and efficacy of these events on the long-term success of participants.