When I entered my PhD program in Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis in the Fall of 2015, I knew I wanted to write about video games. More specifically, I wanted to write about Natives in video games. I was simultaneously puzzled and infuriated by the fact that, in an industry that seemed to be making greater strides towards representational inclusivity of marginalized groups and making games that were not strictly about how many bad guys you could kill, the representation of Natives in games still seemed to be woefully behind the curve. There were games like the Bioware’s Mass Effect trilogy that had non-gendered psychic aliens that queered reproduction and living in the diaspora. There were games like Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan where players took on the role of a young boy grieving his Mother’s death by imagining himself into her paintings and remaking his world and sense of self by painting a story into the world around him.
Yet, the new Mortal Kombat X game was about to come out and, although they had killed off Nightwolf in the previous installment of the series, the stereotyping and overt racism was back in the form of Kotal Kahn. Why, in a game where men with four arms, necromancers, and people with all kinds of cybernetic enhancements exist, did the only two Native characters still exclusively wear feathers and animal skin and either perform as the noble savage, communing with the spirits and sacrificing themselves for the “greater good” or, the bloodthirsty warrior, sacrificing humans to an unmerciful deity? It was then that I decided not only would I investigate why these stereotypes were so deeply rooted within the video game industry, but how we, as Native creators, could seek to make change by Indigenizing games.
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