NC State professor creates immersive Negro Leagues VR game of baseball ‘triumph’

Your fingers tighten their grip on a wooden baseball bat under the bright stadium lights.

You glance toward the roaring cheers behind you, and you see an all-Black crowd of spectators.

If it wasn’t for the weight of the headset on your face and ears, you might swear you are really playing in a historic 1940s Negro Leagues baseball game.

A new virtual reality game created by Derek Ham, a VR designer and associate professor in the College of Design at N.C. State University, lets you experience this rich piece of Black history firsthand.

The game is called “Barnstormers: Determined to Win,” named after the Black baseball leagues that traveled throughout the country in the decades of segregated American sports.

Thanks to VR technology, this videogame is a “traveling exhibit” of a pivotal moment in sports history, unlike going a museum, watching a movie, or reading a book, Ham said.

“The idea is, if you played the 17-minute experience and you come out of the headset, all of a sudden, you have a completely different reference point for talking about (the Negro Leagues),” Ham explained. “As you’re reflecting, you’re not just thinking about photos, you’re thinking about, ‘Oh, that spatial experience I had of being in a VR headset.’”

“Barnstormers” debuted last year as a featured VR experience at film festivals including the Cannes Film Festival in France and the 2022 Ignite Film Festival in the United Kingdom, where it won Best VR experience.

The game is able to be played with any VR headset plugged into a computer, such as the Oculus Rift.

Most recently this year, the game was released to PC gamers worldwide through the major gaming platform Steam.

The gameplay

“Barnstormers” immerses the player in the golden 1940s era of Negro League baseball, which saw the rise of great American athletes like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Jackie Robinson – who are featured avatars, or characters in the game.

The game carries players through vignettes in history, paired with dramatic and heroic music in the game’s score.

Take your chance at the bat during a face-off between some of the game’s featured historic teams, the Kansas City Monarchs and the Homestead Grays.

Hear and see a realistic thundering crowd under the lights in the first night baseball games.

“Nighttime baseball was born out of Negro League baseball,” Ham said. “History has said Negro League was the first to do it out of necessity. They didn’t have prime time. It was later. They would ask a farmer who had some crop lights to kind of set the stuff up.”

Walk through the streets of a Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh and pick a newspaper up off of the ground to read the headlines about the athletes who defied the odds with their baseball skills.

Or walk to a general store where a pair of white men standing outside make sneering comments at you, which conveys the reminder “not everyone is rooting for you,” Ham said.

Ham partnered with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, as his main historical source for the videogame.

His goal was to include several “Easter eggs” in the game by featuring a few famous players recreated realistically with vivid details.

One experience in the game includes the Eagles from New Jersey, featuring Larry Doby as a baseman, who became the second Negro Leagues ballplayer to join the major leagues after Paige.

Before “Barnstormers” Ham produced “I Am a Man,” an interactive VR exhibit hosted at N.C. State in 2018.

It explored the Civil Rights era by recreating the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and events leading up to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

A ‘story of triumph’

With “Barnstormers,” Ham wanted to reframe how Black history is perceived on the screen.

“It’s a story of triumph,” he explained. “I wanted to take people beyond the ‘Oh, I empathize with your pain and suffering.’ Here’s someone with pain and suffering — and they overcame.”

The idea is to emphasize the players’ athletic achievements and to challenge notions of pitying them for not playing in the major leagues, Ham said.

“The idea was to give you the sense of this is the biggest stage of baseball right now. Who cares if it’s not the majors? This is where all the action is happening,” he said. “Look at them being bigger than life. Their skill, their expertise, was bigger than the doors that were closed in their face.

“This is the fun, the enjoyment, the entertainment, and some of the best athleticism that you’ve ever seen,” he said. “I wanted to give you a taste and let you experience it.”

Russell Mosely, who over a half-century ago played on one of Raleigh’s own Negro American League teams, the Raleigh Tigers, thinks this game is an opportunity for newer generations.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Mosley, 89, said in a phone interview. “This would probably be the only way the young people can learn about the Negro Leagues.”

Mosely said he laments that younger players in the major leagues may not know much about Black baseball history.

“Because they’re not teaching (enough) about history in schools,” Mosely said. “Especially Black history.”

On a similar note, Ham said conservative opposition to so-called “wokeness” about Black history also motivates him.

“What we’re trying to do is celebrate these historical figures who overcame an obstacle — and, I’m sorry, the obstacle happened to be other Americans. It’s just factual history,” he said. “I’m more empowered to make sure these narratives are kept alive using emerging technology.”