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from the Don't-leave-yet-There's-a-demon-around-that-corner! dept.
This week, Doom joined the first-ever class of the World Video Game Hall of Fame, and its reasons for being inducted now seem obvious in hindsight—particularly how the game table-flipped our expectations of things like 3D design and gun-wielding action. A few weeks before the game received that honor, game developer and educator Elizabeth LaPensée offered a less typical claim about what might have made the game so special at the time: its connection to Native American culture.
LaPensée counts Doom co-designer John Romero as a friend—along with his legendary game-designing wife, Brenda Romero—and she is intimately familiar with John's Cherokee and Yaqui heritage. As such, she brings up a topic game historians typically don't: "Something funny happened when John Romero became famous," she said. "He became white."
Doom's potential connections to Native culture go farther than that, though. "I have a theory," LaPensée said from her home in Oregon. "John Romero broke ground with Doom, but what was it that he was doing? He was expanding dimensional space in that game." The PhD graduate from Simon Fraser University, and her family, were familiar with concepts like dimensional space well before they could be related to the alternate realities of games like Doom. She talked about the teachings she drew upon as a member of the Anishinaabe and Métis communities—along with those of other communities like the Cree—and their commonalities.
"[Our communities] have always related in multiple dimensions," she said. "I believe that influenced John's work and influenced games as a whole."
If indigenous cultures lend themselves well to software, perhaps Lamaist monasteries could be the world's next great programming centers?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Monday June 08 2015, @08:26PM
Or, you know, and one of hundreds of science fictions books that rely on exactly the same concept. Personally I think relating it to native American culture in any way is a big stretch and "acting white" is a little racist.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @09:17PM
It also ignores the 20 or so other people who were involved in making that game.
It seemed more of homage aliens/the thing/scifi genera than anything. Did not really see native american influences at all.
DOOM was what it was because there was nothing else really like it. The hype around it was pretty intense. http://www.trilobite.org/spispopd/spispopd-faq.html [trilobite.org]
It was also one of the first games where I realized motion sickness is a thing... :(
(Score: 2, Insightful) by TWX on Monday June 08 2015, @10:21PM
Yeah, I see a lot of Lovecraftian and other vintage horror influences, even some homage to Warhammer 40k. Admittedly I am no expert on American indigenous work or thought, but what I have seen has always seemed more abstract than the in-your-face nature of the action in most of the id Software games.
Besides, the plot in these games is paper-thin, literally just what's printed on the back of the box on the introduction page of the installation booklet. The point of the game isn't the plot, it's to violently kill things and get one's adrenaline going with FM-synth midi overdriven guitar...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS...
and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss.