The Interesting Case of Black College Football Experience

GamePolitics brought back to the fore an interesting case in the annals of controversial games today, Black College Football Experience. To quickly summarize, the game is a college football game featuring historically black conferences, but it also features rhythm game bits when the marching bands come on at halftime, even using the Rock Band drum kit. The game was previously published almost nowhere in 2007, but is apparently nearing an Xbox 360 release.

From knowing as little as we do about the game, it can be easy to think "Why do black people need their own game?" as many commenters have said. I felt this way at first, but this is a game featuring the region's historically black conferences of colleges that were established to fix education inequality between the races. Highlighting a specific region of football isn't objectionable, but the game also has "Black" right there in the title, which does come off as fairly exclusive.

Also, this game isn't just about the football. The much larger emphasis on marching bands and dancing gives a different cultural perspective that is welcome, I think. The point is, this isn't taking the white/Hispanic/Asian/anybody else out of normal college football and making a game out of it. This is highlighting a real world slice of college football that is majority black and has some different features, like more prominent and active marching bands.

Still, this is an interesting case for people to look at, and comment wars seem to happen on every site the game is mentioned on. For more details on the game, here's their site.