The Ethics of Indigenous Storytelling: Using the Torque Game Engine to Support Australian Aboriginal Cultural Heritage

The Ethics of Indigenous Storytelling examines how the Digital Songlines (DSL) project, an ACID initiative, applies the Torque Game Engine to help Australian Aboriginal communities record, share, and teach their cultural heritage through culturally sensitive three-dimensional virtual landscapes. The work argues that heritage technology can be built around community ownership rather than external authority, and it positions its contribution as distinct from typical heritage applications because it models organic, non-orthogonal "country" environments instead of built structures. The framework rests on accurate regional authenticity in flora, fauna, artwork, and story content, a tiered content-layering model, and cyclical consultation with custodians, with limited budgets and the sensitivity of sacred knowledge acknowledged as ongoing constraints.

The development process is iterative and community-led, moving through consultation, on-site fieldwork, and repeated community authentication before any project is finalised. Evaluation with Aboriginal children and adults produced a notable finding: younger children, around preschool and early primary age, initially struggled with navigation and expected quest-based gameplay, while older participants valued the tool's capacity to bring tribal stories, traditions, and languages to life for transmission to the next generation. These results point to the need for age-appropriate design alongside cultural fidelity.

The paper concludes with protocols for Indigenous cultural knowledge that centre community ownership and copyright, require Traditional Owner approval at every production stage, and mandate fair payment and royalties. Its reference base, drawn from roughly 1997 to 2006, includes Gibbons et al.'s 2006 work on authentic aural experience in the Digital Songlines Game Engine and the ATSILS Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services, underscoring a sustained emphasis on Indigenous cultural protocols within the broader field of virtual heritage and digital preservation.