Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace

Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace | Indigenous Representations in Commercial Video G
Copyright Elizabeth LaPensée beth@elizabethlapensee.com
http://www.abtec.org/blog/?p=175
Indigenous Representations in Commercial Video Games
I've been toiling over the script for the "Indigenous Representations in Commercial Video Games" portion of the forthcoming
Skins documentary film for the past several days. I'm still at 1 minute and 40 seconds when I need to get it to 1 minute. I
don't think it's possible, so I've decided to go ahead with the existing script, and leave it in the hands of the editor to decide
which sections stay and which go. As a compromise, I'm going to put this very short script up here on the blog so that people
can catch whatever details go missing in the final documentary.
Believe me... I'm leaving out a lot of details and could probably write a paper on each one of these games or overall themes.
In commercial video games, indigenous peoples are stereotyped and appropriated—at worst, they’re killed for points; at best,
they’re the half-breed hero in Red Dead Revolver and GUN (where, by the way, you start off killing Apaches).
With real time strategy games, you take over land represented by maps and collect resources rather than sustain them. In Sid
Meier's Civilization III, you have Iroquois riding mounts. No Man’s Land has “Prairie Indian Medicine Men” who can “cast
mighty magic spells.” In Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs, you increase your units’ speed, damage, and skills by having your
villagers dance in a pit.
In fighting games, there are T. Hawk, Nighthawk, Nightwolf, Wolf Hawkfield -- all stoic, folded arms, body paint, leather – the
“keeper” or “protector” of his people, but who are his “people”?
In first person shooters, we have Turok, a warrior in an alternate world who hunts dinosaurs. In Prey, you play as Tommy, a
Cherokee garage mechanic who reluctantly saves the world from an alien invasion. In the gothic western Dark Watch, you run
into Tala—a voluptuous Native woman who tempts you to become a vampire.
However, in Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, cartoon-like and colorful, you protect the imaginary salamander-like Grubbs against
a Springs Bottled Water Company. The game ends with a quote from Chief Standing Bear, pointing out the analogy with the
indigenous experience of colonization.
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Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace | Indigenous Representations in Commercial Video G
Copyright Elizabeth LaPensée beth@elizabethlapensee.com
http://www.abtec.org/blog/?p=175
We too as Native people, mixed or otherwise, can create our own video games to represent ourselves, whether historical or
contemporary, or even as allegory, which is what motivates the curriculum and projects developed by the Aboriginal
Territories in Cyberspace.
- Beth
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