Everyone regularly reading this blog knows that pnea is the gamer and explorer of these virtual worlds. I have very very low gaming skills, experience and knowledge relating to these spaces, the way devs make assemble and construct these games. So I am always grateful when someone is guiding me via their vast experience, POW, hard-gained wisdom. One can is hard pressed to at least try inhabit subjectivities and even worlds this way without ignoring the fact that one is led, guided. These videos by Super Bunnyhop are a revelation in that particular sense. Thanks to Alin Rautoiu I came across them, and well, I think they somehow managed to give me another kick and start making appreciate more the variety of games out there, or the shifts that animate game development. Probably these are not only some of my favorite gamers videos but YT youtuber videos per se in general! Videos and games that cross easily over into astronomy, anthropology or climatology, with various critical insights that do not diminish but enhance our constant delight. I love to be introduced this way to larger things.
This one is about an indigenous game called Umurangi Generation inspired by NGE. The game takes the whole fury about our current world, about the feeling of a lack of agency and the way everything gets subsumed under capitalism, transforming a shooter into a camera shooting exercise of journalistic proportions where the maori- developer included several ‘alien’ invasions, one worse than the last. But this is only the teaser towards a really a romp through the recent switch from UFO to UAP terminology and the way Pentagon and US conservatives such as Rubio are framing the narrative in regards to these recently released videos branding them as “threats”. There is not just a inkling of militarism and a possible investment incentive to up the ante of the military-industrial complex whenever such unexplained are branded as “threats”.
Invasions are a particular keyword favorite of mine – and there is always some reverse victimization involved. The invader is almost always – feeling invaded, very rarely acknowledging how our world has been shaped by migration routes or brutal gunboat colonialism. The European white male human, even if we take let us say Bram Stoker’s 1890s Dracula as the most obvious example – has deemed the immigrant from Eastern Europe as disease ridden and ‘foreign’, and a vampiric threat to women. My particular focus is about how biological invasions or what we call invasive species, tends to paste over these ravages of colonial and global capitalist histories, the way plants or animals were introduced, or have escaped introduction into new areas, new lands. This index of human ‘invasiveness’ – is a darling of the far right, and almost all current ethnopolitcs of the “the long counter-revolution” (in McKenzie Wark‘s terms) tends to collate dehumanizing, invasive swarming attributes to the immigrants coming from war-torn and climate crises affected areas. When this happens, most of the invasiveness of the Western powers and destabilizing economic effects are being muffled or skipped. Radical UFOlogy (in the sene of Dante Minazolli or MIR Men in Red collective) acts like a counter-strategy, declassifying such attempts at weaponzing and militarizing contact with other civilizations. It is very important to also see how first contact as cargo cults lies at the core of paleoastronautic contact narratives or how ‘advanced civilization’ is equated with a Western history steeped in exploitation of resources and the enslavement of others.
The colonial ghosts, they are not ghosts and not far away, since indigenous resistance is still at the forefront of resisting big oil and the depredation of capitalism. Extraterrestrial or exobiological that does not take this into account will end up on the poor side of an imagination that sees everything in terms of outside danger, alien invasions or colonizing ancient aliens. Most of the time we are the threat, and so any future contact with Mars will have to abide to Antarctica type of no-contact measures or even more stricter. Even as Bunnyhop mentions, discussions about parietal Aborigine art from Australia that presumably registers such paleo contact tend to ignore the way contact with the recent past white ‘alien’ invaders wielding foreign technologies also got registered. Since its inception science fiction’s emergence as a modern genre remains unthinkable outside the history of colonization and exploitation (see John Rieder) of others by European powers. Afrofuturism is at the forefront taking this history of slavery and exploitation and remaking it into something else, and of terming UFO abductions precisely in terms of slaveship Atlatic Trade abductions. It is easy to forget the way ‘colonization’ and space colonization tends to overlap for that matter or the terrestrial way we imagine aliens as alien ‘races’. Any alienism has to deal with the subjugation of others, their annihilation and continuous othering, including the was this history gets transmitted and communicated and how such occupation traumas are still around us and determine the “uneven development”, to use Marx’s words. Thus the histories of this planet are with us whenever we imagine us imponderable during flights of space exploration or the most recent trends of privatization of space travel. It is always helps going back to H G Wells War of the Worlds and the way it was critical on British Imperialism and Victorian racial hierarchies. Don’t want to overlap more with the incredible introduction to the Umurangi game, developed by a maori about kids that basically witness and document the depredation of their worlds.
And there is more to come – including Gamifiying Global Warming or doing the math and Newtonian physics for the whole of the solar system in a game or how one can be walk in the footsteps of your primate predecessors.
TimeSpace Warps 