Indigenous videogame designers highlighted their latest work at the Strong National Museum of Play’s recent Black Indigenous and People of Color Game Studies Conference.
WXXI’s education reporter Noelle Evans caught up with some of them to talk about how games and play can reflect cultural narratives and shape our worldview.
Below is a transcript of a radio broadcast story. Conversations were edited for brevity and clarity:
ELAINE GÓMEZ: Hi. My name is Elaine Gómez. I am a video game designer and developer. I own Midnight Hour Games where I do freelance work. I am also the co-founder and president of Latinx in Gaming, which is a nonprofit.
... I recently, like two years ago, developed a small game called "The Vejigantes," about the art of making the vejigantes masks. It's folkloric art, and it has a lot of indigenous and African roots.
... I recently started taking language classes with my tribe, with the Higuayagua Taíno of the Caribbean. ... Our final project was to create a language project, a poem, write a story. And I chose to translate one of the games that I made, ‘Vejigantes,’ into the language.
... our Cacique, which is our chief, she was like, "You have to make a game. We have to keep making games for the tribe and for the kids to learn the language and get inspired, because this is something bigger than I could have ever imagined." You know, we always see it in textbook format, in our dictionary, the language, but when you see it moving and in motion and there's characters walking around, it really feels different.
ANANGOOKWE HERMES-ROACH: I'm Anangookwe Hermes-Roach. I'm the lead designer and developer and co-director for ‘Reclaim! Azhe-giiwewining,’ a point-and-click adventure game being developed by Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia.
... I'm originally from Hayward, Wisconsin, ... so that’s near the Lac Courte reservation....I definitely grew up knowing this feeling and having this kind of internal struggle of feeling colonized.
EVANS: How does it show up for you?
HERMES-ROACH: It’s hard. It's something that our youth notices right away. I remember, you know, for myself, these were feelings that I had very young — we're saying, like fifth grade, sixth grade — this feeling of belonging to a culture that has been defeated, right? That has been supplanted and pushed into the margin where once it wasn't.
And that is something — that's a big feeling, I think, for a kid to have. So, it's kind of morbid, honestly. It makes you feel like, if my culture could be attacked like this, couldn't anything be destroyed? And you just grow up with that understanding of a kind of cultural mortality from a very young age.
... Right now, the work we're doing and the community that we're building, you can see, like, we're still here and we're still alive, and we're trying to build ourselves back up.
