Thread by @enibolas

Day 6/10 of my anti-racist #gamestudies thread series.

Today: @odaminowin's Self-determination in Indigenous games

taylorfrancis.com/books/e/978131…

It's an important text on ongoing efforts in Indigenous digital game dev in North America. How does it resist racist-colonial legacies?

LaPensée positions herself as an Indigenous game dev with ties to Anishinabee and Metis communities. Her work on games is based on personal interactions, community gatherings, ceremonies, and learning and speaking Anishinaabemowin. Games become a tool for self-determination.

So what’s self-determiniation? It is “the right of a people (nation) to exercise sovereignty or self- rule and to determine its own political, economic, and cultural arrangements.”

This includes efforts of Indigenous peoples to regain sovereignty after centuries of colonisation

Survivance is key concept related to self-determination. It means survival with an attitude: activity and presence in the now: Indigenous (capital I) presence as contemporary, not a thing of the past.

LaPensée identifies survivance as “a place from which all of my work comes”.

So how to do survivance through digital games? LaPensée says that this medium has become important for self-determination and the representation of Indigenous identities bc the non-linearity and multidimensionality of games resembles traditional storytelling structures.

Furthermore, given the increasing access of Native Americans to tech, games offer a speculative space to play with alternate history: What if the colonisers hadn’t won? What if Native Americans had resisted the first wave of European settlers?

Questions around identity and survivance are explored in LaPensée’s Skin Workshops, a digital game dev workshop by the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace network, Montreal. The stakes are high: digital games have quite a history when it comes to stereotyping Indigenous people.

The author mentions the western armchair ethnographer whose worldview is catered to: Plains people, feathers, tomahawks. The binary between a western “civilised” onlooker and a “savage” subject is so strong it extends to well intended media studies and anthropology.

In anthropology (a western discipline) researchers are obsessed with describing Indigenous people as producers of media, but hardly as consumers or users of media. This imagines them in terms of a lack. A lack which must be resolved by giving western culture to them.

We see this colonial logic repeated in games that reduce Indigenous people to relics of the past: the “mystic savage” is a trope feat. for example in No Man’s Land and Age of Empires III where players increase their skills by casting spells or dancing in stereotypical ways.

Indigenous game dev presents a path to resist this legacy through self-determined counter narratives. LaPensée discusses a list of games to compellingly make this point. I talk about 5 of them here but strongly recommend you check out all of them in the paper. They are many.

1) Never Alone, a platformer developed in collaboration with the Alaskan Cook Inlet Tribal Council and non-Indigenous game devs. What’s important here is the treatment of traditional story elements like the water spirits as real People. This indicates a respectful design dialog.

More contemporary issues are tackled in Invaders, Wanisinowin and Blood Quantum which deal with concerns of the all-women designers: Who are the aliens? (Invaderes), What is belonging? (Blood Quantum), How to deal with a loss and restoration of Indigenous identity? (Wanisinowin)

Finally, the mobile museum game Gathering Native Foods. In it, players must ration salmon for a feast, resist the urge to overtake and reflect on the losses caused by colonisation. These teachings are infused in the counter-colonial mechanics which rewards slowness. 🐟🐟🐟

These games demonstrate paths to self-determination. They show “an ongoing effort to adapt existing resources in the design and dissemination of survivance games while remaining aware of next generation technologies”.

Indigenous lives matter, and they're a thing of the present.

Let me conclude by pointing to work which continues and complements this important research in different Indigenous & game dev locations.

One of them is Sami Game Jam organised and reflected on by @aakoo and @OutiKaarina in their recent article: digra.org/digital-librar….