settler-colonialism

This call takes up threads of Indigenous Futurisms and Video Games Studies to weave a fiber-optic cable of survivance – (re)coding sovereignty into flowing non-binary streams of Indigenous-made video games and experiences.

As Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish scholar and designer Beth LaPensée notes, Indigenous communities are already in a post-apocalypse, and “doing more than surviving. We’re continuing our traditions in ways that are malleable to the situations we’re in now”(qtd. in Creegan). We ask how these games can shift players to these media landscapes that are, as Loft says, “replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things that mirrors, memorializes, and points to the structure of Indigenous thought” (xvi). We also ask how they can – from internal and external positionalities – (re)code how we understand games and larger networks of connection and relationality. Continue Reading →