In 2018, during the imagineNATIVE Festival, VR artist Casey Koyczan and I had a conversation about digital space. This conversation started turning my mind to an idea about how we could regard video games. The conversation came at a time when there was public outrage over yet another Indigenous sacred site threatened or maliciously approached by outsiders.
Standing Rock was on everyone’s minds and I asked Casey if he felt that his VR spaces represented a kind of safe space where he could hold the sacred, since much of his work revolved around expressing a kind of transcendental Indigenous experience that was very personal to him. He was intrigued by this idea and asked me to clarify what I meant. Since it was only something I had just begun to think about I struggled to put it into words. “Well, since games and other application
software generally cannot be permanently affected by an outsider. Would you then say that, maybe, video games make for a space where Indigenous people can recreate their own sacred spaces without fear of someone permanently damaging it?” It was an exciting idea to me. I was thinking of Indigenous-made video games specifically and that distinction shifted my paradigm regarding the immutability potential of digital space.
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