Join us TOMORROW, Nov 21, as *ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories <https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal> *hosts scholar TreaAndrea M. Russworm for a talk titled "Utopian Funk: Playing and Breaking The Sims in Dark Times." The event will be at 2PM ET on the ROMchip Twitch channel <https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal>. Sign up for our newsletter <https://romchip.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=27c1594af9abf2dc80455091b&id=caaf5790a7> to never miss an update. Head to https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal join the talk @ 2PM. *About the Talk* This talk explores how Black arts traditions—like funk music, speculative fiction, and televisual forms—intersect with video game histories and player practices to chart what Russworm frames as “utopian funk.” Focusing on The Sims and Black player communities, the talk will examine how games become sites of both speculative possibility and structural failure, revealing how utopian impulses and broken systems coexist as generative spaces for cultural production and critique. *About the Speaker* TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California and a Series Editor of *Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture *(Duke University Press). She teaches courses on video games, digital culture, and popular media like film, television, and streaming platforms. She is also the director of the Radical Play Game Design Lab, an Associate Editor for Outreach and Equity for the *Journal of Cinema and Media Studies*, and she has appeared in popular media venues like CNN. A prolific writer and editor on film, television, games, and other media, Professor Russworm has published widely, including the books *Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games*; *Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition*; and *From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry. *She is currently working on three new books on race and gaming cultures. *About **ROMchip* *ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories <https://www.romchip.org/>* is a free, online scholarly journal for game history. *ROMchip *develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected, preserved, and practiced. *ROMchip* is a donation-based organization fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation <https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/> (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499). --- Laine Nooney <http://www.lainenooney.com/> Associate Professor | MCC <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> @ NYU <http://www.nyu.edu/> | they/them Managing Editor | ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories <https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal> | Join our Newsletter <http://eepurl.com/crCul1> -Need to make an appt? Click, don't email: https://calendar.app.google/V9ZuMRWEKnnUBdQ56 -Probably typed by voice recognition, so please cherish typos