CONCEPT
The campaign’s intention was to connect Samoan youth today with their cultural heritage and introduce the culture to non-Samoan audiences by mode of interaction employing critical transmedia concepts of participation and engagement. Enlisting social media and other digital narrative services such as Inkle, the project explored new expressions and impressions of Samoan indigeneity and stories within a gaming context.
Piloting at the Auckland Game Developer’s Conference from April to June 2015, it encouraged people to interrogate popular stereotypes or first impressions of Samoan indigeneity. Due to the lack of Samoan representation in video games, the project assumed a degree of estrangement with Samoan indigeneity in a gaming context and sought to bridge this gap with projects introducing speculative expressions of Samoan indigeneity, and inviting it to inhabit the same space as modern personal narratives, rejecting the notion that these two are mutually exclusive.
The project’s first phase explored engagement with indigenous imagery. The scope of this first phase was too large and employed an ill-suited design for its objectives: the one-way interaction lacked the conversant nature of games or sufficient reward for audience participation and continued engagement. In this sense, it was an inappropriate catalyst for the type of desired user interaction and demonstrated that a campaign focused on building goodwill would require a different form and style of delivery, or significant build-up preceding explicit cue for interaction (e.g. preludes of content as part of a larger transmedia strategy).
Participants were willing to study and discuss the imagery, but were not proactive in taking photos of themselves with the artefact. The instruction ‘take a selfie… and share what you think’ was too broad and lacked frame of reference to qualify the nature of thoughts participants were being asked to share. To gain this insight, the researcher was required to engage and elicit this information through qualitative interviews.
The project’s second phase explored engagement with indigenous story. It was expected that an audience should be able to engage with and be able to understand the narrative without any knowledge of Samoan myth or legend. Participants enjoyed the simplicity of the game’s point-and-click mechanics, but struggled with the story’s narrative voice. Participants report that it was disconcerting when the narrative flowed between natural Western colloquial and a traditional action adventure RPG style. Modern media produced for Samoan youth by other Samoans illustrates a humourous narrative style that is neither of these. Should the Problem with Sina have instead employed a traditional narrative voice such as that witnessed in Never Alone where the legend is recalled by an elder, similar to Samoan Talanoa?
Moving forward, one of the questions I would like to investigate is the narrative voice of Samoa in the twenty-first century. From the style of words to the way they’re presented, to the language of Samoan indigenous imagery and their composition, what can the Samoan narrative voice look like in the context of interactive Indigenous artefacts that pass on cultural heritage?
Future projects will investigate this question by enlisting representatives from the Samoan community, particularly in academia and the media industries, to consult on our myths, legends, ontological and epistemological concepts, informing a collaborative design enjoyed by our youth and introducing our culture to the wider world.