engleski

Building Cultural Awareness through Serious Games

This paper takes as a case-study an adventure puzzle-platform game called Never Alone, developed in collaboration with the Iñupiat, an Alaska Native people and drawing on a traditional story that has been shared across generations. The story is based Nuna, an Iñupiat girl, who tries to find the source of the eternal blizzard that threatens to destroy her homeland and to stop it and restore the balance in the world. In her journeys and adventures, she is accompanied and helped by an Arctic fox. The game was envisioned with the purpose of keeping young members of the Iñupiat community closer to their culture, and in that way slow down the process of cultural amnesia. However, the game is internationally accessible on a wide range of digital platforms such as Steam, Google Play, Gog.com, Humble store, and it has grown into a vehicle of cultural distribution not only within the Iñupiat community but wider. The research approaches the Never Alone video game as a complex ensemble of meaning-making resources interpreted in their social and cultural contexts by a Never Alone community of gamers. The presentation gives preliminary findings of the thematically analysed qualitative data, which identify aspects of the video games and gaming experience that contribute to the building of cultural awareness about the Iñupiat community.

video games, culture, awareness, communication, users

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