Every game has a moment—a moment that not only crystallizes your mission, but that lets you know why you're playing at all. In Foxtales, that moment happens almost immediately. Nuna, a young Inuit girl, and her Arctic fox are overjoyed when the spring thaw begins in her village; but when that enthusiasm leads them to act thoughtlessly, it sets off a chain of events that endanger their lives. It's a mistake, says Ishmael Hope, borne of exuberance without consideration.
"It's an amazing feeling to see the light after so many months in the darkness—instead of an endless blizzard, you have the light and vitality of the tundra coming alive in springtime," says Hope, the game's writer. But that relief isn't without responsibility: "If you forget to respect the world around you, there will be consequences."
Released today for Xbox One, PS4, and Steam, Foxtales builds on the world of last year's Never Alone, which first introduced players to Nuna, Fox, and the tundra above the Arctic Circle. Hope's moral, however, doesn't just inform the game's plot; it also holds true for game developers looking to portray native culture—an effort that too often results in overused stereotypes. "Usually, we just hope the games aren't horribly offensive," says Hope, a member of Alaska's Iñupiat tribe.
And so Foxtales, like Never Alone, presents native culture far beyond igloos and powwows—in large part because Iñupiat elders provided feedback on the game throughout the development process. But those elders weren't a mere focus group; as part of the first indigenous-owned videogame company in the US, they were executives overseeing the process itself.
Both Foxtales and Never Alone were developed by Upper One Games, a collaboration between the Cook Inlet Tribal Council (C.I.T.C.), a nonprofit serving natives in Alaska, and game developer E-Line Media.
"We wanted to make a financial investment that would also make a social impact," explains Gloria O'Neill, president and CEO of the C.I.T.C. and executive chair of Upper One Games. The C.I.T.C. wanted to share Iñupiat values with its young people in a format they found accessible, and to offer an alternative to how the media often stereotypes native culture. "I saw an opportunity to be part of telling our own stories and to have a voice in the development process," says O'Neill. "This was a way to create an authentic game that Iñupiats are proud of."
To make an authentic game, Upper One Games embarked on what O'Neill describes as "inclusive development," guided by hundreds of hours of ongoing feedback from the local Iñupiat community in far northern Alaska. As a game writer with an Iñupiat and Tlingit background, Hope played a central role.
Especially with the native community, often misrepresented in popular culture, establishing a sense of trust took time—and 13 separate trips north of the Arctic Circle.
"This kind of cultural collaboration is unprecedented," says Sean Vesce, creative director at E-Line Media. "The way our industry portrays indigenous culture is pretty shameful—there's a lot of stereotypes, a lot of cultural appropriation without much thought for how these people and their beliefs are being represented."
For Vesce and his fellow developers, the collaboration of Upper One Games offers a way to break out of the game development world. "Gaming can be very insular, very self-referential," explains Vesce, who previously worked on Tomb Raider and Interstate '76. Instead of studio execs at Microsoft or Activision, Vesce's team pitched demos to native elders around a dining room table.
And the elders spoke their minds. As Vesce explains, when he introduced the concept of dimension switching from the real world to the spirit world, one elder informed him, "Our spirituality isn't on demand. You can't just hit a button and suddenly hey, you're surrounded by helpful spirits."
The story in Foxtales is based on "The Two Coastal Brothers," an Iñupiat tale told by Willie Panik Goodwin Sr., Hope's grandfather; in fact, the game is narrated by Goodwin's son (Hope's uncle). "The stories of the elders shape the narrative arc of the game," Hope says. "Having them work on it brings it to the next stage of genuinely being from their world."
While Never Alone was loosely based another Iñupiat tale, "Kunuuksaayuka," sourcing Foxtales from Hope's own family brought in a new level of community involvement. The creative team from Upper One Games all flew up to Kotzebue, Alaska, where they spent five days sharing a template of the game and getting feedback from Hope's uncles. "There's often a denial of the creative and intellectual agency of non-Western people," Hope says. "We've proved that when we're equal collaborators all the way through the process, that's the way to make a better, more authentic game."
In fact, Hope's uncles and other Iñupiat elders contribute to the game experience throughout Foxtales. They're featured in five minute-long video documentaries interspersed throughout gameplay, sharing their own memories and providing background on Iñupiat culture, including one uncle's story of getting trapped while hunting out on the ice.
The game's central message of respecting the natural world applies to all players, but Hope envisions Foxtales as offering something more to native kids. "When I was coming of age in the '80s and '90s, there was so much suppression of being native," says Hope. "Now young people can see interest from outside, and get a sense of self-worth from their culture."
He hopes the games, and particularly the embedded documentaries told by elders, will lead young people to pursue an interest in their own histories. "There's a potential for technology to lead to antisocial patterns, but this has the chance to subvert that," he explains. "Native kids will want to talk to their families after playing the games, and hear about their own stories."
There have been other attempts at culturally informed games, like Spirits of Spring, but not with the same intensive development process. Elizabeth LaPensée, a native game developer who spoke at the first Natives in Game Dev Gathering in May 2015, sees Upper One's work as crucial. "Never Alone set the standard for how to merge native storytelling with game development," she says.
And while Foxtales might be the final experience in the world that Never Alone built, Upper One plans to partner with other native communities worldwide to develop games based on their stories. "We believe there's a place for that variety of storytelling in the younger medium of videogames," says Alan Gershenfeld, co-founder and president of E-Line Media. "These are stories that transcend culture and communicate a perspective, executed at a high end of the craft."
