Changing how Native Americans are represented in video games

Brut America

This indigenous game designer wants to immerse gamers in Native American culture — and put an end to stereotypes.

Transcript

00:00When I was 11, I got into WoW and played over 6,000 hours of World of Warcraft,

00:05about a year in the game of waking hours before I turned 18.

00:09So that was a big part of my life.

00:11And the reason that I got into video game design basically was,

00:16wow, I'm spending a lot of time on this.

00:18I might want to do this as a job.

00:30So I grew up on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in the middle of South Dakota,

00:41what was once the Great Sioux Nation.

00:43So 120 years ago in 1889 is when my family was forced onto the reservation

00:50from where they had been living, basically to live as prisoners of war until 1924.

01:00How did you get into video game design?

01:07Even when you see a representation, let's say the Tauren in World of Warcraft,

01:11it's a caricature.

01:13It's offensive sometimes,

01:16especially the insinuation of lesser intelligence or that kind of thing.

01:21You know, I played Assassin's Creed 3.

01:24Connor was a cool character, but he was still very much a whitewashed Indian.

01:29So Northern Plains Games is the studio I founded last year

01:32to try and change a lot of this stuff in my own culture.

01:37So what I saw a lot of was there weren't a ton of game developers from reservations.

01:42Big surprise, right?

01:45And especially with Lakota, there wasn't a lot of content.

01:50Even books and movies, we just don't have a ton of stuff in our language.

01:54There's less than 2,000 speakers left today.

01:57Less than 1% of people my age are fluent.

02:00So I started building Teepee Gaga, our first title,

02:05a few years back in 2017, spring of 2018.

02:11And the first idea was, wow, I just need to make a game in Lakota.

02:16And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool if you could make a teepee?

02:28You know, it's not a teaching tool, per se.

02:30It's not something that's going to help you learn these words for the first time.

02:36You know, we have the subtitles in there.

02:39It's more like anime, right?

02:41You don't learn Japanese from anime if you're watching it.

02:45But you might get that interest to learn.

02:48You might see kind of how this language could be cool.

02:51And I think it's just a cool way to engage kids and tell them that Lakota isn't dead,

02:55that there is still a reason to learn it.

02:57I think the importance of keeping languages alive in general is to allow for cultures to exist.

03:02And say if we all speak the same language, if our cultures start to blend together,

03:07we lose a lot of the complexity about what makes us human.

03:10And while I like, you know, peace and everyone coming together,

03:16I think that culture is important and that difference is important,

03:20that we're not meant to all be the same.

03:23And that these complicated histories that brought us to who we are today are important

03:27and that we should continue to honor them and continue to carry out, you know,

03:32cultural practices, including language, as a part of who we are.

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