Digital Games and/as Indigenous Storytelling

Abstract: This presentation examines how digital games on Sami culture can draw attention to Indigenous issues, themes, and world views. By probing the design, game mechanics, and user experience of Gufihtara eallu (2018), this presentation shows how digital games are capable of presenting Indigenous ways of knowing by intersecting and interacting with Indigenous storytelling traditions.

Bio: Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam is a settler-scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is currently completing her book manuscript Graphic Historiography: East German Memory Discourses in Comics and Graphic Novels (Ohio State University Press). Biz’s research and teaching includes the representation of history in comics, comics and new media on forced migration, exploring intersections between Indigenous studies and German and European studies, and feminist methodologies in the graphic arts. Biz also sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum and the Executive Board of the Comics Studies Society.

See also the paper "Sami-digital storytelling: Survivance and revitalization in Indigenous digital games" that Nijdam published in New Media & Society in 2021.