Indigenous Peoples Are Decolonizing Virtual Worlds
In an industry marred by its lack of self-awareness, one project is creating a more inclusive vision of the world
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Your mission is to explore space until you find your missing sister. You set off for the stars in your grandfather’s space canoe. Along the way, you visit different planets and meet a galaxy of characters inspired by Hawaiian mo’olelo (stories) who help you on your quest. On a water planet, you learn how the kukui, or candlenut, can make cloudy water bright blue — which allows you to meet a helpful shark. On a lava planet, you hula dance to make kukui trees grow from the ground of a pink-red desert, and on another, you wake the boar-like, eight-eyed demigod Kamapua’a from sleep by throwing kukui at him.
If you think this sounds like an unusual premise for a video game, you’d be right. He Ao Hou, which means “a new world” in Hawaiian, was created by 13 Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) and two non-native teenagers at a three-week workshop in Honolulu last summer. The participants, who were inspired by their ancestors’ tradition of long-distance navigation by the stars, created a game set in the future that is entirely in the Hawaiian language.
Video games have a malicious history of inaccurate portrayals of Indigenous characters. In the 1980s and ’90s, they were the human targets of shoot-’em-ups like Indian Attack, Cowboy Kid, and Hammer Boy, and the repetitive rape of a Native American woman was the main aim of Custer’s Revenge. GUN, released in 2005, required that gamers murder a set number of Native Americans in order to graduate through levels, and the “pan-Indian” stereotypes of mystic chief, ritualistic warrior, or Indian princess continue to dominate storylines. A 2010 academic paper that analyzed the race of characters in the 150 bestselling games in the United States in one year revealed that Native Americans were the most underrepresented segment of society and appeared only as secondary characters.
“It’s a rather poisonous state of affairs that it’s possible for gamers to imagine flying through space…
