Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:34AM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:34AM (#194006)

    Still sounds more entertaining than what comes out of EA anymore.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @01:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2015, @01:17PM (#194057)

    Hmm, die of dysentery or buy an EA game... decisions, decisions...

  • (Score: 1) by KGIII on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:07PM

    by KGIII (5261) on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:07PM (#194238) Journal

    Enlightenment - It's in the game!

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."