This dissertation explores 21st Century African American Literature’s relationship to video games. Drawing upon literary texts, digital archives, video games, play studies and phenomenology, it asks: What are the fundamental ways around which black social life is structured in the early 21st Century? I assert that video games—most of which are Japanese in origin—are the most popular aesthetic objects in the world and consider how they shape desire and the creation of social space for black digital natives. This dissertation suggests that our lack of attention to these popular objects impedes comprehension of the full architecture of 21st Century African American Literature, and the complexities of an emergent social and political life which differs from the Civil Rights or Obama era forms of political progress.