On the whole, Native American and First Nations (Aboriginal/Indigenous) games fall under the same game-related definitions from scholars such as Roger Caillois and Bernard Suits. As Suits states, “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (190). Similarly, Caillois defines play as free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and make-believe (142) and attributes qualities such as competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo to games. I’m with Caillois for the most part, but lean towards Jesper Juul’s more recent breakdown of games that focuses more on the player.
As Michael pointed out in class, it’s difficult to attach the term “unproductive” to play in game genres like Massively Multiplayer Games, because they exist constantly and don’t reset (aside from server resets, which don’t erase your characters or item-gathering progress). After all, even I liquidated my houses, characters, and some rare items into real world money on E-Bay after I decided to leave Ultima Online. I never had the intention of working towards selling my game possessions, and yet they were a fruitful product of my play.
It’s in this very issue of productivity that Native games take a stance. While the examples I’m going to mention also fall under other categories like chance, sports, and so on, first you need to recognize the Native perspective of experiential learning. Learning and applying the values of the community is instilled in all activities. You’re not just getting trained like you would in a simulation, but practicing at enacting values that promote kindness, honesty, and fairness.
Hide and Seek actually originated as an Anishinaabe (you can say Ojibwe if that’s too much) butterfly game that girls would play. One girl would sing the butterfly song for the butterfly to show her the way, while the other girls would hide quietly. Then it was time to practice tracking skills by quietly following footprints and finding everyone. The Moccasin Game has similarly been appropriated and its history of rules has been left behind, making it only recognizable as a chance game. In the original Native game, a marked marble is hidden under one of four moccasins and the finder has to predict where it’s at based on the admittedly confusing moves of the keeper. Drums play for the time the finder is allowed to take to guess where the marble went. Usually it was played for hooours since points are given for every win and removed for every loss. The game was created to promote fairness and the rules were made such that there could be no cheating.
Even though the “by-products” from Anishinaabe games may not be monetary, they are based on learning and enacting values, making better community members a by-product of game play. Now if that’s not productive… We simply don’t have the same perspectives on productivity. Caillois later goes on to add a short argument that “the destinies of culture can be read in their games” (147). Certainly, with Native games and their role in communities, whether they had gambling (sometimes Moccasin Game) or competitive (Lacrosse) or reward elements (Sep game), the emphasis always remained on their promotion of values helpful to continuing a healthy community.
Modern video games, at least those high end console and MMO titles, really call for more than just single qualities. While they might include competition, chance, simulation, and a lively vertigo experience all in one, we also need to keep in mind what makes up games today. Greg Costikyan argues that games aren’t stories since stories are linear (he’s going with the cause-and-effect story here I’m guessing) and games are non-linear. Woah, woah now. Native stories sure as heck aren’t linear, so where does that leave us? Games are a promising way to visualize true Native storytelling for this very reason—the opportunity to experience the non-linear style. There are not always straight answers; as a listener, you’re often left to consider the story carefully and find reasons for things yourself, often by listening over and over again at many different tellings.
Even if scholars are hesitant to see games as stories, certainly we can at least understand games as including narrative elements, such as in Henry Jenkins’ suggestion that game design be viewed as narrative architecture. Indigenous perspectives on space and time are often intrinsically linked (in the case of the Maori and Indigenous peoples, one word is used). Space is essential and sacred, eternally connected and visualized in rich words and stories to understand these connections.
Maybe, then, Native stories and concepts of space/time are uniquely transferable to gameplay. Of course, that’s to be tested beyond the idea stage, where we can actually implement mechanics. While the Aboriginal Media Lab is exploring these possibilities in an Alternate Reality Game, since it’s a real world interactive narrative, other Nations are putting together projects to realize their traditional stories in interactive 3D. The key here is to break genre conventions and remain Indigenous while agreeing with the conventions of what a game is.
