Hello and welcome to Five Things. I'm Philip M. Bailey, a national political correspondent

for USA Today at Sunday, May 28, 2023. A new VR game called Barn Stormers, determined

to win, transports gamers to the 1940s as baseball players in the Negro leagues. The

game throws a spotlight on a difficult time and history for people of color. Through

immersion in the Negro leagues, the game aims to share two things. First, the triumphant

experience of so many of its ball players who earned hard-fought recognition for their talent.

But it also aims to give gamers the experience of discrimination that ball players were forced

to endure, in doing both the game aims to develop its players' ability to empathize.

Today, we're speaking to the game's creator, Derek Ham, a department-head and associate

professor of media arts design technology at North Carolina State University. Can VR tap

into the emotional experience of its players to create transformative change?

Derek, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much. For those who are familiar during

Jim Crow segregation, this was an entirely separate league created for African-American

and since they weren't allowed to play in the major or minor leagues with white players

obviously until Jackie Robinson famously broke the color barrier. I should tell listeners

that as an African-American, it wasn't strange for me to sort of look at this historically,

you know, Derek I'm sure, as you know, we're pretty familiar with African-American history.

And I was taught this history both in school but also by my parents and grandparents. But

for those who are African-American, it is definitely something that I think is notable.

What gave you the idea, first of all, to use the Negro leagues as a storytelling mechanism?

One of the things that I've been really interested in is expanding the historical narrative

beyond what I call the bullet points that we like to do. One of my first VR pieces was

...