Game Art: Kasem Kydd's Play The Game Before Them Niggas Kill Me! (2016)
Kasem Kydd is a visual artist born in Queens, New York. This is his first machinima, developed with 2K Sports' popular basketball game series. He attended the Cambridge School of Weston and is
now enrolled in the Fine Art Program (BFA) at Carnegie Mellon University.Play The Game Before Them Niggas Kill Me! (aka Play The Game Before Them Nigga's Shoot Me) was produced in Angela Washko's Digital Storytelling and Resistance course at Carnegie Mellon University. In this class, students "Explore the ways in which artists today use contemporary technology to create complex alternative stories to dominant media narratives as well as the ways in wh
ich video, film, performance and media artists have historically used documentary and appropriation as a way to resist, respond, and deconstruct one-dimensional news media and pop cultural stories".
Very few machinima address the theme of
race (a notable exception is Alex Chan's The French Democracy, 2005) and even fewer appropriate and reconfigure a sport game like NBA 2Kxx. The soundtrack features Crime Mob's "Knuck If You Buck" (2004): "Ain't no game off in this thang/We too deep off yo party".Play The Game Before Them Niggas Kill Me! is the video game equivalent of Hank Willis Thomas's B(r)anded.Hank Willis Thomas, And One, series: Strange Fruit, digital c-print, 2011.LINK:Kasem Kydd