Why games not rooted in our Lineage miss the mark.
When people are taught to forget their past, someone else gets to decide their future; memory is a form of resistance! – Malcolm X
Games that are not rooted in Black American culture often miss the mark because they treat Blackness as a surface-level aesthetic—skin tone, slang, or a soundtrack—rather than as lived history, community, values, humor, faith, family, and regional diversity. Authenticity requires cultural insight and creative authority, not just inclusion of Black characters
What “rooted” means
Do not boast over the branches and pride yourself at their expense. If you do boast and feel superior, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root [that supports] you. – Romans 11:18
Black American culture is not a single monolith. It includes distinct regional, generational, religious, and artistic experiences, shaped by Indigenous American as well as African heritage and by the history of American Genocide, slavery, segregation, migration, resistance, and creativity in the United States. Hoodoo (or Root work) is not a religion any more than taking pain medication is for a headache. If you take the Bible out of the equation it also removes the foundation, our ancestry strength and faith rooted in Christ (a revolutionary Black Messiah). Who supports the root, as well as our laws and customs.
In American folk magic, he’s the trickster hero who could outsmart the Devil, the master who could never be enslaved in spirit. The root itself, usually a dried and knotted piece from the Ipomoea jalapa plant (a type of morning glory), is believed to carry his power.
pomoea purga
A prime example of a game that is about our lineage and spiritual traditions that are not from are lineage or tradition include:
Southern folklore, spiritual traditions, and family history, such as South of Midnight (which is a bed wench thriller) which isn’t written or devolved by us its basically a group of outsiders who want to jump the gun on our culture before were awaken to it. Make a sexualized trope flick as the foundations of a Black American mythology. Those the Hoodoo history might have been factual, it lacks a proper cultural lens. Its taking the soul out of the experience by making a traditionally downtrodden group and gives them an “All lives matter” defusal and or mix our ancestral power for white consumption. You pay for a game especially with such limit games for made bv us to choose from you shouldn’t be the one being energetically played with. You should leave feeling like you’ve learned something and have grown closer to your ancestral past and power, not having to deal with some anti-Black/anti-Christ agenda pushed on you.
Why South of Midnight and other unrooted games fall short
There is no mention of the Bible, every other character plot is regarding a Gentile who your either married too or living in “proximity” too. aka (your freedom is sexual access/proximity) not finding the sustainer of the root and living in a just world.
There is no mention in the Bible about dolls/Idol being used by followers of Christ but they are in South of Midnight. As a sort of European/white male stand in.
Compulsion Games is located in Westmount, Montreal, Canada by a group of non-ingenious Canada immigrants/migrants.
Why unrooted games fail
Problem
Why it misses
Surface diversity
Changing a character’s skin tone or adding slang does not convey cultural perspective, relationships, or lived experience.
Stereotype recycling
Games have often limited Black characters to athletes, criminals, hustlers, violent sidekicks, or hypersexualized roles, narrowing who Black people are allowed to be in the medium.
Outsider authorship
When Black creatives are absent from writing, design, voice direction, and leadership, cultural details can feel researched rather than remembered. Only about 4% of global game developers identified as Black American, African, or Afro-Caribbean in a 2021 IGDA survey. atomhawk
Treating Blackness as a genre
Hip-hop, basketball, or urban crime settings can be valid subjects, but they become reductive when they are presented as the entirety of Black American life. futures.
No emotional specificity
Players connect with particular family tensions, humor, faith, grief, pride, code-switching, and community norms; generic “diverse” characters lack that texture.
The deeper issue
Games are interactive systems, so culture should shape more than dialogue or character art. It can inform mechanics, worldbuilding, music, moral choices, language, spatial design, and the kinds of stories considered worth telling. When it does not, Black characters may be present but not culturally centered.
Historically, the industry’s default protagonist has been white and male, while Black characters have often appeared through narrow or caricatured roles. That legacy makes shallow representation especially noticeable: players can tell when a character is “diverse” in appearance but not grounded in a real cultural worldview.
What gets it right
Ubisoft for example worked with Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) consultants to get the language, culture, and history as accurate as possible. During the development of Assassin’s Creed 3.
Games and tabletop games rooted in Black American culture tend to treat cultural knowledge as central rather than decorative. For example, Rise ‘n Fly combined bid whist—a game with strong communal ties in Black communities—with Black history trivia, while Black Quest and Blerd Domination treated Black history and contemporary cultural knowledge as core gameplay material.
The standard is not that every game must be explicitly about our lineage. It is that, when a game includes Black American people or culture, it should reflect the complexity, agency, history, and diversity of that culture—ideally with Foundation Black American creators meaningfully involved.
