How Black Designers Write in Both Past Continuous & Future Perfect

This Black History Month has been marked with significant efforts by the government to desegregate public and private life to combat “DEI” and “woke”—words that once signified efforts to combat systemic oppression but have now become catch-all pseudoslurs. These attacks on civil rights have already been deemed “The Great Resegregation” after the Trump administration signed an executive order directing the illegal DOGE commission to remove all “DEI” staff, such as Air Force General Charles Q Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and having federal agencies remove evidence of their own history that highlights the accomplishments of marginalized people. This has extended into the private sector, with a slew of private companies ending their equity programs and layoffs of public figures like Joy Reid at MSNBC.

For many Black game designers, this is all too familiar. “The segregationist-in-chief and his people are—you can see it in plain sight—trying to memory-hole [Black history],” said Quinn Murphy, founder of Thoughtcrime Games. “A lot of their play is on memory—if we don't remember it, it didn't exist—but we've actually already played this game before, right?”

This is echoed by Chris Spivey, founder of Darker Hue Studios. “There's always revisionist history,” he said. “It hasn't stopped. The only thing now is that we're in a place where it's so dangerous and so prevalent that it's impossible to ignore.”

Spivey and Murphy are two of the many Black game designers whose work engages with the past and future. For Spivey, it’s about reclaiming history. For Murphy, it’s about empowering the imagination: “Imagination is the weapon that we have to hone. It's the blade we have to sharpen.” But regardless of which tense they choose to work in—past continuous or future perfect, their games resonate with the present.