The hegemonic colonizers and the silenced indigenous

 We've been talking about how the current game industry is a hegemony that marginalizes racial, gender and sexual minorities and those with disabilities because of its composition of primary white males. In Land (2020), the author extends this discussion about hegemony onto the topic of representations of indigenous people in games. Similar to the previous discussions, a common issue for representations of indigenous cultures in games is that it still is limited to small communities who share the interests in this topic, such as Native Twitter, Native news sites and Indigenous events such as Indigenous Comic Con, but it fails to be channeled upwards so that it becomes a center of discussion among the industry leaders. Therefore, just like gender or race representation we talked about before, indigenous culture tends to be invisible, or poorly represented in the industry to make any meaningful change for the equality for the native populations.

In a 2018 survey for the International Game Developers, the most ideal individual to be working in the game industry is "a 32 year old white male with a university degree who lives in North America can who does not have children" (the living in NA condition is especially ironic as the indigenous people are the ones living for the longest time in NA), and Aboriginals or Indigenous people only constitute 2% of the total amount of people working in games. With such a low participation of Indigenous people in the game industry, the normative valuation within digital games culture is by nature exclusive of indigenous games, and the educational, diverse and multicultural "serious" games are often seen as an illegitimate presence, giving way to those stereotypical "white" games that entails casual misogyny, racism and imperialism/colonialism, and whose representations of the indigenous people are either stereotypically written as savage, backwards and unintelligent, or written in a way that has no relevance to the indigenous population today.

This situation has created a systematic meritocracy for the indigenous population who lacked resources, education and training in this field and therefore need to put much more effort into making games than white males. However, this is not to say that there are no efforts to represent the indigenous populations in games. The standard practice in the non-indigenous game industry is to hire individuals from those indigenous population as long-term consultants to contribute to the story or the aesthetic details for the games. Though this method has created some representative works that does reveal some authentic aspects of indigenous cultures such as Thunderbird Strike and Never Alone, they are often held to a double-standard when assessed by the gaming community, or even the political discourse in general who tend to dismiss or even criticize this type of games as "threats for the nation-state". For instance, the game Thunderbird Strike in 2017 that represents a deity in the Anishinaabe culture that protects the natural world was criticized as "an eco-terrorist version of Angry Birds." Therefore, the simple theme of a deity protecting the environment has to be distorted into a bullet for the political war of discourse in terms of environmentalism. In addition, besides the contested field of environmentalism, it is also possible that the reason this particular game receives such large-scale criticism has something to do with the toxic white-supremacism, because the mainstream culture of the west is marginalizing the cultures and the voices of the non-white population, and the cultural heritage of them always ends up being the target of attack, and environmentalism has merely been an excuse for that.

In addition, indigenous videogames have been out of the public field of vision also as a result of a lack of technological and financial resources flowing into the industry. This shortage results in low qualities among such games which tend to be poorly coded and uncreative when it comes to gameplay. For example, the game Never Alone (2014) by Upper One Games tells a story of "Kunuksaayuka," a traditional Inupiat story about a young man discovering the source of a blizzard, and adapts it into a puzzle game based in Arctic landscape to discover pieces of cultural insights, with the collaboration of Alaskan native elders and storytellers. However, despite the intention, the game received very complicated evaluations across the internet, people understand that the game is crucial and has an important story to tell and a community of marginalized people to represent, but they hesitate to give this game high scores and evaluations because of its mechanical flaws and poor design decisions that make the game less playable or fun.

In sum, there isn't a lack of good stories to tell from the communities of Indigenous peoples, nor is there a lack of people who is willing to put in the efforts to tell them. The obstacles of delivering these stories and representations to the public are two-fold. First, such games are often scrutinized under a double-standard scope where the marginalized communities are seen as a "illegitimate presence" in an industry dominated by white males, and their identities embodies in the games can often be used as tools for political interests and gains. Second,  there are not enough resources or money distributed to those groups who are willing to engage with indigenous people to tell their stories, resulting in poorly made games that are not able to penetrate the hegemony of the "mainstream" game industry. Ultimately, it still aligns with our previous discussion about how we make these voices heard by those who get to allocate resources, and modify the ways in which decisions are made in the industry by giving more power to those on the ground who has the knowledge and the intention to push the industry to a more inclusive future. 

Yuheng

References 

Land, J. (2020). Indigenous video games. In L. K. Lopez (Ed.), Race and Media: Critical Approaches (pp. 92–100). NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11vcbrf.11