Video Games in Dialogue With Ancestral Knowledge, From Ritual to Interactive Music
How can video games enter into dialogue with ancestral knowledge and oral tradition? This talk brings together Isabelle Arvers and Ezéchiel Sene-Boileau around that question, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas.In 2019, to celebrate two decades of curating art and video games, Isabelle Arvers embarked on the Art & Games World Tour: seventeen countries of the Souths, nearly 300 artists and game designers interviewed, six exhibitions curated. Her doctoral research, Decolonizing Art & Video Games, shows how independent creators use games to reclaim their own narratives, representations and cosmogonies, and to imagine counter-fictions from the margins. It resulted in a Cartography of Queer, Feminist and Decolonial Art and Games of some 150 works.She then presents Aux Futurs Ancestraux (Towards Ancestral Futures), created in Benin with Vodún priests and guardians of knowledge, young artists and game developers: film-games and an immersive game built from rituals, chants and 3D scans of sacred places, where listening and slowness replace conquest.The talk closes with Ezéchiel Sene-Boileau, a game audio designer. His research asks how music from various cultures can work as a reward in games. It guides players toward what has value, beyond points or currency. He introduces Tension Engine, an adaptive music system built from that research: the score reacts in real time to everything the player does. He reworked the recordings made in Benin into one of the Engine's musical rewards. Together, they show how a game, films, a soundscape and a documentary can speak to the same questions from different angles.
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