Critical Game Literacies and Critical Speculative Imagination: A Theoretical and Conceptual Review

Abstract

Digital gaming has expanded during the pandemic, adding urgency to educators’ efforts to implement research on game literacy learning. However, researchers have also documented racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression in gaming. Educators need to prepare young people to resist these, and game developers need to challenge them in their designs. To contribute to these efforts, this article reviews and synthesizes theories, conceptual frameworks, and research on critical game literacies, defined as the literacy skills needed to play, analyze, modify, and design games in ways that challenge systemic oppression. Synthesizing sociocultural learning theory, abolitionist critical theories, and Afrofuturist Development theory, I argue that critical game literacies can nurture critical speculative imagination, “the capacity to conjure, enact, and rehearse future worlds free from oppression” (Tynes et al. forthc., 23). I demonstrate this by focusing on movements for abolition of police and prisons, part of the international struggle for Black liberation. The theory could also be developed further in related movements around the world, supporting young people in using games as equipment to prototype liberated futures.