“A Game 10,000 Years in the Making”

David Gaertner

doi:10.6093/2035-8504/9606

David Gaertner University of British Columbia

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/2035-8504/9606

Keywords: adaptation, video games, Never Alone, screen sovereignty, Iñupiaq, Inuit technology

Abstract

Inuit adaptation technologies, which have been in place for thousands of years, provide unique insight into the burgeoning field of Indigenous video game studies by advancing sovereign articulations of technology in digital space. Grounded in the principles of ikiaqtaq, an adaptation of a song, Never Alone / Kisima Ingitchuna (2014), extends and nuances how Indigenous stories translate into video games by foregrounding community sustainability and cultural flexibility. Addressing Iñupiaq video game development specifically, this essay demonstrates how ikiaqtaq, as demonstrated in Never Alone, generates the conditions for sovereign storytelling in the digital.

Author Biography

David Gaertner, University of British Columbia

David Gaertner is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia and the co-Director, with Daisy Rosenblum, of the CEDaR Space, a community-oriented new media and digital storytelling lab. He is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada (2021), the editor of Sôhkêyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe (2018), and co-editor of Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (2017).

“A Game 10,000 Years in the Making”

Never Alone / Kisima Ingitchuna and Adaptation as a Future-Oriented Technology

Abstract

Author Biography