Leveraging Games in the Fight to Protect Local Cultures

[Music] welcome where this session as you see is leveraging games in the fight to protect local cultures my name is kate edwards i'm the executive director of the global game jam organization and i've been around the industry for many many years as a geographer doing culturalization work so this topic not only dovetails very closely to my heart with little game jam but also with my work uh in the industry all these years um so as we get started though i'd like to the uh the illustrious panel because uh who's the real focal point here to introduce themselves we this project was basically a combination as you will hear of of the us state department um or department of state however you want to say it and the global game jam and of course the team who's here representing the winning team for this project so

and we'll get into of course the details about what this was all about and what we uh what the whole vision for this was but first let's have some introductions so if you want to start with catherine sure um yeah good morning everyone thank you so much for being here i'm catherine foster i'm the program director for the cultural antiquities task force i'm also the executive director of the cultural heritage coordinating committee at the us department of state in washington thanks catherine and i'm paul fisher i'm a senior program officer also with the cultural antiquities task force mostly i back up katherine and then victor yep i'm a victor bankler i'm a ceo of a small in the studio named another team from sweden together with vanier and i'm also a lecturer at the university of huevda where i teach game design and game development hey i'm vania castano i work together

with the student game arena as event coordinator and i'm the creative director of another team so i work with victor i am mateo alaiza i'm from peru i'm a lecturer in the university of lima i am also ceo with my brother in hermanos baja a game development studio and i'm my old and i also work as a game director in leap game studios hi hey thanks for coming my name is joaquin concha i'm a game developer for carpaccia a little studio in lima great well thank you um so just so for in case people don't know what the global game jam is i feel obligated to let you know so the global game jam is the world's largest game creation event that happens every january or thereabouts usually at the end of january it's been around since 2008 so there's been 14 editions including during covid where we had to make it a virtual edition but our mission statement is to empower individuals worldwide to learn

experiment and create together through the medium of games it's really what it's all about the global game jam is not a competition it is an educational and collaborative exercise and we're really proud of the fact that we can point to many people in this industry who will you know basically tell us that the global game jam is where they started their path on their career in the game industry and so um our whole mission really then is to emphasize the cultures of different about the jammers all around the world i mean just to give you a sense of the scale right before the pandemic which was our largest event in 2020 we had about just about 49 000 people in 118 countries at 935 live sites produce about 9 600 games in one weekend a lot of games and and of course it's all around a single theme because we launch with a single theme like this year's theme for the jam was duality last year last year's theme was lost and found and so we always create a theme that is some

sufficiently generic so that it can be you know it can work both culturally and linguistically around the world and it's just utterly fascinating to see the interpretations of all this you know from across all these different cultures and and jammers and to see what uh you know see what they come up with with these themes so um so the one of the things that we do in the global game jam other than the huge event that we do in january we also have a smaller event in the summer called gtj next which is for young younger people usually 12 to 18 year olds because we obviously want to get the next generation coming up into the game industry into game development but we also do partner jams which is really where the cultural heritage jam comes in so throughout the rest of the year other than january or in the summer we try and come up with events that are going to be interesting for our community that'll engage them on different topics sometimes it's focused on a certain technology a company might want to try out but then sometimes it might be a certain theme which is really how you know our partnership with the us department of state started um around

this particular uh jam that we that we came up with so um so we want to talk then about how this came about the cultural heritage game jam initiative which was this partnership that started between us and the us department of state so do you want to describe yeah sure i mean maybe i'll start a little bit with background on our office the cultural heritage center in the department of state which has a really unique mission to that we conduct on behalf of the american people and which really benefits people around the world and we work with international partners cultural heritage professionals and engaged communities worldwide to protect and preserve cultural heritage in all its diversity we foster connections between cultural heritage professionals and institutions and their international counterparts we support preservation efforts

to protect heritage from the impact of deterioration natural disasters and other causes by supporting preservation projects around the world and we protect heritage from theft looting trafficking and destruction through constant collaboration with partner governments and law enforcement officials and you know while our efforts are focused on the unique characteristics of the culturally significant you know monuments and sites as well as intangible heritage practices this work really depends on partnerships and adopting technologies that can enhance our efforts and you know in that vein i really can't think of a better avenue to explore than game developers and and this conference so every year gdc brings the international game development community together to exchange ideas to solve problems and

really shape the future of the industry and that's exactly what you know we were hoping to achieve through through the this first ever cultural heritage game jam competition that happened in november of last year and you know this innovative kind of global initiative invited individuals and teams of gamers to exchange ideas to ask you know tough questions and to develop prototype games to really raise awareness of cultural heritage protection among you know new audiences at least new to us so by by expanding this circle of awareness those of us who work to preserve cultural heritage and whether that's governments or civil society or you know engaged individuals you know we really gain new allies in the shared responsibility of helping communities kind of safeguard these artifacts these monuments and practices of of their past

and you know i'm really proud to say that the cultural heritage game jam exceeded our expectations like greatly so you know we attracted over 850 participants from more than 70 countries around the world and we're very excited about the potential of the 116 games that were created for this jam like the potential that they have to reach new audiences and people to spark new ideas around cultural heritage preservation and really to inspire action in in the real world to protect and preserve cultural heritage so it's a little bit of background about our work and the jam itself i want to turn it over now to my colleague paul fisher to add a bit more kind of context to the work that we do on the cultural antiquities task force thanks catherine and and thank you to all of you for showing up here today i want to tell you a story we're all gathered here at gdc

because we're all storytellers we're the collection of stories that we tell about ourselves the myths the epics that we tell about ourselves as individuals as organizations as nations and as one planet protecting these stories as they're represented intangible cultural heritage of peoples around the world so that future generations can study learn from and be inspired by that cultural heritage is the work of katherine and i's team the cultural antiquities task force the task force and our six federal agencies including the department of homeland security and the department of justice work to disrupt illicit trafficking of cultural heritage by promoting close law enforcement coordination training and building the capacity of foreign law enforcement and heritage managers to protect and preserve sites objects and the stories they tell

so we collaborate with partners on public education and outreach as crime prevention this is where the game jam and all of our storytellers come in the task force wanted to use the medium of games for a couple of reasons to raise awareness about the threats to cultural heritage from looting theft trafficking and destruction to build understanding about the importance of cultural heritage within communities to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and dialogue around cultural heritage protection and to develop new and innovative tools and solutions to protect cultural heritage from various risks including climate change so the games developed for the jam have not only inspired us but countless others around the world who now have a newfound appreciation for cultural heritage

for the threats it faces from looting and trafficking and the positive role that games can play in telling the stories of our past for the future so now let me tell you one particular story about the gilgamesh dream tablet which i hope will illuminate what it is that we do because playing 116 video games is not our normal fare so the story of gilgamesh a demigod and his dreams of adventure were inscribed into a clay tablet more than 3 500 years ago the tablet is originally from iraq and was exported from that country without permission in 2003 an antiquities dealer in the united states bought it and then created a fake ownership history for the tablet before selling it on the tablet changed hands many times before ultimately ending up in a museum

not the smithsonian not far from where catherine and i work in washington dc so this is where the cultural antiquities task force comes in since 2004 the cultural antiquities task force has coordinated with federal law enforcement agencies foreign partners and interpol to disrupt the theft looting vandalism and trafficking of cultural heritage organized crime syndicates including terrorists steal loot and illegally export objects like the gilgamesh dream tablet and sell these national treasures to dealers and collectors around the world through pillage objects are hastily and unscientifically removed from their archaeological contacts sometimes destroying whole sites in the process and thus depriving us of vital information for understanding past societies which then goes on to inspire

all of our gamers often the trafficked objects find their way into private collections never to be seen again in the case of the gilgamesh dream tablet i have good news in 2019 it was seized by u.s law enforcement and last year it finally made its long journey home and returned to the people of iraq so that's the cultural antiquities task force i'm going to hand it back over to kate who will tell us hopefully about our judging process yes so well i do have one question though i don't know if you remember but when we started this partnership and i remember in our first conversation and they approached uh you know the global game jam like let's do this and i said do you do you really want to partner with the industry that created tomb raider and has indiana jones and things like that and um so i i'm just curious really quick like what drew you to games specifically is like a medium to to like

really you know help with this issue yeah i mean games of course are are a very unique and powerful medium and you know first and foremost we we really wanted to democratize our problem solving you know we can do all the strategizing in the world internally with the task force but when you open that up and you allow other engaged partners to come in and especially um in the game dev community you know you can come up with um problem solving that you know solutions that we couldn't even dream of um but that all of you you know have this unique perspective too to offer um games also of course like bolster innovation you know you think of all the user driven experiences and interfaces of course ai vr ar all of those technologies um could be leveraged in in our efforts to protect and preserve heritage

um as paul has already kind of alluded to the storytelling aspect of of games that that all of you are aware of you know we can really convey these narratives and complex ideas in ways that are not kind of preachy they're experiential for the players you know to kind of actually play through scenarios play through histories and the lives of other people that they couldn't have kind of imagined or experienced in any other way short of you know actually going and visiting these places and living with people and it's through that real immersive experience that you can begin to kind of build mutual understanding build that empathy for people and in in the terms of trafficking i mean so many lives are affected on the ground if you think of you know cultural objects that are important to

your your ethnic or religious community if something is taken away from your church from your mosque for example synagogue that doesn't allow you to participate in your religion anymore because those objects are gone it's you can imagine how detrimental that is to your your being you know your your day-to-day and what your community identifies itself with and so being able to tell that story and feel that emotion that loss that communities have when their cultural objects are kind of stolen away from them is something i think you know that games are uniquely suited to to build on and then of course um just meeting people where they are you know you've all you know all know the statistics how many gamers there are out there like that is where people are spending their time and so um you know we want to meet people where they are in a medium that they're comfortable with and so games

more than movies even or any other medium like kind of rise to the top for us in terms of a space that we could really engage and and the game dev community seems to be really game pun intended um for for collaborating and so yeah that's why we were looking to games awesome well um i'm sure people might be curious about like what came out of the game jam so i'm going to show you a uh a little highlight reel here [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause]

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mean really and of course that's just a small sample of the 116 games that we received it's just the diversity of not only the game play the game types the cultures being represented in the geographic diversity was just phenomenal and i think it really surpassed all of our expectations um and to just talk a little bit about the judging process of course once we have these 116 games um the group of us between the the us department of state and the global game jam we basically had to get together and and judge the games very quickly all right we had a very small window to make this happen but we had our criteria that we set up played all the games um we went through every single one of the games and um had a great time doing it and then we did some uh there were some prizes attached to the to the games and so you could see here we had like um we had uh what was that was the uh i can't read that but the yeah best audio the accessible design um best use of educational design

principles the best art and best engaging desiring or most engaging design um so we had a lot of games that just did a fantastic job it was really difficult to pick like the overall winner but um we did eventually decide upon the overall winner um which was the game purumachu um which yes so um one of the great pleasures that we had is that as the people you know organizing this event was uh to bring the team here to gdc to talk about their work because really they are the stars of this session and the amazing work that they did on their game and so um what we want to do then is turn it over to the team to talk about the process they went through and their engagement with this jam and um you tell me i can show the video of the game if you want or do you want to uh speak a little first you want to start with the video i think

okay well let's you saw a brief sniff snippet of it in the highlights reel but let's uh we'll show you some gameplay this here is cut so it's uh show three different pieces from the game this is uh quite early when you find one of the first artifacts in the rainforest close today [Music] it's our protagonist right there and we communicate through these bubbles that gives us insight into her thoughts that changes throughout the game she encounters cultural heritage and i don't know if you notice but the prompt that appears every time you

approach an object changes from take to steel and that sort of reflects how her own attitude towards what she's doing [Music] and this is the moment when she faces the pure macho with which is a mummy from the chachapura culture and this is at the very end when she's climbing uh the mountain uh to reach the actual spot of the permacho where they are found what's the name of the mountain tiger mountain uh it's where actually get the chataboya culture will bury their death

up in the mountains yeah we went that side just for you to have the view yeah plus [Music] [Applause] so maybe i think i can start introducing a little bit of our team we are actually 11 people yeah us four we actually have three more people in the audience which is pablo carrillo between and gabrielle eliza i

don't know if you wanna yeah we have some people that couldn't make it here in between those naheed who has our fantastic programmer she's from iran and she couldn't actually have the visa to come here and and we actually come from like two three actually different universities uh two universities in peru universidad de lima and universidad catolica which is where gabriel works and there they're actually a funding for six months more of uh purumachu they are very excited about where we can take this game to and we have the university in kotte where victor is a lecturer and actually where i also studied in the serious game master and for example we also have been working with some institutions i think mateo knows a little bit more about this

yeah we have worked with many organizations from peru that work in two different fields one is the protection of the nature field and it's really important because many of the references of the plants we use are not just okay i'm going to make a generic type of jungle that many times we see that on video games but we try to make a unique identity of django precisely the opposite to the reference of indiana jones yeah like gabriela has been working with rangers from nature parks like manu and tambo bata and matses so he has like a lot of detail into what they looked like botanical knowledge yeah and the other organization we we have talked with and actually uh is the second part of the help we are re receiving but also giving is uh with a former director of the chachapoya's region that is in the north of peru in the jungle region

and she was a former ministry of culture and now she runs the the this museum and we're going to donate the game for the whole region actually and for the museum too and well she has helped us a lot with many things about information because it's really hard to get it was really hard to get to certain things about a game touching a culture that it's not as well known as many others in peru well i'll show um you also included some slides that show some of the inspiration between the the actual cultural objects which you see on the right and then how it was represented oh yeah so this just shows uh you saw this in the video before this is um actually a textile used for wrapping uh the mummies in there or it was used in this church civilization and that's one of the first sort of artifacts for a

culture that you encounter and uh here you shamelessly treat it like indian neons would have just you grab it and put it in your backpack and before you start questioning yourself oh yeah that's up in the mountain where actually the bodies are well buried those are the actual matches actually they are potteries so there is a a a very interesting fact about why we chose this culture and not another one like any game that is fighting against the protection of any culture it's important so what's the criteria that you are going to use to to choose which one so one of the we got two two strong arguments that are very different one is in peru the most well-known culture is inca culture but and chechapoya it's a culture that that there's not much information about them and not too many people

know about this culture and what is really important of this is that people there there's still people of that region that identifies with this culture but there are there is not too many too much material that you can find about it so in in a way uh making games about ancient cultures and it's not only about it's not only about talking history and the past but it's also a way of rethinking the future with new symbols with new ways of seeing them and new ways of having a way of relate to to something that something that existed and has transformed uh with with with time yeah that's again a family of mummies on at the side of the tiger mountain all these contain mummies they are as materials they are pottery yeah huge you can see the skulls on the top of their heads yeah that's a

human skull so then you realize how big they are in comparison for us what it was really interesting is that many times when you talk about the culture it's really hard to make people get related to it so for example at the beginning we we we weren't going to do a purumachu project when we were just discussing what we're going to do we wanted to do a inca bridge this is really interesting because this bridge is made every single year by farmers and it's made with ropes but we thought it was really it was a really important subject but at the same time it was going to be really hard to people to relate to to to an object as a bridge it's more abstract especially if you're if you're trying to make people connect to something that they are not related even more if a a culture that it's not well known so for us put on matchus had this another special argument that is literally the purumachu is a person

and even so many for our accidental influence when we see maybe these drawings we see a dead body and we think oh this is disgusting this is horrible no but and what it's really interesting about the culture is that actually these people see them as their ancestors so that's a great way of transforming a conception that normally it's not criticized or rethinked and we thought this is a way of making a new relation to what what really means to have ancestry and true cultural heritage to where you have come from or or or or else no so so we thought this was uh like a really strong point to make a connection between our main character and on the relation that we wanted to work with him yeah it was very important for us that the game was like could show something that everyone can relate to especially because in our own

team we didn't have only peruvians we had like swedish and iranians so it was very important that you could see what it goes happening in the game and relate and yeah yeah we try to to to make the team one so we chose the the purumachu like an idea we can't develop so everybody can understand what we want to make just clarify what we're seeing in the picture there so that's the mommy and our gabrielle's drawing of the uh the mummy and then you see the smash pur macho uh it's uh looters that have crushed the purumacho and stolen mummies because those uh are actually subject of looting well i'm curious in in this process when you went through the research um obviously you mentioned like talking some to some of the experts in the in the region especially people representing that particular cultural

group i'm wondering like was there anything that you learned that was like like you just had no idea like very surprising to you well actually yeah of course like when you do research things get more complex and complex that's the beauty of it so actually what we knew at the beginning was that there was only one type of furumachu then when i did the research there were like seven types of food and matches and all and actually there was the region was influenced by the incas that were an immense empire and uh well there were there were matches incas with mixed with chachapoya's culture also true i learned a lot about the dangers of cultural theft because this this is a very particular thing that happened when i was talking with this archaeologist uh she she she was very happy that we were doing this project etc but she was she was already frustrated when we were doing the project and i couldn't

understand why and the thing is like she kept telling me stories about how uh everyone goes takes takes pieces no one respects like the space where the pieces are and this is an immense danger because cultures like this uh really really really uh really there are not too many too much information about an any intervention of any person that is not on a specialist creates enormous danger and also this is one of the little things i learned but i learned much more but i don't want to take the mic and yeah um well one another thing too i'm curious this is kind of a question for everybody so now the game's done well i mean it's it's i mean it's been you know the at least the first version of it's done um where do you where do you want this to go from here i guess i'm asking both the team like what do you hope to see with this particular game and then also in general with this

con this whole effort like where do you see it going from here well we have used a new version for the adc now so we are keep working in the game uh like matteo said we will donate this to to the museum so we people can understand in another way how this could is so that's where we are working we we probably have like six months and at least for continuing to work into this game and also there are no many there's not too many examples of games like this in latin america this is really important because for us trying to find funding for the project that is also extremely hard in latin america we were lucky that i and my brother were and victor our professors helps to build a new perspective of what games can can do and that we're really grateful to be here because um this gives really a big horizon of how how far a game that has this type of aim

can can go no yeah i feel that the university specialty in peru have been very excited about this project like seeing this culture uplifted and they're excited about seeing where it goes and what else can we teach with this type of tools yeah and i i want to plus up uh what matteo just said a little bit ago you know for us when we were thinking about our learning objectives what mateo just said you know it brings this huge smile to my face and it's like the monitoring and evaluation right there you know that he said you know he gained this uh appreciation for the nuance between different types of buddha macho and then also you know learned about these different threats to cultural heritage from theft looting trafficking and destruction um and so that that work of fostering respect and telling those stories through games like i don't know this is exactly what we're hoping for and i'm just so overjoyed that you know that's what came

out in the game um can i ask them a question [Laughter] so you know in the game i okay so this is how i interpreted it that the puran machu washed down from the mountains because of increased rainfall because of climate change is is that how you were you know conceiving of the risks from from climate change to cultural heritage in the game yeah right uh that's we really wanted to touch on climate change as a part of this because uh not all uh um cultural heritage destruction is man-made uh of course no matter the course we have the power to protect it still so um we want to touch on that as well and hopefully we can um give a little bit more focus to it so it's it doesn't have to be a question in the future but it's clearly um put some spotlight on the

issue of uh called er sorry um climate change well great well i think um we've got about 10 minutes or so left and what i'm going to leave you with this link because the games are all up on the cultural heritage game jam site on itch io so i really encourage people take a snapshot of that go to the link play the games i mean all 116 games are there including including pro and machu so uh we hope you go enjoy that and in the meantime while we're still here if anyone has any questions for the panel here i mean please uh come up to the mic i think there's a mic there right and uh you know feel free to ask some questions [Applause] hi everybody thank you this was a really good talk i'm actually a local organizer for a global game jam here in san francisco

yay one of my questions is like um i think that or well okay beginnings opinion the next part is the question related to the opinion one of my opinions is that like if more people get to make games we get to get more of these different perspectives and different cultures and whenever i run game jams uh like it's more or less the same people who kind of come all the time and i would like to have more different kinds of people aside from the the usual like yeah they usually are great then you know they can support the new people and stuff um i i don't i'm not really sure how to make make these kinds of things more accessible and available because a lot of the ways that we advertise these things so it's all on the internet but a lot of people don't have internet or don't have good internet connection or don't even have computers or access especially if we're talking about like protecting local cultures and heritage there's lots of people like for example

in the remote regions of the philippines or something like that um how can we make stuff like these more accessible so they can make games and they can collaborate with us and do all these cool things thank you that's all thank you i think it was a very global game jam type of question no well i'm happy to well i can give you an example and i think to your to your question a lot of times what we have to do is is you know we have to be the ones to reach out and make that happen and help facilitate that interaction so one really good example i can give you is um i participated a few years ago in the sami game jam up in northern finland so we were up there in utsuyoki above the arctic circle where this indigenous sami people live um which um you know across the world they're across the whole region finland sweden in norway and what we did is we basically there was teams of game developers who went up there and we spent a lot of time interacting with

people from the community and listening to their stories and talking with them we also did tradition traditional gatherings that they showed us like outside and it was -40 so it was it was cold but um but it was it was an amazing experience so basically a lot of listening tons of listening in you know facilitating that communication between the the game developers and the community and then the game jam actually you know was about taking their stories and basically putting that into game form basically but with the community kind of looking over their shoulder there were some people in the community who had the development skills so they participated as well but was really a way to try and both be there as an educational forum for game development but also see how can the game developers be good listeners and see what if they're going to make games about other cultures then how do they do it right you know and a lot of that comes down to like exactly what they did where you're interacting with that culture and communicating with them um just like i worked on the game never alone and and that game was really about that entire game everything in that game

every piece of content was approved by the the inuit people you know as they were they were basically doing the creative direction the games development team was basically facilitating just the technical part of it and to me it's like that when we want to do things like highlighting uh cultural heritage that's really to me the the way you do it but to get more people in those communities developing or that's that's a whole nother educational outreach piece which i know from global game channel that's part of why we exist to try and make that happen but you're right there's a huge socio-economic disparity in terms of internet access hardware access all these other things it's a bigger problem um you know that's sometimes harder to achieve so but yeah there's but so a lot of times there's sometimes where you actually people bring the equipment to the community and you know have a longer longer term commitment to doing education there but yeah it's unfortunately that's not the norm yet but i've seen good examples of it so far so yes hi

um what are your thoughts about the current state of uh localization tools for different languages and uh how they could be improved all right um what's the what's the state of uh localization tools well my my thought comes from the fact that i was looking at a lot of these games and nursing a lot of them are in english um and i am wondering i would imagine that at least some of the languages aren't supported in unicode at least not to a sufficient extent um i don't know if that's a problem you ran into personally but in terms of trying to localize games into you know the parent culture's language yeah better than difficult we're going to run that problem ourselves because we want to localize this for uh in a quechua language which is the language that is spoken in the undies of peru and i don't think

we know how to do that in a good way yet but i think what we'll have to do is just find someone who can do it for us who is not an official localizer but someone who can speak ketchup well and stuff and that that's very inconvenient if you would like to do that in a large scale like for a whole industry right um so what how the state is is like is in development i guess localizing is need to be evolved and and maybe it's hard to find incentive for that always and that's why it is like this now but when it comes to these sort of things it's very important that we do it either way yeah and i think we will actually have that help from the organizations that we're working on so maybe if you want to use like some smaller language you should reach out to some smaller organizations that are actually working with that i think that's a good idea thank you

there's also an opportunity that dawns on me about you know there's a lot of groups out there and governments who support them to to document and preserve kind of dying languages and less well-known languages so there's maybe an opportunity for games like that to kind of merge the two initiatives and and you'll be reaching goals you know each other's goals by not only kind of documenting and preserving the the language itself um just you know as as a standalone project but also incorporating those languages into your games as as a way to preserve and also celebrate you know those less well-known languages so there's definitely an opportunity there yeah i might add as well that it was very hard for us because we wanted to use it would have been great if we could have used some language uh like the local language in the game already but since none of us um are descendants of the church not even

me and it we decided that for example with the audio and the the audio the music is inspired by local medicinal music but we decided immediately that we wouldn't try to represent any voices in the music as chanting often comes with this type of music and if anyone of us would try to do chanting from a culture that is not ours that would be problematic and so in that way we felt a little bit limited and we had to find a way to go around that while still drawing inspiration from the culture that we were representing hi uh wonderful games you guys um i was just wondering what the research process looked like for making this game and what kind of sources that you relied on or maybe uh what kind of sources were

out there that you could find thank you well uh the the research is on our archaeological and historical research and i think this is this is an uh a very interesting question because many times when when you hear about okay let's do a historical game or a cultural heritage game sounds like sometimes okay it has to be a game so it has to be fun but also you have to fill the other person with information no so there is a there's a big challenge of the balance between how you you deal with information the person that it's playing is really going to take and how is going to take it like for example if i put all of the names of the plants probably no one is going to remember them no even more so for a game like this no so in those terms we we really thought that um we really had to make all the

investigation and that research in order to put these elements in the game just to give you a glimpse and a feeling that you were really seeing something that is different not only because you have an artist that does a different art style but also because it truly comes from a different reference the jungle of india is not the same as the one from peru and the one from brazil and et cetera et cetera no so this is a very big element in the in the concept and our department and this is related to another idea that it's really strong for us and in the game of course that it's trying to think about how how do you deliver a message to a player because um we come here and we explain the project no but how how does a game that it's it's dealing with cultural heritage uh giving you a message that is not a moral message for example let's say okay it's about you for you to steal pieces it's really easy for anyone to make a game that gives you these limitations but the

the hard thing is how do you make the person like feel a true connection to this idea so we aimed for the artistical one and uh for us uh the game is it's about uh a person that is actually trying to save the pieces at the beginning of the exploration in the map and then he went he wants to take them the the investigation told us the purumachus are in the mountains so that's a fact but in the sense of the message and more in a metaphorical way even that i think it's always interesting to have as an extra layer in games and what you're doing is the process of stealing and then realizing that you have done wrong so going up to the mountain is is in a way the element of investigation but also a metaphorical sense of you have done wrong you have to yeah you have to do retribution no one is telling you you're you're just

doing this as an act so i think investigation comes the true balance of investigation because you can die in a pool of information is what you choose in order to make a true meaning and and how can that meaning be a metaphor that accompanies the mechanics the narrative that are more like the structural more direct part many players are used to feel and and and know so we think that that element sometimes flips like uh uh a post-months card from under under the under your door and and we think that that really really helps to make that um extra element of maybe you didn't learned a lot about chachapoya's culture but you get a feeling of oh this is important and that's that's the first piece of sound that really we think let's let the games change

hi um so i was wondering if there were any people that you talked to in your research that gave you information that made you decide you needed to change something fundamental about your game i noticed you talking about the archaeologist who was expressing frustration with the fact that people were just going out and damaging these sites who didn't know what they were doing i really appreciated the change from take to steel because it's something people don't think about especially in how these uh collection of artifacts is represented in most games so i was just wondering if there was something that came up in your research be it with archaeologists or locals who were familiar with the culture that made you decide to change a fundamental direction of some aspect of your game uh no we didn't it didn't happen that but when we talked with the archaeologist she was really worried about making a game that in one moment the player is

stealing uh but but the the challenge is you have to give that three for us it was you have to give that freedom to the player in order to realize the damage that that means no also many people that have the the information you need for a game they don't know about video games and the power that they have so it's a really delicate balance and depending on the context you are that that gets stronger uh so in peru people many people sadly see video games still as something of only that are only entertainment no so but no we didn't got any in any of those challenges hi this has been really great um i was wondering if there was any uh suggestions or ways for people to get involved with making more games like this happen and like more just like um yeah or organizations i can contribute to directly or indirectly to make this happen more i guess um yeah i guess uh

what was the question how to engage in making these type of games like what context or that way or also just existing organizations that i could you know help to so that we could get more um developers out there who can tell their unique stories of their cultures or that kind of things even if if i personally can't facilitate that i guess games for change would be a nice forum for that you can also come to sweden and study my program serious games development at the oklahoma university [Applause] in the context of peru there are no organizations but that's also interesting because what happens if you are you have that interest and that you don't find them someone has to take charge of it maybe you're not going to be the the the best maybe you're not going to be games for a change but you're going to learn in the process that's one of the richness of those empty spaces that someone can take

that drum that crown and fight for it no so that's what we're trying to do maybe it's you yeah it's you we need you yeah we we certainly hoped that one outcome of the game jam was to inspire others to do similar cultural heritage game jams you know other organizers whether it be you know on the local country level or regional level we certainly we the us government certainly could not have done this alone like it certainly took working with a trusted partner like the global game jam in order to make it happen so there's definitely room for more kind of public private um partnerships and collaboration or you know motivated people in in the dev community who like to organize these jams to go out you know go forth

and have your own cultural heritage um game jams you know in the future so and uh just one thing i would add to that is that i think you know base the comments uh building on those comments is that you know all it was really was just picking the theme you know because like every global game jam has a theme and every jam that we do whether it's a partner event or the january event it has a theme and most jams that i know of today they do this similar now you know whether it's at a school or a company or whatever and so all all it really has to start with is having the the will to say you know what this jam is going to be about representing our cultural heritage so that's what the theme is going to be this year or this month or whatever it is because i know some organizations especially schools tend to jam like a lot but all around the world that's one of the things i'm hoping and i think it's probably logical that it would start at universities is that hey you know this you know make a jam make a game about your cultural heritage either your personal heritage or generally of the the region that you're in and and i

think that's really all it takes to kind of get that moving in that direction and we just haven't seen that happen very much because a lot of jams just kind of pick sort of like global game jam we pick a generic theme but we do that because it's our jam is across so many cultures so and i think that i think with that we're we're done so yeah thank you so thank you for coming thank you for coming [Music] you