Be Playful brings nine Black-made games to Leimert Park
Connor Wall's echolocating android and Jeremy Kamal's bass-irrigated floodplain lead the October 15 slate, with the makers on hand.
On Thursday, October 15, Black Public Media sets up in Leimert Park with nine projects to play. Be Playful, a showcase curated by Lisa Osborne and staged as part of LA Tech Week, runs PC and VR demos plus a pair of augmented reality artworks, with the makers on hand. The announcement reads like a festival lineup, and two names on it are my favorites.
Connor Wall's Omnivores Rule puts you in a flying android sent ahead of its human creators to scout an alien planet, and your voice does the work: echolocate to map what's hidden, shout to send shockwaves through the land, whisper to bond with the wildlife. The look is hand-drawn and Moebius-inspired, and Black Public Media's description promises a world where "listening triumphs over conquest."
Jeremy Kamal, who teaches at SCI-Arc, has spent years building Mojo, a universe where the rituals of contemporary Black culture shape the land. In Mojo: The Floods, a trap producer runs a watershed from a mixing board, bass notes vibrating the water. Mojo: Stained, which won a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in 2024, follows a tea master whose gang marks territory with colored flora. Both have circulated as animated films, and Kamal is now developing Run, a one-hour game set in the same world.
The opening of the Omnivores Rule teaser. The full trailer, with sound, is on Steam
The rest of the slate: Spencer Garland's Counter of Sheep; Mannahatta 2100 by MaryAnn Talavera and Anatola Araba; Squidpunk, a Japan-set beat 'em up from Naomi Urey and Georgiana Wright; Jonathan Williams's Fatherhood Legacy; Spritewrench's Caribbean folklore mystery Duppy Detective Tashia; and Dominick Rabrun's Vévé-Punk: Mind Singer, the Haitian Revolution game Killscreen covered in January.
Black Public Media has backed Black storytelling for public television since 1979, and Be Playful is that infrastructure making room for games. Most of the projects are still raising budgets, so pitch decks will be on hand too. The demos are the draw: much of this work has only been seen in trailers, and here you can play it with its maker beside you.
Registration is on Partiful, with room for 400. Demos run 5 to 8 p.m.
Stills from the Be Playful slate, via Black Public Media
Work like this mostly surfaces in rooms like this one, a long way from the release calendar. Killscreen's free Radar letter finds it and tells you where to see it, three times a week.
