Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes grew up playing video games, including “probably hundreds of hours” colonizing a distant planet in the 1999 title Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
So, when that same game studio, Firaxis, approached the tribal nation a quarter-century later with a proposal to make a playable character out of their famous leader Tecumseh in the upcoming game Civilization VII, Barnes felt a rush of excitement.
“I was like, ‘This can’t be true,’” Barnes said. “Do they want us to participate in the next version of Civilization?”
Photo: AP
Beloved by tens of millions of gamers since its 1991 debut, Meier’s Civilization series sparked a new genre of empire-building games that simulated the real world while also diverging into imaginary twists. It has captivated nerdy fans like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a young Barnes with its intricate and addictive gameplay and rich historical context.
Choosing among leaders that can range from Cleopatra to Mahatma Gandhi, players build a civilization from its first settlement to a sprawling network of cities, negotiate with or conquer neighbors, and develop trade, science, religion and the arts.
Circana, which tracks US game sales, says it is the bestselling strategy video game franchise of all time.
However, things have changed since the early days of Civilization. Of course, video game technology has advanced, but so too has society’s understanding of cultural appropriation and the importance of accurate historical framing.
Firaxis dropped plans to add a historical Pueblo leader in 2010 after tribal leaders objected. The game incorporated a Cree leader in 2018, but faced public criticism in Canada after its release.
Developers knew that to properly represent the Shawnee leader, they would need the input and blessing of Shawnee.
For Barnes, it was an opportunity to not only showcase the power and might of Shawnee, but also a way for tribal citizens to see themselves represented in popular culture in a new and imagined future for the tribe.
“For us, it’s really about a cultural expression of cultural hegemony,” Barnes said. “Why not us? Why not? Of course we should be in a video game title. Of course we should see ourselves reflected in every media. So, we took advantage of the opportunity to make our star shine.”
For designers at Firaxis, the partnership represented a chance to improve a game development system that has been criticized by indigenous leaders for misrepresenting their cultures, and for Shawnee, it was a way to promote their language and history in a new way.
Series founder Meier and other studio executives acknowledged past missteps in the Civilization franchise’s casual treatment of history, including how it incorporated indigenous groups and colonization more broadly.
That led to careful thought and months of collaboration to “make sure it’s an authentic, sincere recreation” of Shawnee culture, said game producer Andrew Frederiksen, speaking during a visit to the tribe’s headquarters last month.
That meant asking Shawnee questions about what a Shawnee university or library building of the future would look like and creating new Shawnee words to describe futuristic concepts.
Meier, who started developing computer games in the 1980s, said the Shawnee partnership is “kind of special” and was borne out of meetings with Barnes where the chief talked about the challenges of preserving the Shawnee language. As part of the partnership, Firaxis and its publishing label 2K Games — subsidiary of gaming giant Take-Two Interactive — are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in language revitalization programs and facilities.
When Shawnee actor Dean Dillon auditioned for a part that involved speaking the Shawnee language, he did not know he would be voicing Tecumseh. The military and political leader from what is currently Ohio united a confederation of Native American tribes to resist US westward expansion in the early 19th century.
“I just gave it my best shot,” Dillon said. “And then a few weeks later, I heard back, and they said: ‘We’d like to offer you the role of Tecumseh.’ And my head exploded and I ran around the house yelling: ‘My gosh, my gosh.’”
“It was surreal, to say the least, to see Tecumseh’s face, but to hear my voice come out of that,” Dillon said.
While the franchise has always had indigenous leaders, starting with Montezuma of the Aztecs in the original 1991 game, Meier said game developers at the time were looking for familiar figures without much thought into the weight of history. Playable characters in that game included former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), whose totalitarian regimes were still in many people’s memory.
“We never realized people would take it as seriously as they do,” Meier said. “We always kind of felt: ‘Here’s a way that you can change history.’ Maybe we can make Stalin a good guy, but that might have been stretching things a little too far.”
“We learned a lot as time went on,” he added.
The seventh edition, due out in February next year, would for the first time do away with barbarians — or at least no longer use that term for hostile characters that are not part of a playable civilization. Players can instead create diplomatic relations with them.
As the game’s audience expanded beyond the US and Europe, with more than 70 million games sold worldwide, so too did players want their societies or heritage reflected. More recent editions include themed music and spoken languages from dozens of playable civilizations, from Maori of New Zealand to Mapuche of South America.
“It is now a badge of honor for a nation to be included in Civilization,” Meier said. “We’ve been lobbied by different countries, et cetera.”
That is not to say everyone has been happy about their inclusion in a game centered around settling land and exploiting resources. Civilization is one of the pioneers of the genre known as 4X — for “explore, expand, exploit and exterminate.”
After the franchise added a 19th-century Cree leader to its gameplay in 2018, a prominent Cree leader complained to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp that it “perpetuates this myth that First Nations had similar values that the colonial culture has, and that is one of conquering other peoples and accessing their land. That is totally not in concert with our traditional ways and worldview.”
One of the game’s two resident historians, Andrew Johnson, said that the studio wanted to make Tecumseh a playable leader, but after reaching out to some academics, “we were told repeatedly: ‘No, this is a really bad idea, and nobody’s going to sign off on this.’”
Johnson suggested reaching out to Shawnee leaders directly to ask what they think and how it could help them.
“I think so often you get people assuming that representation in Civ is a reward of some sort. It’s not,” said Johnson, who is also an anthropologist who studies Southeast Asia.
“This is a company and we’re selling a product and we’re using an image and likeness to make a profit. And getting your ‘civ’ in Civilization doesn’t really help you very much if you’re struggling to preserve your culture,” Johnson said.
The game studio and the tribal nation decided on a partnership that would help Shawnee preserve and expand some of that culture, particularly language.
Chief Barnes said the tribe was in dire need of resources for language education and creating dialogue for a Shawnee civilization of the future was another way to help revitalize their language.
“Firaxis was asking questions about language we never would have thought to ask,” Barnes said last month at the opening of a new language education center in northeastern Oklahoma.
Barnes has not had a chance to play the new version of the game yet, but he is already imaging the future he can build virtually, as well as how doing so will inspire other Shawnee gamers.
“What I do know is that with the efforts we’re making here today, I expect Shawnee to be spoken in 2500,” Barnes said.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
RATIONING: The proposal would give the Trump administration ample leverage to negotiate investments in the US as it decides how many chips to give each country US officials are debating a new regulatory framework for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) chips and are considering requiring foreign nations to invest in US AI data centers or security guarantees as a condition for granting exports of 200,000 chips or more, according to a document seen by Reuters. The rules are not yet final and could change. They would be the first attempt to regulate the flow of AI chips to US allies and partners since US President Donald Trump’s administration said it rescinded its predecessor’s so-called AI diffusion rules. Those rules sought to keep a significant amount of AI
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
RSS