For isolated indigenous communities, video games are becoming the medium of choice to tell their stories, spread their values and make their way of life more accessible to outsiders.

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Out of sight, out of mind

“ In the isolated mining town of Roebourne, Western Australia, the Yijala Yala Project aims to teach Aboriginal youth contemporary, innovative and creative art forms to maintain their cultural heritage.

Love Punks - powered by community-created content.

A NEOMAD film shoot and voice recording session.

A panel from NEOMAD and one of Roebourne's locals putting in some Wacom work.

“ One of the biggest questions when it comes to reinterpreting stories of such importance into a new medium [is] who gives permission?

Aboriginal elders like Ned Cheedy are part of a long-standing oral storytelling tradition.

Some amazing art from Warlu Song.

Just the beginning

“ In terms of the video game industry, titles like Never Alone and Love Punks... have laid out a roadmap of how the industry can be more inclusive of indigenous cultures...

NEOMAD 6 IMAGES

More importantly, they are also being used as a tool to reconnect and reengage their youth with their own cultural heritage, and to help maintain it.The Iñupiaq, the First Nations people of Arctic Alaska, have for thousands of years passed down their culture through scrimshaw art, dance and word of mouth, known as the oral tradition.Over time these people have watched their way of life increasingly affected by an ever-changing world, forcing them to find new ways to keep their culture alive in the face of colonialism, assimilation and globalisation.Like many indigenous communities, the future of the Iñupiaq’s way of life rests on the shoulders of their youth listening, learning and passing down their stories to future generations.Realising that traditional ways of storytelling weren’t reaching their youth, the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, a non-profit Iñupiaq organisation, collaborated with developer E-Line Media to release the video game, Never Alone A game created in equal partnership with an indigenous community, Never Alone takes stories, characters and settings from the Iñupiaq culture to deliver a wholly unique and culturally authentic gaming experience, which teaches just as much as it entertains.Players control an Iñupiaq girl named Nuna and her arctic fox spirit guide, and their long journey is filled with fantastical creatures, treacherous villains and beautiful spirits, narrated in the traditional Iñupiaq language, Inupiat, by elder James Nageak.For outsiders, what at first glance looks like a barren snowy landscape becomes a world brimming with life and spirituality, with gamers walking away understanding the Iñupiaq people just that little bit more.But for Iñupiaq youth, by taking the traditional stories of their people and presenting them within a contemporary medium they know and understand, they’re given greater significance and longevity.And by seeing other, non- Iñupiaq experiencing and enjoying their stories, their people’s way of life is validated and they themselves gain a sense of being valued.Game development has historically been an expensive, high risk endeavor, but fundamental changes over the last decade – lower barriers to development tools, a growing independent development scene, easy self publishing, more and more digital distribution platforms – have helped open the door for gaming to represent a broader range of experiences, like Never Alone.In the isolated mining town of Roebourne, Western Australia, the Yijala Yala Project aims to teach Aboriginal youth contemporary, innovative and creative art forms to maintain their cultural heritage.Created by Big hART , an Australian arts and social justice company whose motto is “it’s hard to hurt someone if you know their story,” the Project in 2011 teamed up with international award winning illustrator, writer and interactive designer Sutu aka Stu Campbell Known for his cyberpunk interactive comic series Nawlz, Sutu came on board as the project’s digital media coordinator, and discovered that the youth of Roebourne had a deep interest in video games.“They needed to learn new skills in which they could present their culture, and the things they were interested in learning about were video games, iPads and apps,” Sutu tells me.“So we actually created a video game called Love Punks. The kids used Wacom Intuos tablets and Photoshop to cut out animations of themselves which were then superimposed into a flash game environment.“Over 4 months they cut about 2000 frames of animation, so it’s a considerable amount of content made in that time.”Available free-to-play at LovePunks.com , the game uses stop-motion animation to recreate a side-scrolling montage of Roebourne, allowing players to quite literally explore their community.From there the project moved onto NEOMAD , an interactive iPad comic that imagined a future where Roebourne’s mining industry had been replaced by tourism.“A big problem in the story is that these tourists are going into sacred sites and encroaching on sacred areas and that kind of is a commentary on essentially the mining community, and white people, over the last 400 years,” says Sutu.“One of the heritage sites in this area called Murujuga where there’s all these ancient rock carvings. There’s about a million of them, and some of them date back over 30,000 years.”Within the story a rocket booster falls from space branded with an ancient petroglyph, the symbol of Minkala, a mythological god from the area. This sets the heroes, a group of Aboriginal kids, on an adventure to better understand the petroglyph and to discover more cultural information.The inclusion of mythological gods in the story brings up one of the biggest questions when it comes to reinterpreting stories of such importance into a new medium: who gives permission?“One of the things that holds back indigenous culture from transferring to different mediums is indigenous protocol. A lot of the content is sacred and because it’s endangered it’s putting a lot of pressure on community to make it public so that the people who are endangering it can understand why it’s so important to the indigenous people,” says Sutu.During the creation of Never Alone, this was one of E-Line Media’s biggest challenges as well, even with the Iñupiaq community being so heavily involved. But it led to the creation of a game that was of cultural significance and which strived to maintain culture rather than change it for a mainstream audience.This process can be long and tedious, as Sutu discovered with the creation of the project’s next story, Warlu Song , which included the translation and adaptation of an ancient Aboriginal song given to them by the late Ned Cheedy, who was 105-years-old when he granted permission.“It’s a song that was passed down to him back in the 1920s and the negotiation and consultation process for creating that story went over 13 months. It was a big leap for that community to feel comfortable with putting the story of the Warlu, which was the ancient snake, in the public arena,” he says.“It’s pretty brave of them and I’ve got a lot of respect for that sort of process. I encourage anyone who’s coming into that space and hoping to work with indigenous communities to really appreciate and respect that it’s a big move for them.”Much like Never Alone, this project was also able to keep alive the oral tradition within the story, with the iPad allowing the seamless incorporation of the local Yindjibarndi language.“This was a point that was made to me by one of the other elders in the community and why she liked this format so much because we still hear the elder’s voice telling the story,” he explains.“In the circumstance of NEOMAD, you can hear the kids telling the story and also in NEOMAD some of the elders share experiences and they are telling the story to the kids.“So you get this beautiful transferal of knowledge by the Aboriginal people telling the story to their own and then by us, as an audience, being able to read that they’re telling it to us and it’s a nice kind of contract of permission and respecting protocols.”In terms of the video game industry, titles like Never Alone and Love Punks, and interactive media like NEOMAD and Warlu Song, have laid out a roadmap of how the industry can be more inclusive of indigenous cultures, setting the bar incredibly high when it comes to striving for cultural authenticity.So in this way they are pioneers of not only the gaming industry, but of indigenous communities the world over.Sutu believes that the fact it has taken so long for this to happen will inevitably bring up bigger questions of how we view our indigenous people and to rethink how we approach indigenous cultures.“The reality is that we are really behind in Australia and it’s a really sad sort of fact,” he says.

Check out some images from NEOMAD.

“NEOMAD could well be the first Australian comic with a full cast of indigenous heroes more or less, or just protagonists seen in a positive light, and it just blows my mind that it’s taken this long.“I think it’s just a slow recognition problem and that’s kind of why we are trying to do this… create more opportunities to even out the equation.”

Jesse Matheson is a journalist and former intern for IGN Australia. You can follow him on IGN and on Twitter: @Jesse_Matheson