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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: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 09 2015, @12:18AM
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.