In something of a departure from my typical work, I recently published an article in International Political Sociology on Indigenous political thought in video games.

As some of my prior blogging here suggests, I have been thinking about the place of video games in the study of popular culture in International Relations (IR) for a while. I make a couple contributions to that literature here.

First, I argue that video games merit equal weight to traditional media in popular cultural research in IR; video games represent a common enough practice and a big enough industry at this point to put them alongside film, television, or literature when we talk about “popular culture”.

I’m certainly not the first to make such an argument; I build on plenty of IR scholarship that has studied video games. But such work still often provides a standard disclaimer—“You might think video games are frivolous, but…”. Perhaps we can skip that part.

Second, I argue that we can find important political content even in the not-so-popular artifacts of popular culture. There is good reason to study billion-dollar, transmedia franchises, but even niche products, video games or otherwise, can contribute to the circulation of political thought and produce political effects.

Indeed, I focus in the article on two relatively small games, Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) and Thunderbird Strike. These games may not be as globally influential as, say, the Grand Theft Auto or Pokémon series, but they tell distinctly Indigenous stories that were intended to have real-world effects.

Never Alone is explicitly didactic. Players of this puzzle-platformer control Nuna, a young Iñupiaq girl, and her Arctic fox companion. Alaska Native groups were central to the game’s design—it is meant to relay cultural knowledge to the next generation while also providing outsiders with a window into their culture. It has been successful enough at doing so that the publisher is producing a sequel.

Thunderbird Strike is a smaller, shorter game in which the player controls a mythical Thunderbird with the goal of revitalizing a despoliated Great Lakes region by destroying oil and gas pipelines and related infrastructure. Even with minimal text, the game’s lead designer, Elizabeth LaPensée (who identifies as Irish, Anishinaabe, and Métis), offers players a clear argument—the extraction of the fossil fuel industry distorts the proper human relationship to the earth and nonhuman animals.

This brings me to another literature with which I am engaging here—studies of relationalism. While this literature in IR has largely focused on anglophone and sinophone relationalisms, I argue that Never Alone and Thunderbird Strike present a distinctly Indigenous relationalism that emphasizes relations to place and nonhuman entities.

I say more about how I am building on previous work on Indigenous relationalisms in the article; the important point for me is that video games can be a helpful place to look for distillations of political thought.

Assessing the real-world effects of any given cultural artifact can be difficult, but Never Alone seems to have garnered much attention for the way it offers a view into Alaska Native life. This acclaim (more for its cultural content than for its gameplay) means it has likely succeeded in exposing many people to its distinctly Indigenous story. Whether that exposure translates to further effects—empathy, political support, or otherwise—is a different question I cannot answer here.

Thunderbird Strike, development of which was funded in part by a Minnesota state grant, produced more visible political effects. As the game began to receive positive attention, Republican state lawmakers and fossil fuel industry groups criticized the game for its environmental content, which one state senator described as “an eco-terrorist version of Angry Birds” (gameplay differences notwithstanding).

Since then, Minnesota Republicans have repeatedly tried to add language to omnibus funding bills to the effect that, “Funding from the arts and cultural heritage fund must not be used for projects that promote domestic terrorism or criminal activities,” language that has failed to appear in any final version of a law (surely due to differences on whether such language is necessary given existing modes of grant-making oversight and on how to define “promote”).

This political backlash, however limited in its successes so far, is instructive insofar as it was provoked by a relatively small, low-cost game most notable for its expression of Indigenous political thought. To the extent that video games big and small increasingly seek to contribute to political discourse, we should not be surprised if politicians increasingly seek to (de)legitimize (dis)favored political messages in video games.