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posted by LaminatorX on Monday June 08 2015, @08:07PM   Printer-friendly
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

 
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  • (Score: 1) by pasky on Monday June 08 2015, @08:26PM

    by pasky (1050) on Monday June 08 2015, @08:26PM (#193800)

    So the main claim seems to be that Doom (that very famous 90s FPS) has brought Native American influence to computer games.

    What influence in particular? Anyone got that?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Monday June 08 2015, @09:09PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Monday June 08 2015, @09:09PM (#193819) Journal

    TFS ended LaPensée's quotation a line too early (at least for my tastes):

    “[Our communities] have always related in multiple dimensions,” she said. “I believe that influenced John’s work and influenced games as a whole."

    "I can't prove that!" she added.

    So it seems like this is one woman's speculation, which she openly recognises as possibly flawed and totally infalsifiable. That's fine, I like interesting speculations.

    In Doom, an interdimensional portal is opened up as a result of humans experimenting with teleportation on Mars. Demonic beings start coming out of the portal, and the player/protagonist has to slaughter the transdimensional immigrants. The player/protagonist then goes through the teleporter and ends up visiting something that at least resembles hell, murdering all of the demons there as well. Finally he goes back to earth, and finds that it has been overrun with demons.

    I'm not very familiar with Native American culture, and I can't say how much these memes (the interdimensional and the apocalyptic) resemble the memes of that culture as opposed to those of the dominant culture of North America. It might be interesting to hear Romero's thoughts on the matter.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 09 2015, @12:18AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday June 09 2015, @12:18AM (#193871) Journal

      You read TFA? You must be new here ;-)

      Yes, I too know little about American tribal cultures to be able to discern what aspects of Doom or other games are specifically related to them. But it was an interesting thought so I submitted the article. Usually the only non-Western culture you see well represented in games is Japanese, which is always apparent because of their general lack of a linear story arc, good vs. evil dualities, or clear resolutions. Instead, you get a lot of inversions where good turns to evil and vice versa, because Japanese don't tend to think you're either one or the other but shifting combinations of both that change with context; it's a lot more realistic, I think, but it can also sometimes feel unsatisfying to Western audiences.

      So it would be interesting to explore games that are specifically influenced by American Indian cultures, or Indian Indians or Africans as a window into their worldview.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday June 09 2015, @06:46PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday June 09 2015, @06:46PM (#194177) Journal

      Sounds more like a Lovecraft homage to me....

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday June 09 2015, @01:27AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Tuesday June 09 2015, @01:27AM (#193881) Homepage

    Probably what taking a shitload of Peyote looks and sounds like.