Astrid Ensslin, University of Regensburg

In this talk, I approach Indigenous representation in game design through the lens of critical, Transregional Game Studies. I introduce the concept of folk mechanic as a medium-specific game design concept that communicates relational values and postcolonial anthropocentric critique. Folklore and other folk-related themes manifest variably in video games and game culture, as players respond to and engage with ideas of nation, cultural heritage, and the relationship between land, human and other animate forms of being in a variety of ways and from diverse political angles. Aspects of folk mechanics and narrative world design can, for example, contribute to nationalist identity formation and alt-right community building, where they engender xenophobic, (anti-)social practices intra- and extradiegetically. Conversely, “folklore mechanics” can herald a “third game culture” in a politically left-leaning manner and be read as revolutionary-subversive game practices with culture-specific content; or, folk mechanics can embody folkloristic and specifically Indigenous epistemologies and value systems and thus help transform the colonial-ludological agon principle (Caillois 1961) into anthropocene-critical philosophies of relational play. Drawing on Indigenous games from and about the Arctic Inuit (Never Alone by Upper One Games [2014]), Anishinaabe and other Indigenous communities from Turtle Island (When Rivers Were Trails, LaPensée 2019), and Sámi people (Skábma-Snowfall [Redstage 2022]), I focus on three types of Indigenous folk mechanics: decolonial un-mapping; the relational drum; and survivance through co-species collaboration. They serve to illustrate relational agon as a mutually supportive and respectful interplay between animals (human and otherwise), land, and the environment.

Astrid Ensslin is a settler scholar of German origin and Professor for the Dynamics of Virtual Communication Spaces at the University of Regensburg (Germany), where she teaches and supervises students in Digital Area Studies, critical and transcultural game studies, literary media, and Critical Digital Humanities. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, where she spent five years teaching and researching Digital Culture (2020-2026). During that time, she supervised graduate work in Indigenous Game Studies (Barnes 2021) and took training courses in decolonial curriculum design and research. She is Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded “Writing New Body Worlds” project and a Director of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her most recent books include The Routledge Companion to Literary Media (2023), Pre-web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature (C.U.P. 2022) and Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis (with Alice Bell, Ohio State U.P., 2021). At Regensburg she directs the Digital Area Studies Lab (DAS|LAB).