Read-Only Sacred Spaces:
Indigenous Video Games as Space Safe from Vandalism and Theft
“We are the coders who create sovereign virtual worlds, the digital code talkers who braid Indigenous tongues into networks of resistance.”
-Brian K. Hudson, Indigenous Cyberpunk Manifesto
I first really started thinking about the Sacred in Indigenous video games during a conversation between myself and Tlicho Dene artist and musician Casey Koyczan in 2018. During this conversation I suggested that since games and other software like it generally cannot be permanently affected by someone outside of it, games offered a unique opportunity for protected sacred spaces. Save for games or software applications with multiplayer or server-based content, most video games we play are an isolated copy of a source project.¹ After hearing so many times about another sacred site in North America sold, bulldozed or otherwise defaced; my thoughts had started to turn towards an idea. Maybe video games could allow Indigenous people to create sacred spaces without fear of someone permanently damaging it. It was an exciting idea that I got to explore in Unsullied by Others’ Hands: Indigenous Video Games as Immutable Sacred Spaces (Byrne 2020).
At the time I had termed the concept “Immutable Sacred Spaces.” However, as I kept thinking on this idea I started to realize that the term ‘immutable’ did not really express what it was that I was envisioning. When I used the term ‘immutable,’ I had reasoned that even if someone were to destroy the world inside their copy of the game that, because it was a copy, the original source and world remained untouched ready to be uploaded again. However, following that thought through it also becomes clear that ‘immutable’ implies a space without growth or change. When I used the term ‘immutable’ I was specifically referring to digital space’s ability to be “immutable from human interference or mischief,” not that digital space itself is immutable from the passage of time. Afterall, everything decays, even technology.
But then I considered photographs. What is the quality of a photograph that we consider as ‘unchanging?’ Following this my thoughts were drawn towards the concept of ‘Read-Only,’ a computing term that means holding the property of being able to be accessed, or read, but not modified. It can also denote an object, such as a CD-ROM, which can be played, but on which no further recordings can be added. In essence, viewable but untouchable. This concept of “viewable but untouchable” was at the heart of my theory of “immutable sacred spaces,” and so for the purpose of this article I will instead amend the concept of “immutable” to“read-only” to become “Read-Only Sacred Spaces.”
So then what do I consider a “Read-Only Sacred Space?” Knowing that read-only means something that can be viewed but not touched, I want to set the groundwork for what I define as a Sacred Space. In A Conversation on the Efficacies of the Game Engine to Address Notions of Sacred Space by Wyeld, Crogan and Leacy, there is an excellent set of definitions of what makes up a sacred space:
- “Sacred spaces are those spaces that defy the logic of scientific definition, of quantifiable space;”
- “Sacred spaces are controlled spaces. Access to and representation of these spaces and what they contain… is often subjected to rules and regulations.”
(Wyeld et al)
In Unsullied by Others’ Hands, I further expanded that list to include a third definition:
- “The space is defined as Sacred by the one or the community who crafted or found it.”
(Byrne)
I must pause here for a moment to discuss the Sacred. It is too simplistic to just point out that an Indigenous conceptualization of the Sacred is different from the American settler’s. However, I cannot just describe what is so vital about the Sacred to Indigenous people as each Nation will have their own nuance and complexities to what the Sacred is to them. What I can tell you is that the Sacred is something that cannot be divorced from the triad of the self, the land and the community. Equally so, I want to point out that much of modern capitalist society incentivises and disincentivizes people within it’s systems to untether themselves from both land and community — to be perpetually solo and ungrounded. In this way the modern Western conceptualization of the Sacred has become something that exists outside or apart from the self. It is a church in your neighbourhood you do not go to or a retreat in a monastery you attended once. Most Western schools of philosophy ignore the triad of self, community and land as being inseparable and to many Indigenous nations this triad is a requirement of the Sacred. Often these philosophies first hold the self as the entrity of being before splitting the Self into Mind and Body. A distinction unthinkable in many Indigenous philosophies. It would be like taking the motor out of a car and calling it the “true” car. I bring this up because it is important to hold in your mind as you continue to read this article that the Sacred is not just important, but crucial to Indigenous health and colonial resistance.
So then considering this and the points above, a digital sacred space must hold the following properties:
- A place that can defy scientific definitions of quantifiable space;
- Access to that space is controlled, and;
- That either the creator or the audience define or denote that space as Sacred.
Through this lens we can see that game engines offer a blank page on which to craft a digital space that can embody these characteristics:
- The digital is a space that defies preconceived notions of quantifiable space both literally and figuratively as video games offer a space unlimited by physics or time;
- One cannot access a video game without a code, link or some other controlled permissions including the ability to download a copy, and;
- Many Indigenous video game creators intentionally design and develop their games to become Sacred, often noting that the act of crafting itself is an act of ceremony.
The last one I will go into more detail below, however, I would like to note that often the specific act of ceremony described by many Indigenous video game creators, myself included, is one of healing and survivance from colonial trauma. Survivance, a term coined by Gerald Vizenor, is defined as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy.”² In short, it is the act of not just being resilient, but growing stronger or more stable in the face of opposition.
When working against over 500 years of colonization and assimilation there is no one “right” or “correct” way to heal from that level of systematic and generational trauma. And in so, for some, Indigenous-crafted video games are the ultimate safe space for an Indigenous person wrestling with concepts of identity or tradition. Wanisinowin|Lost (2015) is a prime example of this, as it was both a means for the artist, myself, to work through generational trauma and to thrive as I did that work. The plot of Wanisinowin|Lost is simplistic: you are going to meet family you did not know about before. The game’s mechanics are likewise simplistic: a side-scrolling platformer where players can go either left or right and jump over obstacles or listen to people talking. The story and the mechanics did not need to be complex because the issue I was exploring was not the complexities of navigating an Indigenous identity, but rather the frustration, confusion and fear I felt while trying to navigate those complexities.
When developing Wanisinowin|Lost, I was disinterested in gamifying my trauma, something I have seen done that I believe does a disservice to the players. While playing a game that deals with interwoven and delicate issues (poverty and homlessness, for example) the player can come to believe that complex social issues are ones that can be overcome simply by playing perfectly. This was not what I wanted my players to experience. Furthermore, that was not the aspect of my trauma that I desired to work through. Instead, I wanted to hash out and examine the emotional reactions I was having as I worked to gain a path back to my culture, and perhaps one day, my community. Returning to culture or community cannot be achieved by making a game about it. However, one’s own internal struggle about that trauma can be eased through the development of a Read-Only Sacred Space.
Elizabeth LaPensée (2014) points out that her social impact game Survivance (www.survivance.org) “recognizes that players are the ones who create change rather than the game itself.” Wanisinowin|Lost was a deeply personal work where I focused on creating change within myself by personifying the aspects of my trauma-work that I struggled with into the game. I did this rather than try to have the game invoke a change in me. In doing so, I codified the experience in such a way that only myself and others who had had a similar experience would be able to access the deeper knowledge embedded in the piece. This is another way even public pieces can close off parts of their “sacredness” to outsiders. In Casey Koyczan’s work Wenazìi K’egoke ; See Visions, a non-interactive VR experience, viewers are invited to take a short journey to experience the myths, legends and visions from the Northwest Territories. While there is nothing in the visuals or audio of Koyczan’s work that is restricted to outsiders, it is very much made for a Tłı̨chǫ First Nation (Koyczan’s community) audience.
It is an experience that is only truly understood by those who have lived enmeshed in those stories and legends. Koyczan does not explain or make accessible the stories and worlds he is showing. Much like sacred sites covered in ancient drawings, Wenazìi K’egoke ; See Visions is open for everyone to look at, but only for a few to understand. This absence of audience education is a growing trend in Indigenous media, especially video games. As I point out in This Space is Ours To Keep:
It’s (…) very new [in media] to be presented with works, especially ones by a marginalised audience, that don’t seek to make everything understood to an outside audience. (…) [T]he public is used to marginalised creators, in this case Indigenous creators, spelling out everything so that the majority can understand. I think it speaks a lot to the maturity of a medium when artists can create works that speak to one select audience alone.
Butet-Roch & Byrne 2019.
As Indigenous games grow as a medium, the focus on developing for audiences with prior understanding of cultural aspects will become the norm, in part because the teams are Indigenous-centred. These teams are often able to remain culturally-centred because the majority of Indigenous-led video games or interactive media is developed by small teams or even a single person — such is the case with Elizabeth LaPensée, Casey Koyczan and many others.
It is this obfuscation coupled with video games’ literal read-only characteristic that renders video game space as the ideal locus of healing for traumatized peoples. Further, the digital is uniquely important to Indigenous people as a space that, having dealt with centuries of displacement, they can have full access and control over. It is a place that cannot be sullied by an outsider. That key quality is what makes game design so significant for Indigenous people as an aid in the process of healing from the trauma of displacement.
By allowing for telling of story through mechanics, video games offer a media where Indigenous people can protect and obfuscate their trauma from pain-tourists. “Pain-tourism” or a “pain-tourist” is my term for individuals who enjoy sad/painful media about real people or events in the same way someone might enjoy comedies or horror films. The key difference here is that they require that the subject of pain be real rather than fictional. Or if fictional then sourced from someone’s real pain. They enjoy the catharsis of crying as someone (else) goes through, retells or reenacts (sometimes another’s) trauma. Media that deals with Residential Schools and the trauma they induced are often favoured by this kind of media watcher.
To avoid the fate of becoming mere entertainment, each piece of Indigenous media that chooses to express and work through traumatic themes must then develop a secret language between the creator and their intended audience. For example, in Wanisinowin|Lost, because the story of my trauma was only expressed through things the player could do in game — such as interact with and move past the Doubt character — it was difficult or impossible for players who did not already experience disenfranchisement to fully access the story of my pain. This design was deliberate because the intended audience was specifically others who were going through a similar experience. The intentionality behind the design of the game was not to share my pain with the world, but to express the hopefulness of my situation to others like me in hopes that it would ease their sadness or feelings of isolation. This was not a game meant to speak to everyone. Much in a similar way to Wenazìi K’egoke ; See Visions, which is available to the public, but is only fully accessible to its intended audience.
A similar approach can be seen in Ashlee Bird’s work Full of Birds, which is a digital representation of yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini artist Sarah Biscarra Dilley’s work and the memories/thoughts that went into her conception of each piece. In Full of Birds, players are invited to walk into Sarah’s works to visit a space made up of her thoughts and memories in the form of a video game environment. There is no doubt that this game space is a sacred space as it both plays with the concept of the gallery (a place for the public) and the concept of what goes through the mind of the artist as they create a work (something deeply private). This game stands in stark contrast to Bird’s previous work, One Small Step, which takes space that is already sacred (the Earth, the stars and even the Universe itself) and imagines a future where capitalism and colonialism has destroyed and profaned it. Bird states that One Small Step was her attempt to showcase “how unsacred a space video games have been to Indigenous people.”³
However, sometimes it is not the place or the game-space itself that is sacred, but the fact that it makes room for ceremony. In short, it makes space for the Sacred rather than being a sacred space. The difference between the two is that when a game space is considered sacred, it is the being in the space that is key. However, when a space makes room for the Sacred, it is the actions of the participants that are key. In the Anishinaabe video game When Rivers Were Trails,⁴ Métis and Anishinaabe game designer Elizabeth LaPensée points out that “ceremony is interwoven [into the game]. You can make offerings of tobacco to change the hunting minigame. You can participate in ceremonies if you are respectful. You are often given opportunities to gift elders and community members and receive knowledge in exchange. The animals are all in Woodlands style art because in those instances [when you’re hunting] you’re seeing them from an Anishinaabe worldview, like a lens for the sacred.”⁵
In When Rivers Were Trails (WRWT), the mechanics encourage an active engagement on the part of the players in the Sacred. Here it is not the space itself that is sacred but the actions of the player throughout the game. In this game, the Sacred and ceremony that is required is unique in each situation the game presents the player. In these moments the space is sacred. Once the moment is over, what was sacred has left with the people and does not stay in the space.
As Indigenous creators continue to take back control of our own narrative, we will see even more of these works that play and craft spaces that are sacred and designed for personal healing. It is clear that to Indigenous people the opportunity to have freedom from the fear of interference and control from outside forces gives video game creation a popular appeal. I see the act of creating and holding these read-only sacred spaces as no different from holding on to sacred items that should have been (re)buried or having a restoration done on a photo or painting. It is something that is an aid to healing, but in time, as intergenerational healing is enacted and solidified will be put to rest when it is no longer needed.
Throughout the practice of my craft and exploration of my peers’ works, I am in constant awe of how cleverly and creatively Indgenous peoples are able to mold new tools to traditional technique. Since the colonization of North America began, the systems and walls that were in place to protect our sacred knowledge/information have been repeatedly ripped away, leaving our knowledge/information (in all senses) exposed and leaking into spaces and hands to which we have not consented. But like a damaged dam, we are beavers who quickly and cleverly find new tools and materials to plug up those gaps and holes. Video games are just the next material/tool we have manipulated to fit our purposes and have molded to fit our techniques. Thus crafting read-only sacred spaces is unto itself a clear and beautiful act of Survivance.
[1] I will not be touching on games that are single player but have mods as this is a specific design feature that gives people from outside the studio limited permissions to add or change data and is not the kind of game that I am talking about.
[2] LaPensée, Elizabeth, “Acts of Survivance | Survivance.” http://survivance.org/acts-of-survivance/. Accessed 11 Mar. 2020.
[3] Byrne, Meagan. “Interview with Ashlee Bird” March 17, 2020
[4] “A point-and-click adventure game about the impact of colonization on Indigenous communities in the 1890’s developed in collaboration with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation and Michigan State University’s Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab” https://indianlandtenure.itch.io/when-rivers-were-trails. Accessed 31 Mar. 2020.
[5] Byrne, Meagan and LaPensée, Elizabeth. “Email Conversation with Elizabeth LaPensée” March 30, 2020
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