Native Son Race

For our game, we chose to use the downward spiral of life as our format for the playing board. We chose this because it is the symbol on some of the actual Native Son books. It is very fitting for the events of Bigger’s life, it truly just gets worse and worse. At the same time, it gets better and this spiral explains it because we never know where it starts. His path from what he does leads to the affects on his soul. In our game, multiple characters are invited to travel along this journey to see how it affects them. They can hope to make it to their “fate” and hope even more that they get a good one. Maybe life will get in their way on the path to fate, though. For the background, we used a gradience of different skin colors to represent the major motif of race in the novel. Bigger is highly discriminated against because he is black. Then in the center, is the color of red, representing the communist party, which is almost an in between. They advocate for African American rights, but are still white. On our special white cards, we chose images such as the rat, a white blur, blind eyes, earrings, a gavel, and the communist sign to represent Bigger’s journey with the surrounding characters. Most of the things that stood out on our game board acted as motifs in the novel, thus why we chose them. We chose to use the
It provides and accurate representation of the racism of the time period, which brings a deeper meaning to the game and its title. The racism of the time is what proves to be Bigger’s downward spiral of life. He is discriminated against, which poses challenges and makes him angry. I feel like we did a superb job at portraying this by showing the skin color gradience and having the reds in the middle to show that the Communists were see to be a part of each side. I feel like this summed up the reason for Bigger’s actions, which is a key part of the