The
Mechanics of Survivance in Indigenously-Determined
Video-Games: Invaders and Never Alone
DEBORAH L. MADSEN
Survivance as a legal concept names the right to inheritance and more
specifically the condition of being qualified to inherit a legacy. In his essay
"Aesthetics of Survivance" (2008), Vizenor describes survivance as "the
heritable right of succession or reversion of an estate" (1). This aspect of
survivance is overlooked by those scholars of Vizenor's work who focus rather
on the conjunction of the terms "survival" and "resistance," terms that are
important most fundamentally as they intersect with the capacity to transmit
and to accept the inheritance of the past that is itself the intersection of
survival and resistance.[1] That is to
say, acts of resistance and survival form the axiology (or ethical action) of
survivance; the preservation of tribal languages, for example, or the
transmission of traditional stories, are acts that ensure the continual
availability of the tribal values of knowing and being in the world that are
encoded in those words and stories. These Indigenous lifeways constitute the
inheritance that motivates survivance. Thus, survivance is not a static object
or method but a dynamic, active condition of historical and cultural survival
and also of political resistance, practiced in the continual readiness of
Indigenous communities to accept and continue the inheritance passed on by
elders and ancestors. In this sense, claims made by recent Indigenous
video-game developers to speak to youth through digital media by creating games
that transmit tribal legacies of language, stories, ontologies, and ways of
knowing and being in the world, speak to the practice of survivance. Indeed,
the particular capacity of video games to engage active participation in the
making of stories offers a powerful means to encourage and sustain survivance.
In what game designer Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe/Métis) refers to as
"Indigenously-determined" video-games, then, survivance is both a substantive
dimension of the experience of playing a game and also the underlying
structural principle that governs the game mechanics that are determined by
Indigenous epistemologies.[2]
This
essay focuses on the analysis of game mechanics: the rules of the game that
prescribe the opportunities made possible for, and the limitations imposed
upon, player interactivity. The term "game mechanics"
refers to all the rules or conditions that govern interaction with the game.
They determine both the means by which the player can act within the game world
(for instance, pressing a designated button on a video-game controller to move
from one kind of reality to another, or throwing dice in an analogue game) and
also the constraints imposed on potential actions by the player (the legitimate
movement of various chess pieces around the board, for example). Ian Schreiber
suggests additional questions that can be posed concerning the functions of
game mechanics: "What actions can players take, and what effects do those
actions have on the game state? When does the game end, and how is a resolution
determined?" (n.pag.). These aspects of game mechanics are closely related to
the structure of the story or game narrative: most clearly the conditions for
an ending but also the intermediate actions that a player can (or cannot) take
to advance the story through a succession of episodes towards that final
resolution. Thus, game mechanics not only control the "rules of the game" but
more fundamentally the conditions for a player's interactivity with the game.
This emphasis on interactivity and action characterizes the definition of games
and game mechanics offered by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek in
their influential 2001 essay, "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game
Research" where they write: "Fundamental to this framework is the idea that
games are more like artifacts than media. By this we mean that the content of a
game is its behavior not the media that streams out of it towards the player.
Thinking about games as designed artifacts helps frame them as systems that
build behavior via interaction" (n.pag.). The "behaviour" of a game is
conditioned by its mechanics, which they define as "the particular components
of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms (inc. actions,
behaviors, rules/control mechanisms)." Game mechanics work with "dynamics"—"the
run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others'
outputs over time"—and "aesthetics"—"the desirable emotional
responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system"
(n.pag.)—to produce the total gaming experience. Both the player's
experience of interaction with the game environment and the emotional impacts
of the game arise from the crafting of the mechanics that control the behaviour
of the game system.
Mechanics
are thematized in the context of the game narrative, through a combination of
"dynamics" and "aesthetics." As Elizabeth LaPensée (whose game Invaders is discussed below) told Vicki
Moulder in a 2017 conversation: "Ways of knowing and
game mechanics always inform one another in anything I work on" (n.pag.).
LaPensée explains this relation at greater length in a contemporaneous
interview with Patti Martinson, in terms of her interest in the
interaction between Indigenous culture and gaming. LaPensée distinguishes games
that use representational "pan-Indian" characters from those
Indigenously-determined games that are created from and by the Indigenous
epistemologies that generate the fundamental game mechanics:
I grew up playing games and looking
for myself as a player character, but of course an Indigenous young woman wasn't
there... I went with the close seconds like Nightwolf,
which were these pan-Indian characters called the "keepers of their people" or
"protectors of their people" but not actually represented in relation to land
and communities and elders. I first started off critiquing these
representations but recognized that if I was ever going to get to play a game
that I wanted to play, I'd have to do it myself. I'm interested mostly in how
Indigenous ways of knowing can be transferred into unique mechanics. That is, I
want to go further than simply representing Indigenous culture through a game
character, I want to see Indigenous cultures infused in the gameplay itself.
(Martinson, n.pag.)
The transference of "Indigenous ways of knowing" into
"unique mechanics" both thematizes game mechanics and goes beyond this
content-based relation to encompass the interactivity that characterizes the
player's structural engagement with the game system. In their study of the
psychological dynamics of digital games, Glued
to Games (2011), Scott Rigby and Richard M. Ryan argue that the degree of agency attributed to a player is
enacted by the availability of opportunities to make choices, to act on them,
and to see the consequences of those actions in the game-world (7). By
emphasizing the creative role of the player, Rigby and Ryan de-emphasize the fact
that player-input is always limited to the potentials for action encoded in the
game mechanics by the game designer. This function (action-potential)
thematizes player interactivity as one of the ways in which mechanics
determines the meaning(s) of the game. Further, as LaPensée's remarks suggest,
the capacity of interactivity to thematize issues like who has the capacity to
assert authority within the game-world, and who is responsible for specific
actions and their consequences, has a distinctive valence in Indigenous game
design.[3]
Rigby and Ryan link the concept of player agency with a need for personal
autonomy; in contrast, a powerful motif that runs through LaPensée's
conversation with Vicki Moulder (and indeed all of LaPensée's work) is
relationship with community:
- "To me, human-computer interaction and the well-being of all life must be interwoven";
- "Another important aspect of Indigenous game development involves creating the game and then gifting it to the community fully or partially";
- "Choices always come down to making sure I'm meeting the needs of the community I'm collaborating with." (n.pag.)
In these assertions, LaPensée crystallizes a recognition of the
inseparability of human-digital interaction and "the well-being of all life" or
the web of relations that characterizes Indigenously-determined games:
relations among player agency, interactivity that is shaped by design choices
that both enable and limit player-actions, respect for community rights and
needs expressed through collaboration, and the orientation of the game design
through Indigenous ways of knowing.
LaPensée
is essentially talking about survivance as the principle that generates and
thematizes Indigenous game mechanics. Vizenor's concept of survivance enhances
understanding of the powerful decolonizing potential of mechanics in
Indigenously-determined video-games and these game mechanics illustrate in
particularly clear ways the workings of survivance as an active engagement in
the politics of what Vizenor calls "native presence." In an interview with
Jöelle Rostkowski, Vizenor remarks: "The character of survivance creates a
sense of native presence, a critical, active presence and resistance, over
absence, historical and cultural absence, nihility and victimry" (xlvii).
Native presence, then, in the fullness of Vizenor's concept, captures the
essence of the tribal inheritance that is passed down as a potential for
decolonization, from one generation to the next. In the discussion that
follows, I seek to show how the sense of a critical, active Indigenous presence
is created, by analyzing the mechanics of two very different types of
Indigenously-determined video-games: the downloadable 2-D fixed shooter casual
game Invaders (2015 Steven Paul Judd,
Elizabeth LaPensée, Trevino Brings Plenty) and the Iñupiaq puzzle platformer
video-game Never Alone (2014 Upper
One Games). The mechanics of these games are designed to compel players to
enact survivance, and understanding of this relationship underlines the
importance of the decolonizing potential of Indigenous video games.
Invaders (2015): Survivance,
Loss, and Resistance
The aspect of survivance that enacts resistance to "historical and
cultural absence, nihility and victimry" (Vizenor) is explored through the 2-D
fixed-shooter video-game Invaders
(2015). The artwork is by Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw), the music by
Trevino Brings Plenty (Lakota), and the game is designed and coded by Elizabeth
LaPensée based on the Unity platform. This free downloadable game is available
for a variety of platforms: Web, WebGL, Android, iPhone, and iPad.[4]
In the 2011 interview with Vicki Moulder cited above, Elizabeth LaPensée
discusses the necessity of making her work available to communities where
"access is so limited that I'm focusing mostly on mobile, Web, and museum games
that I'm sure will reach community members. I've been back and forth between
living where there's very limited Internet access, so really, why would I make
games I can't even play myself?" (n.pag.) This accessibility locates Invaders as an instance of what in the
industry is known as a "casual game." In A
Casual Revolution (2010) game theorist Jesper Juul identifies several
distinctive qualities of casual games: that they are easy to learn to play and
can be played in a variety of different situations; they use mimetic interfaces—"the
physical activity that the player performs mimics the game activity on the
screen" (5)—and they do not require a great deal of time or investment:
they "can be played in short time bursts, and generally do not require an
intimate knowledge of video game history in order to play (5). The casual game
genre of Invaders, then, meets
precisely LaPensée's need to reach and involve communities in her work of
survivance.
As
the title suggests, Invaders is based
on the 1978 classic arcade game Space
Invaders, the aim of which is for the player to save the Earth by
preventing the alien invaders from landing, by shooting them down using a laser
base. Invaders uses the same basic
game mechanics as Space Invaders but
re-thematizes them in axiological ways that express a powerful sense of
survivance: indigeneity is inscribed as persistence and resistance to
historical erasure, and the subject position of the victim. This
re-thematization of mechanics is achieved both through the game's dynamics (the
player's interface with those algorithms that determine the behavior of the
game system) and most obviously through the emotional impact on the player of
the game's visual and musical aesthetics. In a well-designed game like Invaders the dynamics and aesthetics
work inseparably with game mechanics—and in this game, they create performative relations of
survivance. As designer Elizabeth LaPensée explains,
The game is meant to be played in
quick bursts for the attainment of a high score, much like the original Space Invaders. However, in the context
of playing as an Indigenous warrior, the design takes on another meaning—no
matter what, the aliens eventually obliterate your character and community.
Lives are represented not as numbers or even as your own, but instead as the
warriors who stand side by side with you. If you get hit, you permanently lose
a community member. This mirrors the very real losses experienced as colonizers
attacked and decimated Indigenous communities during invasion. ("Indigenous Game Design" n.pag.)
The evocation of loss as "tragic wisdom" is achieved through the game's
axiological resistance to "victimry," a feature that is encountered as soon as
the game starts. The launch screen offers the player only two options: to play
or to quit. After the player fails to stop the alien invasion and is defeated,
the only option offered is to "play again," which returns the player to the
launch screen. Each time the game is played a conscious ethical decision to
engage actively in the scene of conflict and to reject surrender or the
position of the defeated victim is demanded.
The
significance of this demand for survivance-as-resistance is highlighted by the
differences in game design between Invaders
and the original 1978 arcade game. The laser base that in Space Invaders is used for shooting becomes in Invaders a Native warrior-avatar, which the player moves
horizontally across the bottom of the screen. The impersonal firing of a laser
weapon in the original game is replaced by the personalized manipulation of the
digital warrior-character. The haptic interactivity—literally a
"hands-on" relation—between the player and the character (rather than a
direct relation between player and weapon) suggests at least a minimal
identification through the subject-position of the warrior-avatar. Standing
behind the active avatar there are three more, which move in succession to take
the place of the active warrior when he is "killed"; thus, the player has a
total of four "lives" with which to play each game. The significance of the
warrior-avatar is explained by LaPensée in an interview with Chad Sapieha to
mark the showing of Invaders at the
2015 Toronto imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and the
Digital Media Art+Cade:
Invaders is
inspired by original artwork by Steven Paul Judd that depicts warriors facing
off with sprites from the arcade game Space Invaders. The game calls
into question the term "invaders" and what an "alien encounter" can mean for
Indigenous people. Lives in the game are represented by images of community
members rather than numbers, hopefully causing players to recognize the real
lives lost because of colonization." (n.pag.)
The warrior-avatar shoots arrows (not lasers) at the invading
spacecraft, which appear in increasing numbers, with each successive level or
"wave" moving horizontally across the screen while at the same time advancing
towards the bottom of the screen. Thus, the basic game mechanic is very simple:
using the arrow-keys on the keyboard, the player moves the warrior-avatar
horizontally across the screen while using the up-arrow to shoot. This mechanic
is thematized in the desktop version of the game by the mirroring of the player's
use of keyboard arrows and the avatar's shooting of arrows. By playing on the
double significance of "arrows" the mechanic instantiates the subject position
of the player while suggesting a further gesture towards Vizenor's concept of
"wordarrows" as discursive weapons in the ongoing struggle for Indigenous
cultural self-determination.[5]
Invaders uses the same pixelated "vintage"
icons for the four varieties of spacecraft, though Columbus's La Santa María makes occasional
appearances. The destruction of each type of invader earns the player points,
earning more points for destroying the larger spaceships that fire more
powerful weapons. As in the original game, different kinds of weapons are used
by the invaders but in Invaders,
rather than moving uniquely, the weapons are increasingly destructive
culminating in the rockets, bombs, and super-charged bombs that are fired by
the Mystery Ships. The player controls the warrior-avatar's shots but the
invaders' shooting is generated randomly by the game system. The "wave" ends
when the player has destroyed all the alien spacecraft, thus averting the
invasion, but the next wave starts immediately with the appearance of an even
greater number of invaders to defeat, in a loop that is endless and relentless.
The pace of the game is significantly faster than in Space Invaders where each of the player's shots must reach the top
of the screen before the next shot can be fired. In Invaders there is no limit on the speed of shooting and if the
player has received the "rapid fire" bonus then s/he can fire continuously for
the duration of that bonus power. Adding to the relentless pace of the gameplay
in Invaders is the absence of the
stationary protective shields or bunkers arranged in Space Invaders along the bottom of the screen, just above the laser
base. There is no refuge at all to be had in Invaders. The warriors have nowhere to shelter from the
bombardments, which become extremely intense in the later waves when many
invading spacecraft are firing at the same time. The player's dexterity is
severely tested by the need to move the warrior-avatar in increasingly precise
ways to avoid the incoming missiles, with no shelter or shield to offer
respite.
Conditions
for ending each game also differ significantly: in Space Invaders the game ends when the invading spacecraft reach the
bottom of the screen, indicating that the invasion has been successful; the
game also ends when the last of the protective bunkers has been destroyed. Invaders, in contrast, ends when all
four warrior-avatars have been killed; if an invader reaches the bottom of the
screen, the next wave of the invasion continues. Unlike Space Invaders, there is no maximum limit placed on the number of
points a player can score: in the original game this was limited to 9,999
because this is the largest number that can be seen on the four-digit arcade
display (Space Invaders Manual
n.pag.). While there are no "extra lives" to be won as a bonus for acquiring a
specified number of points, on the more advanced levels of Invaders the power of "rapid fire" is gifted when a ghosted quiver
of arrows appears at the top of the screen; the player must move the avatar to
"catch" the arrows as they move down the screen, acquiring this temporary power
that lasts only a few seconds. The game's dominant shooting mechanic requires
that, in order to survive, the player must balance the winning of points
(firing arrows at the invaders) with the need to play defensively (evading the
invaders' weapons). In this way the game mechanic integrates acts of resistance
and survival in its performance of survivance.
In
Space Invaders, the speed of the
invasion and the tempo of the music increase linearly as more alien spacecraft
are defeated; in Invaders the sheer
number of invaders increases while the circularity of the music continues in an
infinite loop. Such a comparison, however, belies the complexity of Trevino
Brings Plenty's composition for Invaders,
which represents an intricate reinterpretation of the original game music
within the context of survivance. The function of music in the original Space Invaders significantly advanced
the role of sound in subsequent video games, as Andrew Schartmann argues in Maestro Mario: How Nintendo Transformed Videogame
Music into an Art (2013):
by enhancing player interactivity by providing auditory feedback, by providing
stimulus through the continuous four-note loop, and by demonstrating the
potential of sound effects so that "[o]ver the years, analogous strategies of
variation would be applied to pitch, rhythm, dynamics, form, and a host of
other parameters, all with the goal of accommodating the nonlinear aspect of
video games."[6] Trevino Brings Plenty's strategy of variation is based on the
indigenizing of the original music. In his fascinating short video, "Tutorial
on composing music for the game 'Invaders'," Brings Plenty describes in detail
his method of composition for the game. He started with the various elements of
the game mechanics that required different kinds of music and auditory
feedback: the launch screen and opening/ending sequence music;
sound effects for the player's shooting and player death or invader death; and
to signal the appearance of the Mystery Ship or other invaders. His strategy is
based on the layering of musical lines that then play on infinite loop
throughout the game. In his account, he began with the set bass-line music that
speeds up throughout the game (1:19). The four-note C- bass line, he describes
as "ominous"—in classical music, he notes, C- is the key for death (3:07)—and
the tempo of 90 beats per minute based on the hand-drum sound (3:50) emphasizes
the sound of "live artifacts" (5:08). To the bass-line and drum beat he added
"a soft, almost ethereal harmonic line" to increase depth, and then added a
"choppy" electronic beat that alternates with the drum beat. Four bars are
repeated over and over (10:45), with live music complementing the use of the
synthesizer and computer-generated plug-ins to avoid a sound that would be "too
electronic." The drum beat unifies all the musical pieces; the same bass
drumming line is deployed throughout but with variations. In the
opening/closing sequence he added extra percussion (bass and treble) for
emphasis, with handclaps to mark the turn-around of the loop. This "human
element" is complemented by the fragmented reverberating "yell" that Brings
Plenty added to the down beat (20:45) and the voiced reverberating "Oh" on the
offbeat with the drum. The tension that is generated between the chords
introduced by the voice and those of the bass line, together with the treble
line characterized by a "sci-fi" quality, produces a complex musical experience
to which Brings Plenty modestly refers as: "some stuff happening there that I
think is pretty interesting" (22:23). A musical gesture to the
extra-terrestrial, science-fictional nature of Space Invaders is retained in the eerie treble-line, while the
base-line and the human-voiced themes emphasize the indigeneity of Invaders. Thus, Trevino Brings Plenty
creates a musical score that underlines the player's participation in a game
that is, as Elizabeth LaPensée describes, "a message of reflection, of pointing
out that we, as Indigenous people, have already experienced the apocalypse. Now
we survive to thrive." ("Indigenous Game Design" n.pag.).
The
musical fusion of the futuristic with the Indigenous in Invaders works with the game's artwork to thematize the survivance
("survive to thrive") "message" of the game mechanics. The game was initially
inspired by a T-shirt designed by Steven Paul Judd for the Native American
Rights Fund in which the original Space
Invaders alien spacecraft are ranged opposite four Indigenous warriors
posed to evoke "classic" photographs of "Indians," like those of Edward Curtis. Judd's sometime collaborator, Simon Moya-Smith, describes
Judd as "one of a wave of Native American artists who use contemporary tools to
make salient the modern Native American experience, from pain to prosperity.
His medium of choice: paint and ink (which he refers to as 'war paint'), as
well as graphic design programs in which he will superimpose an image of, say,
a flying saucer onto a centuries-old photo of a Native American camp." He
quotes Judd: "'I just want to make cool stuff for Indians to have, and that
gets white people to think,' said the Kiowa and Choctaw artist. 'I want to make
the stuff I never got to see as a kid'" (n.pag.). Moya-Smith's example of Judd's
"War Paint" series—images of cans of spray paint labelled "War Paint"—is
described by Wilhelm Murg as an "Andy Warhol-esque blend of pop culture, street
art and reverse cultural appropriation" (Murg n.pag.). This combination
typically generates the visual and aural puns that characterize Judd's work—another
instance would be the series "LEGO My Land" that shows "Indian" figures in the
form of LEGO dolls, or Judd's characters Siouxperman and Siouxperwoman.
|
|
Figure 1. Steven Paul Judd, Invaders. 2015. [iOS]. Digital art. Screenshot 8 Sept. 2016.
The visual art of Invaders
presents a powerful pun on the concept of the frontier, specifically "space as
the final frontier," by juxtaposing two frames of reference: the historical
settler-colonial frontier through the warrior-avatars and the futuristic icons
of alien space-craft. However, the iconography of the invading aliens is not
"futuristic" in the sense that, in terms of the history of video-games, Space Invaders effectively belongs to
the past. Thus, there is a dramatic irony at work in the complex image that
brings together two sets of "historical" symbolism. Judd has explained
something of this interplay: "With Invaders,
it is also a two-part thing... I loved Space
Invaders, and the second part is, well, I think you can read into it:
Someone is trying to invade where you are living, you know, peacefully. I tell
people it's the only time you're allowed to play Indian and not get in trouble"
(Murg n.pag.). The shift from the past tense in relation to Space Invaders ("I loved") to the
present continuous tense ("Someone is trying to invade") suggests the same
dynamic temporal relation that is achieved in Invaders: where Space
Invaders belongs to the past, Invaders
engages with the continuing present moment of colonial invasions that have
never stopped. The iconography used by Judd takes the twentieth-century
space-craft of Space Invaders back to
the nineteenth, and brings the nineteenth-century image of "the Indian" into
the twentieth, to dramatize the ongoing nature of settler-colonialism. Indeed,
the T-shirt design that inspired the game introduces to this dynamic further
historical moments: the Native American Rights Fund design features a "high
score" of 1970 (the year when the NARF was founded) and in the reissue of this
design for "The NTVS," an online Native American clothing company, Judd changed
the "high score" to 1491. Thus, the present reality of settler-colonial
invasion is traced not just to the nineteenth century but right back to the
first invasion of the fifteenth century. This complex historical point is
crystallized by the juxtaposition of resonant visual icons, avoiding an overt
statement but creating the potential to interpret the Indigenous figures as
victims of colonial history.[7] The
warrior-avatars, however, engage with this inherited history as active, ethical
agents of resistance and survival. Gyasi Ross underlines this quality of
survivance in all of Judd's work in the review, "Man Crush Monday: The
Audacious Genius Art of Steve Judd, Kiowa Love Machine" (2014):
instead of going the route that many
seem to be infatuated with nowadays—constantly protesting and whining
about the mainstream imagery of Native people (and thereby reaffirming the
white supremacist power structure that makes Natives the objects that react to
the white/male/patriarchal subject), Judd goes in the complete opposite
direction! He creates HIS OWN positive and healthy Native images. Imagine
that—Native people can actually create our own healthy (or unhealthy!)
images instead of simply crying about what non-Natives give us.
That's powerful, my friends. That's
self-determination. That is the power to influence generations of Native
people. Instead of angrily protesting popular images of Natives, he's
consistently showing the many ways Native life is beautiful. (n.pag.)
Judd's images substitute agency for reaction and Indigenous presence for
absence, performing survivance in the sense described by Vizenor in "Aesthetics
of Survivance" as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and
oblivion; survivance is the continuance
of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent" (1, emphasis added). To
play Invaders is to recognize that
settler violence has not ended; that Indigenous people still exist with their
tribal integrity intact. Playing is the active participation in a history of
survivance through the interconnectivity of aesthetics (art and music),
dynamics (the player's experience of interacting with the game system), and
mechanics (the rules of the game, including the possibilities for winning,
losing and ending the game).
This
is not to deny that the fundamental activity in which the player of Invaders participates is losing. The
game mechanics dictate that the player will always and inevitably lose; this is
a game that cannot be "won" in any straightforward way—and that is the
point. In his study of losing in video-games, The Art of Failure (2013), Jesper Juul explains:
the paradox of failure is unique in
that when you fail in a game, it really means that you were in some way
inadequate. Such a feeling of inadequacy is unpleasant for us, and it is odd
that we choose to subject ourselves to it. However, while games uniquely induce
such feelings of being inadequate, they also motivate us to play more in order
to escape the same inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by
improving our skills) is central to the enjoyment of games. Games promise us a
fair chance of redeeming ourselves. This distinguishes game failure from
failure in our regular lives: (good) games are designed such that they give us
a fair chance, whereas the regular world makes no such promises. (7)
In fact, Invaders refuses to
offer the player "a fair chance." The game mechanics ensure failure because
more and more enemy invaders appear, and they are increasingly powerful, while
the player is powerless to control their behaviour. In this respect, and also
due to the lack of defensive actions that the player might take, the game
itself seems intrinsically unfair. But the injustice built into the game
environment through the mechanics is balanced by certain compensations that
include, as Juul writes, the chance to try to escape the feeling of failure.
Each wave of invaders challenges the player to improve their response-speed and
accuracy of shooting, holding out a promise that the player might perform
better next time, both with practice and as the game mechanics become more
familiar.
This
motivation to improve is enhanced by the implied relation between the fictional
world of the game and the extra-diegetic world of the player or what Juul calls
"the regular world." As he observes, the frustration of losing can take the
form of an emotional bond with the game because "[w]e are motivated to play
when something is at stake" (13). What is at stake in Invaders is precisely the complex historical homology created by
the artwork, musical score, and game mechanics between fictional invasion by
alien space-craft and actual settler-colonialism. Elizabeth LaPensée emphasizes
this relation as a fundamental aspect of her design of the game: "in the context
of playing as an Indigenous warrior, the design takes on another meaning—no
matter what, the aliens eventual obliterate your character and community. Lives
are represented not as numbers or even as your own, but instead as the warriors
who stand side by side with you. If you get hit, you permanently lose a
community member. This mirrors the very real losses experienced as colonizers
attacked and decimated Indigenous communities during invasion" ("Indigenous Game Design" n.pag.). Playing as an
Indigenous warrior demands effort to save the community and the other
warrior-avatars, as well as to preserve one's own virtual life. Jesper Juul
describes this in-game experience where "the goals of the player are... aligned
with the goals of the protagonist; when the player succeeds, the protagonist
succeeds" (27).[8]
The
player-response that is privileged by the game mechanics is not avoidance of
loss but awareness of the proper use to which the anger and frustration of
losing are directed. In Invaders, the
player can simply quit the game—when all four warrior-avatars have been
killed a screen appears that offers the stark options: quit or play again.
Since the ostensible goal of the game—to destroy definitively all of the
invaders—is impossible to achieve, the effort to "play again" is, in
itself, an escape from the feeling of failure and a qualified measure of
success. The determination of success is qualified by the causes to which
failure are attributed. Three possible causes identified by Harold K. Kelley
are: a person, an entity, and circumstances
(qtd. Juul 15). A person may be held accountable for failure due to
inadequate skills (the player's ability to shoot, for example); an entity can
be seen as the cause of the occasion for failure (the power and relentless
appearance of more and more invading aliens, in Invaders); and circumstances that cause failure, according to
Kelley, may include bad luck or chance (qtd. Juul 16). In Invaders, the player's lack of skill can be improved with
persistence but neither the seeming invulnerability-through-numbers of the
invading aliens, nor the historical circumstances evoked by the game—through
the homology among (first) the diegetic world of the game, (secondly) the
historical world evoked by the artwork, and (thirdly) the present world of
ongoing colonization in which the player is located—can be changed for
the better. An ethical act of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds (the
axiology of survivance) is the only positive response made available to the
player of Invaders. This is, as noted
above, Elizabeth LaPensée's intention for the game; the recognition that, as
she says, "we, as Indigenous people, have already experienced the apocalypse.
Now we survive to thrive" ("Indigenous Game Design,"
n.pag.). Playing this game involves frequent endings and continual experiences
of loss that pose the questions of how and why the player has lost. The
feedback from the game itself is clear: the player loses because of the
superior numbers and firepower of the invaders. This leads directly to Juul's
question: "Is there a difference between failing inside and failing outside a
game?" (10). The answer, in Invaders,
is clearly "no." There is no fundamental difference, in historical terms
(because Indigenous lands have in fact been colonized) or in subjective terms,
because the imperative of survivance under which Indigenous people have lived
since 1491—to resist, to survive, to preserve and continue the cultural
inheritance passed on by elders and ancestors to their heirs—has never ended.
Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna, 2014): Survivance, Indigenous Epistemology, and
Native Presence[9]
Like Invaders, the Iñupiaq
puzzle-platformer video game Never Alone
(Kisima Ingitchuna, 2014 Upper One Games) enacts survivance as the
epistemological practice of a living, tribal presence that is sustained in the
past, enacted in the present, and transmitted as the inheritance of the future.
Simple physical survival in a group environment is
not survivance; survivance names a manner of living with indigenous integrity
while resisting by transcending the assimilative pressure applied by the
dominant settler-colonial community. This is why Gerald Vizenor calls the
relation between Indigenous nations and the US federal government
"paracolonial" (Manifest Manners 77).
What is left after the onslaught of active territorial colonization is the
parallel existence of tribal nations alongside the settler-nation. Survivance
then is grounded in the cultural and political values that must be passed on in
order to sustain an Indigenous community that functions on the basis of
inherited tribal values. The fundamental cultural values shared by Alaska
Native peoples, which motivate Never
Alone, are described by Yupiaq philosopher Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley in A Yupiaq Worldview: A Pathway to Ecology and
Spirit (1995). He identifies four primary values: harmony, responsibility,
reciprocity, and learning. Harmony he defines as "an intricate
subsistence-based worldview, a complex way of life with specific cultural
mandates regarding the ways in which the human being is to relate to other
human relatives and the natural and spiritual worlds" (8). Responsibility as an
"attitude was thought to be as important as action; therefore one was to be
careful in thought and action so as not to injure another's mind or offend the
spirits of the animals and surrounding environment. For one to have a powerful
mind was to be 'aware of or awake to the surroundings'" (8). Reciprocity
signifies that "all of life is considered recyclable and therefore requires
certain ways of caring in order to maintain the cycle. Native people cannot put
themselves above other living things because they were all created by Raven,
and all are considered an essential component of the universe" (9). Perhaps
even more fundamental than these three principles is the value of learning:
"Alaska Native worldviews are oriented toward the synthesis of information
gathered from interaction with the natural and spiritual worlds so as to
accommodate and live in harmony with the natural worlds and natural principles
and exhibit the values of sharing, cooperation, and respect" (11).
These
values are taught through an Indigenous pedagogy that departs from European understandings
of education in almost every respect. Both Kawagley and Tewa philosopher
Gregory Cajete emphasize interactivity or active participation by the learner
in a process that is: fundamentally place-based, nature-centered,
community-focused, spiritually-oriented,
and indebted to the wisdom of the elders. Cajete describes the nature of
traditional Indigenous education as "[t]he cultivation of one's senses through
learning how to listen, observe, and experience holistically by creative
exploration... all tribes highly regarded the ability to use language through
storytelling, oratory, and song as a primary tool for teaching and learning.
This was because the spoken or sung word expressed the spirit and breath of
life of the speaker and thus was considered sacred" (32). These forms
(storytelling and oratory) and concepts (place, nature, community, spirit,
inheritance) of Iñupiaq traditional knowledge guide the design of the game-play
mechanics in Never Alone.
The
fundamental aim of Never Alone is
twofold: the preservation of Iñupiaq language, story, and ways of knowing; and
the dissemination of Iñupiaq values of resiliency and survival, cooperation,
intergenerational wisdom, and the interdependence of land, people, and animals.
The structure of the game requires the player to perform these values while
moving across the computer screen, thus going beyond the static modes of
telling made possible via the printed word and the passive reception of story
through media such as film, video, and television. The game is able to recreate
the conditions of oral storytelling, with the additional advantage that the
player becomes the active narrative protagonist. The identification between the
player and the game avatar is the primary vehicle for empathy, as the player
experiences something akin to Sam McKegney's view of community as the sum of
culture and politics, where culture is "a lived series of acts within actual
political units of community" (56). This emphasis on acts, action, and activism
serves an "ethical commitment [to] the survival, enrichment, and eventual
self-determination of Indigenous communities." And in Never Alone the player is the active agent of this axiological
process of survivance.
The
objectives of the game—the preservation and dissemination of inherited
traditional knowledge—are actions realized through the game narrative,
which retells the ancient story "Kunuuksaayuk," recorded by Iñupiaq storyteller
Robert Nasruk Cleveland who passed it to his daughter, Minne Aliitchak Gray,
one of the cultural ambassadors who shaped the video-game. Never Alone is narrated in Iñupiaq (with subtitles available in
another ten languages) by James (Mumiġan)
Nageak. The story is about a young boy (though in Never Alone the protagonist is a young girl, Nuna) and his journey
to discover the source of a never-ending blizzard that is threatening his
village. This is the quest on which the player embarks: the search for the
knowledge that will lead to truth is realized through continual ethical action.
Thus traditional knowledge is experienced as a verb or a set of behaviors
rather than a tool or noun. In this respect, the story performs what Jace
Weaver describes as a communal identity-producing role at the same time that
the communally-developed story is passed down as cultural inheritance to the
next generation within the Iñupiat community (and beyond). These qualities of
the story are thematized in the game, as Ishmael Angaluuk Hope suggests when he
remarks that the game story is about how to be the kind of person who can bring
about a return to "true living in the community." This lesson in survivance is
essentially what the game teaches the player.
Never Alone, then, performs important
work of cultural inheritance, passing on the key values of a living, thriving
Iñupiat traditional community. Nearly forty Iñupiaq elders, storytellers, and
community members contributed to the development of the game, working with Cook
Inlet Tribal Council and the non-Native educational publisher E-line Media.
However, responsibility and accountability for the Indigenous direction of the
game were firmly located with the traditional tribal custodians of knowledge,
who had the power of veto over all aspects of the game's development. Sean
Vesce, the Creative Director at E-Line, describes an incident when the
community exercised this power to correct a proposed game mechanic that
contradicted traditional values:
What was really important for us [was] to portray [the
Iñupiaq] spiritual worldview within the game, and it's a really complicated
subject... The game designers at the time, we all were in favor of a model... where
the player can hit a button and basically move from a regular environment, a
regular realm to the spirit realm, and there was a lot of gameplay involved in
crossing between those by virtue of the player hitting the button to change
modes. And when we showed an initial prototype of that to members of the
community, they said, "You've got it all wrong... The spiritual world is not
something that is on demand. We can't will that into existence and go back. You
have to embody the values. You have to demonstrate a level of competency in
order to experience that, and it's a gift that's given to you. It's not
something that you control." So that was a really core mechanic that we were
starting down a path of, that was really representative of misunderstanding
from us, that comes from being raised in a Western ideology. (qtd. Scimeca
n.pag.)
As Vesce indicates, the
performance of Iñupiaq values through the player's interaction with the game
relies primarily on the design of the game mechanics.
Sean
Vecse has suggested how the design of the mechanics of Never Alone had to take careful account of traditional Iñupiaq ways
of learning, knowing, and acting on the level of physical interaction between
the player, the game controller, and the game world. Contextualization of the
mechanics impacts the game on every level. In terms of the genre of the game: Never Alone is a side-scrolling
puzzle-platformer, requiring that the player continually moves the avatars Nuna
and Fox across the screen from left to right, advancing forward in a way that
follows the linear narrative of the storytelling. The story is narrated in
continual voice-over, with foreign language subtitles appearing on each screen.
As the narrator's voice is heard, the player is performing the story in a
combination of passive and active modes of reception that replicate and advance
the oral tradition of storytelling. The inheritance of tribal orature is a key
element of survivance, counteracting the colonialist erasure of living
Indigenous cultures. Weaver explains: "Limiting consideration or admission to
the canon to orature is a way of continuing colonialism. It once again keeps
American Indians from entering the 20th century and denies to Native literary
artists who choose other media any legitimate or "authentic" Native identity"
(23). If orature is the only expressive form available to "real Indians" but
orature has become "extinct" then so too must those "authentic" Indians have
become extinct in the modern world. The orature constitutive of video-game
mechanics offers a powerful oppositional response to the myth of Indigenous
"vanishing." Not only is the oral tradition alive and thriving in a game like Never Alone but the digital medium of
the game contradicts the assumption that "Indians" belong only to the
historical category of the primitive and have not survived into the
contemporary period. James (Mumiġan) Nageak's oral narration of the story
"Kunuuksaayuk," in Iñupiaq, is not only evidence of Indigenous cultural
continuity but actively works to preserve and disseminate the tribal language
that encodes in the story traditional Iñupiaq values and ways of knowing and
being. To emphasize the importance of orature to the building and unification
of community, Weaver turns to the words of Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz:
Noting the coterminous
nature of orature and contemporary culture, Simon Ortiz declares, "The oral
tradition is not just speaking and listening, because what it means to me and
to other people who have grown up in that tradition is that whole process... of
that society in terms of its history, its culture, its language, its values,
and subsequently, its literature. So it's not a simple matter of speaking and
listening, but living that process." (qtd. 47)
Living
the process of the story is what the player does by interacting through the
avatars Nuna and Fox, switching between these two characters or playing in
two-player mode with each player controlling one of the avatars, in order to
complete successfully the challenges presented by the game. Each
avatar-character has unique capabilities: Nuna can climb, move objects, and
throw her traditional bola; Fox can fit into small areas, jump high, and moves
faster. Neither Nuna nor Fox can proceed if either is left behind, so
cooperation between the human and other-than-human animal is a fundamental game
mechanic. Together, Fox and the force of the wind help Nuna to jump onto a
spirit's back; Fox's movements help to guide where Nuna must move, and Fox is
able to guide the spirit helpers. Trees come alive and reach out to greet Fox.
This cooperative behaviour is coded into the mechanic that governs the
assistance offered by other animal and spirit entities who will, for example,
lift Nuna and Fox across the screen, from one object to another; but these
helpers cannot be summoned at will by the avatar-player, their help being a
gift freely given. However, from mid-point in the game, when he transforms into
a boy-spirit, Fox can move freely by "swimming" around the screen to access
objects that are inaccessible to Nuna, and he is able to activate "Helping
Spirits" to overcome obstacles so the characters can proceed from screen to
screen.
The
completion of the challenges that comprise episodes of the story is rewarded
with the unlocking of "Cultural Insights" in the form of interviews with
Iñupiaq elders, storytellers, and cultural ambassadors. These short embedded
documentary videos must be earned and they then provide cultural information
that helps the player to overcome subsequent obstacles and threats. By using
this inherited information, the player transforms data into experiential
knowledge, in a learning process that enacts traditional Iñupiaq educational
forms. "Cultural Insights" relate to the main game narrative in several ways
besides offering information. Some "insights" explain or interpret narrative
events that have already taken place. For example, in one of the most
distressing episodes of the game narrative, Fox is killed by the man, "the
terrible one," who wants the bola. We move to a cut scene in which Nuna and Fox
fall down into a snowy forest landscape; Nuna grieves the loss of her companion
but then Fox is reborn into a different form, the form of a boy-spirit, who
"swims" in the air around Nuna. The narrator puts into question the ontological
distinction between the other-than-human animal and the humanized spirit-being
by asking, "was it [the boy-spirit] who he [Fox] really was this whole time?"
In the Cultural Insight that follows, "Animal Spirits," Ishmael Angaluuk Hope
explains how the Iñupiat do not recognize a hierarchy of creation with humans
separate and "on top." In Iñupiaq cosmology, all animals have or can be seen in
a human form but the animal must want to be seen in its human form. From this
point, a game mechanic offers the player a button which when held down allows
interaction with spirits. The narrator underlines the interrelatedness of the
animal, human, and spirit entities by remarking that Fox continued to reveal
"the beauty of the helping spirits." By acting on the traditional knowledge
that is gained, the player-avatar is rewarded with increasing ease of movement,
a greater capacity to overcome obstacles, and a greater sense of belonging in
the Iñupiaq diegetic world.
The
challenges presented in the game are puzzles, primarily spatial obstacles (such
as unstable ice floes, caverns, or precipices) or entities that may be animals
or spirits, that block the progress of Nuna and Fox. Navigating the story space
of the game demands close attention to all aspects of the environment, in the
manner of Cajete's description of traditional Indigenous education: by "[t]he
cultivation of one's senses through learning how to listen, observe, and experience
holistically by creative exploration" (33). Many of the features of the
diegetic world are neither "good" nor "bad" but must be understood and
accommodated by the player. For example, one of the mechanics introduced early
in the game is the behaviour of wind (remember, the crisis engaged by the story
is a never-ending blizzard). A strong gust of wind will push Nuna off an ice
precipice or into a chasm so when the player hears the wind approaching, s/he
must manipulate the controller so that she crouches protectively; however, in
subsequent scenes, the only means by which Nuna can jump across ice floes is by
harnessing the power of the wind to give her distance as she runs and jumps.
The wind, a natural phenomenon, is not presented pejoratively. Rather, the
player acting through the avatar is required to learn to read and respect
environmental conditions, and then adapt their behaviour accordingly. This
mechanic illustrates the importance of learning to watch closely and to
interpret accurately the diegetic space of the game, which is underlined in the
Cultural Insight entitled "Reading the Weather." As the game narrative
progresses new mechanics are introduced through the reading of the diegetic
space. For example, when a sparkling spirit ball appears Nuna is able to call a
spirit helper if she hits the ball with her bolo. Or entities in the
environmental background, like the owl early in the game, can later become
actors such as when that owl takes human form to give Nuna a side quest—finding
and returning his drum—which is then rewarded with the empowering gift of
the bolo. Here, the Iñupiaq value of interrelation among all elements of
creation works with the game dynamics and aesthetics within the diegetic space
to thematize the introduction of the mechanic of the bolo, which Nuna learns
will not only enable her to call spirit helpers but in more practical terms
allows her to break down ice walls that block their path. The mechanics that
determine game action work closely together with the game dynamics of challenge
and fellowship or cooperation, and the game aesthetics, to produce a covert
level of meaning that is resistant to paraphrase. Located in the player's
experience of reading the diegetic world through Nuna and Fox, and receiving
reward in the form of cultural insights, this covert meaning can be equated to
the adoption of an Iñupiat subject position within the diegetic community of
creation.
The
ultimate objective of the game is to discover the source of, and resolve, the
mysterious blizzard that afflicts Nuna's village. To achieve this, Nuna must
cooperate with Fox, primarily, but also the entire game-world environment that
comprises beings of all ontological kinds: plants, human and other-than-human
animals, ancestors and spirit beings, and mythological monsters. In this
respect, Never Alone enacts Weaver's
"linkage of land and people within the concept of community... lands populated
by their relations, ancestors, animals and beings both physical and
mythological" (38). In Never Alone
the Iñupiaq concept of such a community of creation is named "Siḷa": the space that
connects the land, the moon, sun, and stars, and the weather. Siḷa has a soul, and spirit
helpers reside within Siḷa. Amy Fredeen, lead cultural ambassador and a
Cultural Insights contributor, explains in "Siḷa Has A Soul" that "[i]t's not one way of
seeing things, it's one way of knowing you're connected to everything." In the
game, then, Siḷa is the shared
network of relationships among all entities in the game environment. Even the
destructive "Manslayer" who is causing the devastating blizzard is
part of this network of relations. This character is a recurring villain in
traditional Iñupiaq stories where he threatens the survival of individuals and
the whole community. But in the final Cultural Insight ("Kunuuksaayuka")
Ishmael Angaluuk Hope explains that Manslayer or the "blizzard man," is like
"the physical embodiment of an element of nature." The protagonist who
confronts Manslayer represents a return to order on a cosmic scale and to "true
living within the community" of all creation. Amy Fredeen adds that the moral
of the story's conclusion is "don't think only of yourself but always keep the
community in your heart." This is the community that is Siḷa.
The
interconnectedness and interdependence that characterize Siḷa are related
to the Indigenous understanding of kinship that is key to the experience of
survivance. As Weaver reminds us, "[n]ature, an understanding of which was
essential to Native survival, is viewed and characterized in kinship terms. More than
simply a sense of place, though it is often that as well, this view of 'creation
as kin' imbues the work of Native writers, in different ways, with a potent
sense of interrelatedness" (163). At one point in the
game, Nuna and Fox are trapped in an ice-cave with an angry polar bear. If the
player-avatar tries to break the ice, s/he dies. If the player-avatar tries to
kill the polar bear, s/he dies. Through the repeated experience of failure, the
player must learn to control Nuna as she evades the bear, allowing it to break
the ice and open an escape route for Nuna and Fox.
|
|
Figure 2. Upper One
Games & E-Line Media, "Ice Floes." Never
Alone. 2014. [PC]. Digital art. Screenshot 8 Dec. 2016.
The game mechanic here
demands that the bear-character be the agent that breaks the ice wall; if Nuna
tries to break the ice or kill the bear the player-avatar spends too much time
in that part of the game-world exposed to the bear's anger and so is killed.
The obstacle to progress, the ice wall that encloses the cave, can be overcome
only if the player respects the "bear-ness" of the bear and does not try to
impose control on the bear's actions but allows it to express its anger and
frustration by attacking the ice wall and knocking it down. Later in the game,
the bear reappears as a "helper" but, again, behaving according to its ursine
nature, to which the player must adapt. In both instances the bear assists Nuna
and Fox when these avatars respect the bear's role within the totality of Siḷa.
As
the game progresses, the player must act with an increasingly complex
understanding of the game mechanics that govern Siḷa and of being
appropriately "human" in the Iñupiat world, by collaborating respectfully with
weather, environment, animals, trees, ancestors and spirit beings. In the Aurora borealis sequence, a Cultural
Insight "Northern Lights" has passed on the story that the beautiful but
mysterious green lights dancing and swooping through the air are, in fact,
children who have died in childhood, and are now playing in the sky. The story
warns that if these spirit beings are encouraged to come too close or if someone
goes outside without wearing a hood, they will cut the heads off their
unsuspecting victims and use the severed heads to play with as balls. This
story contextualizes the following game segment, in which the primary hazard is
the animated spirit lights (the "Aurora people") who threaten Nuna and Fox. The
narrator warns that the player-avatars Nuna and Fox are located in an
environment hazardous to those who do not heed the wisdom of the elders,
evoking the story that has just been told. With the inherited knowledge of the
story and the capacity to move cooperatively within the diegetic space, Nuna
and Fox are able to evade the Aurora people just as they did the polar bear. If
they are touched by one of the spirit beings they will die; if their actions
respect the nature of these beings then they can progress in the narrative.
The
Cultural Insight "Northern Lights" is the seventeenth of the twenty-four
embedded videos. At this stage of the game, the interpretative relation between
the videos and game play is familiar but the Aurora borealis sequence underlines the importance of inherited
knowledge; it is juxtaposed with the immediately preceding "King Island"
sequence and the relation between the two creates the potential for a level of
covert meaning to emerge from the game narrative. The Cultural Insight "King
Island" describes the Iñupiat community that historically lived on this rocky
outcrop (Ugiuvak) in the Bering Sea;
the embedded video explains the nature of the distinctive stilt housing built
high against the steep rocky cliffs as preparation for the following game-play
sequence in which Nuna and Fox must navigate an unstable environment of
abandoned and collapsing structures evocative of King Island houses. The
narrators emphasize the fact that these stilt houses remain in place today and
mention in passing that "it's a growing community as the people return back to
their island." What is not explained is why the island was abandoned, to be
re-inhabited only recently. Alice Rogoff, in a recent article published in the Alaska Dispatch News, provides the
history that is missing from the Cultural Insight:
In 1959, just before
Alaska's statehood, the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided summarily to close the
island's school. In so doing, a bureaucratic decision effectively ended their
lives there, forcing several hundred families to become new residents of Nome,
a foreign place with a gold mining past, not predisposed to embrace an ancient
island Iñupiaq culture that had lost its island. And the transition was not
administered with care: young children were forcibly separated from parents in
the name of school "truancy" laws; older ones were sent to boarding schools
thousands of miles away, with no way of communicating with families left
behind. In short, the fabric of King Island extended family life was shredded
without cause. The stated reason for the move, from the BIA, was that a boulder
was about to roll down the hill and crush the school.
More than 50 years later, the
boulder still hasn't moved. (Rogoff, n.pag.).
This
direct colonialist intervention of the US Federal government, through the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, achieved a number of things: the vacating of the
island, the collapse of the traditional Iñupiat community, the weakening of
family and community relations through forcible separation, and the removal of
Indigenous children into assimilative mainland schools. Recall the point made
earlier: survivance is grounded in a complex network of interrelationships
among the people, the land, other-than-human animals, mythological entities,
spirit beings, and ancestors. The removal of the people from their traditional
lands breaks this network and commits what Weaver calls "a kind of psychic
homicide" (38). Juxtaposed with the "King Island" sequence and the suppressed
history of forced alienation of the people from their land is the "Northern
Lights" sequence that is motivated by the story of dead children. From this
juxtaposition emerges a covert narrative of violent colonization and historical
trauma. But the overt narrative communicates the resilience and continuance of
the Iñupiat people. It is at the end of these two juxtaposed sequences that Fox
dies and transforms into a powerful boy-spirit. The Cultural Insight "Rebirth
& Naming" that follows shortly—after "Animal Spirits" which also
provides context relevant to Fox's transformation—focuses on the key
value of interrelatedness. Elder Ronald Aniqsuaq explains the Iñupiat
understanding of life, death, and afterlife: at the moment of death timi (body) returns to nuna (the Earth); however, the spirit of
atiq, a name that is passed down over
generations, lives on for as long as the name is remembered. When the spirit
returns to Siḷa, it may
be reborn if the name is passed on to a new child who retains some of the
memories of the original name. The name Fox is retained in both forms of the
avatar (as boy-spirit and other-than-human animal) seemingly along with
memories of the mechanics of the diegetic world and relations among all the
inhabitants that comprise the community of Siḷa.
In
Never Alone the narrative of colonial
trauma is muted, emerging covertly though the juxtaposition of narrative
sequences and, even then, within the context of Iñupiaq resilience and
continuance—a context that is transmitted as the inheritance of the
wisdom of the elders. This is a powerful gesture of Indigenous decolonization.
The game narrative of Never Alone
insists on the autonomous expression of traditional Iñupiaq cultural values. By
its very existence, this video-game contradicts the colonial mythology of
Indigenous peoples as doomed and vanishing; the voice-over narration spoken in
Iñupiaq gives the lie to the extinction of traditional Indigenous orature; the
expression of a traditional story in a digital medium opposes the notion that
Indigenous cultures are "pre-modern." Indeed, the medium of the interactive
digital narrative allows for the effective communication of Iñupiaq traditional
knowledge through what, in Look to the
Mountain (2010), Gregory Cajete calls an "ecology of indigenous education"
that serves the concept of survivance. Cajete's place-based and nature-centered
education is realized in the diegetic world of Never Alone, which is resolutely the Iñupiat world of Siḷa;
learning to overcome obstacles by being fully "human" in Iñupiaq terms means
learning to live with, and respect the interdependence of, everything that
makes this world as it is. Cajete opposes Indigenous interrelational, holistic
reality to Western European traditions of objectivism, dualism, and
reductionism: to play the game in dualistic (such as human versus animal) terms
is to fail to meet the challenges of the game-play and to "die." The quest for
knowledge and truth in Never Alone is
collaborative, not competitive; for example, to refuse to collaborate with Fox
and other beings in the game world—to play competitively—is, again,
to "die." The aim of Indigenous education, according to Cajete, is wholeness,
self-knowledge and wisdom; in Never Alone
the increasing demands of the game, as the player learns to behave as a member
of a virtual Iñupiat community, requires the synthesis of all that has been
learned into a holistic understanding of Siḷa. This is education for
decolonization, eschewing settler-colonial epistemological and ontological
forms in favor of the performance of inherited Indigenous values that evidence
the ongoing sovereignty of Indigenous communities.
Conclusion:
The Mechanics of Survivance
While they are very different kinds of video-games,
both Never Alone and Invaders constitute creative acts of
Indigenous "representational sovereignty": "a declaration that the Native is
self-defining, producing an 'autovision' and 'autohistory' in the face of
Amer-European heterohistory... It reverses assimilation and dispels the myths of
conquest and dominance. It aspires to participate in the healing of grief and
sense of exile" (Weaver 163-4). At the end of Never Alone, while gliding around Nuna's seated figure, the player
hears the narrator's voice-over:
The Fox said to the
girl,
"If you ever need to
find your way home again,
just look up for me."
and [sic] floated up
through the night sky.
I have heard Nasruk tell
the story that way.
The game's teaching is that of the traditional story,
a story told and retold down through the generations and now told powerfully in
an interactive digital form that replicates the primary principles and
processes of traditional Iñupiaq values. Siḷa is the diegetic world of
the game and the world of the Iñupiat people; to succeed in the game the player
must learn to live in a proper relationship with Siḷa. This is possible
by learning to adopt a virtual Iñupiaq subject position within the game
narrative. This learning process is managed by the player's responses to the
constraints imposed and possibilities afforded by the game mechanics, which are
determined by Iñupiaq traditional knowledge. Player-avatars who do not adapt to
the rules of the Iñupiat diegetic world simply "die." Amy Fredeen, one of the
Iñupiaq cultural ambassadors who contributed to both the game development and
also the narration of the Cultural Insights, explains that "[a]daptation has
been a cornerstone of survival for Alaska Native People... Never Alone is another way We can share Our values and culture with
future generations and the world [by p]assing on wisdom and values... Bringing
our traditional wisdom to a modern world that has changed the path of Our
People forever" (qtd O'Connell n.pag.).
The
game mechanics of Never Alone provide
for the possibility of success on the part of the player; this potential is
foreclosed by the mechanics of Invaders.
Yet in both games resolution is achieved progressively and performatively as
the player learns the consequences of possible actions for the state of the
gameplay. In Never Alone "death" is
the consequence of actions that are not consistent with the Iñupiaq values that
inform the game mechanics; success is a measure of the player's adaptation to
the values of Iñupiaq survivance. The conditions for ending the game in Never Alone are made clear; with the
defeat of Manslayer, the final "boss," and the ending of the blizzard the game
concludes. Effectively, we come to the end of the sequence of side-scrolling
screens—although the narrator reminds us that the story endures. Invaders both continually ends and never
ends: the historical narrative constructed by Steven Paul Judd's juxtaposition
of iconic figures and informed by Trevino Brings Plenty's musical score
underlines not only the continuous present of settler-colonialism but the
sustained survivance that, as in Never
Alone, ensures that the story does not really end. The nature of player-interactivity in these
games, determined by the constraints and possibilities imposed by the Indigenously-driven
game mechanics, requires that the games be played from Indigenous
epistemological positions.[10]
Fundamental
to these epistemologies is survivance, performed in the games as a right to
inherit Indigenous stories, histories, and cultural lifeways while dramatizing
the point made powerfully by Amy Fredeen in the Cultural Insight, "A Living
People: A Living Culture": "One
of the things I think a lot of people need to understand is we aren't a museum
piece. The Iñupiat people are a living people, and a living culture." Fredeen's
point is developed by Elizabeth LaPensée in the specific context of survivance
and video-games: "survivance
refers to recognizing Indigenous communities as thriving rather than merely
surviving. An act of survivance is a work that arises from the practice of
survivance, meaning an 'active sense of native presence.' Games, which are made
of varying levels of code, design, art, and audio, can provide spaces for
expressing self-determination so long as, within the context of Indigenous art,
they stand 'against colonial erasure... [and mark] the space of a returned and
enduring presence'" ("Games as Enduring Presence" 180). LaPensée's emphasis
here on Indigenous presence is realized in the games she designs through the
creation of mechanics that prescribe player interactivity as the performance of
survivance. In Indigenously-determined video-games, like Invaders and Never Alone,
indigeneity is present in the artwork, music, and storytelling that work to
thematize game mechanics that require the respectful adoption of Native
presence as the player's subject position.
By
resisting "colonial erasure" with sovereign Native presence, these games
function as digital weapons in what Vizenor has called the "word wars": the
multifaceted discursive battle for control over the meaning of the actual
events of colonization. In Wordarrows
(1978) he describes how the "arrowmakers and wordmakers survive the word wars
with sacred memories" (viii).[11] In the
conflict between "white" words and tribal memory what is at stake is the
inheritance of Indigenous stories that express ownership of or belonging to the
land and living tribal traditions. In very different game genres, Never Alone and Invaders oppose ongoing settler-colonial attempts to eliminate
traditional systems of culture and identity in favor of assimilation to imposed
settler-colonial discourses. Indigenously-determined games are discursive
weapons in the struggle to defeat colonial stereotypes and simulations of "the
Indian" by dispatching (literally in Invaders)
"word arrows" to engage the continual onslaught of settler-colonialism. "The
heritable right of succession" is asserted in Invaders as the inheritance of histories of resistance and, even
more importantly, the Indigenous values that motivate resistance to victimry
and promote the integrity of enduring tribal nations. The "Cultural Insights"
of Never Alone bring into the
game-world inherited wisdom in the form of information and advice that has been
passed down by elders and ancestors, and in this way the game performs "the
heritable right of succession" that motivates survivance. Both Invaders and Never Alone
demonstrate the decolonizing potential of video games by performing
survivance-as-resistance and survivance-as-survival as ethical actions. The
mechanics of these games determine not just the "rules of the game" but
crucially shape the ethical decisions that guide the ways in which a player can
interact with the game-world. By controlling the potential for action, game
mechanics shape what I am calling here the "axiology" of survivance. This
axiology (or system of ethical action) is both the consequence of inherited
tribal epistemologies and is the instantiation of inherited tribal lifeways.
Arising
from inherited values, stories, and wisdom, present-moment actions become the
inheritances of the future in the dynamic process that is survivance. To focus
only on the terms that comprise Vizenor's neologism—"survival" and
"resistance"—is to analyze at the level of action (important though that
is) rather than engage with the dynamic relations between action and the deeper
structure of cultural inheritance that motivates ethical acts based on
inherited values. Moving beyond cultural preservation (or "surviving"), these
video-games use the mechanics of game design to
engage
player-interactivity and create lived experiences of enduring Indigenous
presence (or "thriving"). Vizenor suggests that the decolonizing power of
survivance is fueled by the concept of inheritance when he describes survivance
as "the heritable right of succession or
reversion of an estate" (1, emphasis added). The reversion of an estate
defines the return of property ownership to the original owner (or grantor)
after a temporary period that ends with the expiry of pre-agreed conditions or
an agreed period of time; "reversion" also names the right of the grantor to
succeed to the reverted estate. Read in this context, survivance does much more
than describe a legacy; it is a radical call to readiness for a decolonized,
reverted estate in which original owners or custodians will reclaim possession
of their Indigenous estate. Virtual opportunities to experience this
post-colonial reversion are offered by the Indigenously-determined game-worlds
of Invaders and Never Alone, through the decolonizing power of the mechanics of
survivance.