Abstract
As gaming communities, industry, even scholars and teachers attempt to address the need for diversity and inclusion in games, how might we locate, include, theorise, and teach games of colour and games that embrace difference? Specifically, how might we look at the representation and algorithmic underpinnings of racialised and marginalised identities, narratives, bodies, and cultures in games? This chapter will offer practical interventions into these fraught languages, grammars, and algorithms in three parts: First, a definition and demonstration of close playing or critical ways of analysing, engaging, and teaching games to address race and difference in digital games; next, three different approaches and assignments to teaching games of colour; and finally, suggestions for developing a teaching with games philosophy. Kishonna L. Gray addresses Blackness and games through the example of Hair Nah (2017), a game about a Black woman tired of people touching her hair; Ashlee Bird discusses the importance of teaching the history of Indigenous representations in games and the teaching of the game Never Alone (2014); Edmond Y. Chang looks at games like Yellow Face (2019) to think through Asian American representation in games and Asian futurism.