"Never Alone" - A Truly Stunning Video Game Based On Alaskan Native Folklore (Genius!)

“Our stories help us understand how the world is ordered and our place within it,” a man who narrates the trailer says in Inupiat. “What good are old stories if their wisdom can’t be shared?”

This. I want this. I want to play it now. I want to learn all the tales. I want my son to play it. And I'm seriously considering investing in another game platform so we can do it together...

Less than a week ago, a trailer was released for an indie puzzle platformer game and it's been making headlines in gaming and geek communities - not only for it's gorgeous visuals and animation but for the premise behind it: Never Alone's inspiration comes from the centuries-old stories and folklore of the Iñupiat people and was created to assist in imparting the thousands of years old Alaskan native tales and folklore to the next generation.

Take a look:

This is truly a genius way to pass the legends and stories on to the next generation.

As someone deeply interested in both folklore and games, I think it’s wonderful to see a very old storytelling tradition join hands with a new one. (The Mary Sue)

While other games have tapped into this to a small extent with their cultural mythology and legends, like Folklore (based on Celtic tales & myth, which no one seems to have heard of) and Okami (using Japanese myth, legend & folklore, which is fairly well known, award winning and critically acclaimed and incredibly amazing but hard for younger kids to play and get into), there has been nothing quite like this. On top of this Never Alone is beautiful to behold. I really hope it's as wonderful to play and explore as it looks.

Here's the description from Upper One Games, who created it, and are incidentally, the first indigenous-owned game company in history, though their products are for people everywhere. Their mission? To provide games with an educational edge:

Welcome to the top of the world. Where nature challenges life in the extreme. Where death lies waiting in the cold. Where you must explore the fantastical world of Iñupiaq stories to help a young girl save her people from an endless blizzard.

You must succeed or all is lost. This is the first in a new category of games — games which draw fully upon the richness of unique cultures to create complex and fascinating game worlds. Upper One Games paired world class game developers with Alaskan Native storytellers and elders to create Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), a game based on stories that have been handed down for thousands of years. A game which delves deeply into the traditional lore of the Iñupiat people to present an exprience like no other. An atmospheric puzzle platformer of wondrous adventure. A game of survival in a place where survival shouldn't be possible. A game that opens the gateway to explore what it means to be human. 

“We’re extremely proud and excited to be building a truly unique game,” said Gloria O’Neill, president and CEO of Upper One Games. “We’d like to think we’re creating one of the most authentic – and fun – games of the year. Video games are powerful tools for making the history, tradition and culture of indigenous peoples relevant to both the next generation of Native people and the rest of the world.”

Here are the gaming details:

Top Level Features of Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) include: 

• 1- and 2-player modes, both involving cooperative play (in single-player mode, the player can switch between the roles of Nuna and Fox at any time);
• 8 sweeping chapters that take players across treacherous ice floes, Arctic tundra, ice caves, boreal forests, cliff-built coastal villages, and more;
• Game story, settings, characters and gameplay inspired by traditional Iñupiaq folklore, including the story of Kunuuksaayuka (Koo-nook-sah-yoo-ka) that has been handed down for generations among the Iñupiaq people;
• Encounters with traditional Alaska Native folklore characters such as Manslayer, Blizzard Man, Sky People, the Little People and the Rolling Heads;
• Exclusive unlockable insights into the Iñupiaq way of life, told by both Alaska Native elders and youth.
Upper One Games is an initiative launched by Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC) in Anchorage, Alaska and its development and publishing partner E-Line Media of New York. The goal of the partnership is to create unique and innovate game experiences that explore and extend global cultures in fresh, vibrant ways by weaving timeless living stories into dynamic and fun games.

While we're on Upper One Games, check out Historia as well; teaching history through interactive play and created to integrate with most social studies standards. I really like the way this company thinks!

Additional sources: HERE, HERE & HERE

Other Theatrical Snow Queen Productions (Pt 6) :Triad Stage's Appalachian "Snow Queen" (I Heart This So Very Much!)

Snow Queen poster for Triad Stage by Tom Woods of Bluezoom Advertising, Design, Chemistry

The final production in this varied theatrical round-up is my favorite find of them all (which is why I've given it it's own post - apart from it being long anyway, due to all the amazing images).

Taking a moment here to appreciate the poster: I haven't seen anyone approach the Snow Queen character (or story) quite this way in illustration! It emphasizes the natural aspect of the Snow Queen as well as how far her reach is. Somehow it's both comforting and foreboding. And notice Gerda's footsteps? (In this production it's Gertie.) They cross the crack the Snow Queen has made in the landscape - that's powerful imagery. Brilliant!

Not only is it a new production that debuted in December 2013 but it's an Appalachian take on The Snow Queen, which I just love. Triad Stage's Snow Queen was created as part of the company's mission to promote the local regional voice and flavor of telling stories in their productions, and that includes not only the design style, but the storytelling style and the musical aspect as well.

Part of the mission of Triad Stage, the ambitious American resident theatre headquartered in Greensboro, NC, is to promote a regional voice — reviving or creating stage literature that reflects the color and heritage of the Carolinas and the South.

Promotional image for Triad Stage's Snow Queen

Promotional image for Triad Stage's Snow Queen

The result makes for a very folkloric approach (a folkloric approach to a fairy tale seems obvious but it's actually more unique that you'd think - and very cool). First of all, just look at the empty stage:

Maybe it's my theater roots but I'm transported into a wonder world just with this (please transport me there immediately!). But it gets better.

While the promotional images are nice I think the production photographs are simply spectacular! Just one or two of these would have sent me running to get a ticket. I'd dearly love to see this show taken on tour. 

There's so much wonderful work here and I you don't need to be "one of the local folk" to appreciate how special this is.I'm not going to bother putting them "in order" as it's really not necessary to enjoy them and besides, I realized seeing them this way makes you think of the aspects of HCA's story in a different way again.

As a bonus, here are some pre-production drawings, showing some of the thinking behind the style.

Congratulations Triad Stage! This is breathtaking.

There's a great article HERE on the music created for the show, including links to a couple of the songs to give you an auditory taste.

In the meantime. if you'd like to see this show tour as well, drop by the Triad Stage webpage, or their Facebook page, and leave a comment to that effect. 

I think people everywhere would find this beautiful, fascinating and, as a result, it could run for a long, long time.

Google is Celebrating American Folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston's Birthday Today

Google pays tribute to an African-American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston today (and I finally added her to my board of Influential Fairy Tale People as well). She was a fascinating woman who found herself overlapping in disciplines and fields of study, both in anthropology and the Arts. While it would seem anyone who dips a serious toe into the waters of fairy tale and folklore tend to do this, Ms. Hurston did this, not only with a subject that hadn't received too much serious scholarly attention till then (the subject of black American folklore), but particularly during a time in which black culture in the US was undergoing serious cultural and political changes (20's to the 50's).

I just love this brief selection of anecdotes regarding her work as it describes so much of her drive, her work and how far ahead of her time she was in her research (from the Kislak Foundation):

In 1927 a wealthy patron, Charlotte L. Mason of New York, gave Hurston a car, a camera and $200 a month to travel throughout the American South and record the folklife and lore of the people she encountered. She explored Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, and gathered hundreds of folk tales, most still unpublished. The tales have been described as a "cultural window into how people lived." 

She continued her writing and research, traveling to Jamaica, Bermuda, Honduras and Haiti. In Haiti, she studied voodoo and collected Caribbean folklore that was anthologized in her book, Tell My Horse, published in 1937. The title came from Haitian Voodoo ceremonies, where a person possessed by a spirit is ridden like a horse by the spirit. The spirit speaks through the person, the horse being ridden, and may say, "Tell my horse..." She also wrote about zombie beliefs and the idea that there was a poison that certain Bokors (Voodoo Priests) knew about that produced a deathlike state in recipients. In her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) she wrote:

What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.

Almost 50 years later her theory was scientifically confirmed.

Although it has taken a while for her work to be properly recognized for a number of reasons she's had a lot of posthumous recognition and in 2002 was named in the list of Greatest 100 African Americans.

There are now a lot of resources available to read up on her life and work but to give you a brief overview (Google it!) but I'll post some quotes to get you started.

From Mules and Men, the book Roger D. Abrahams called "Simply the most exciting book on black folklore and culture I have ever read", here's the publishers blurb:

Mules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her "native village" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history throughout these highly metaphorical folk-tales, "big old lies," and the lyrical language of song. With this collection, Zora Neale Hurston has come to reveal'and preserve'a beautiful and important part of American culture.

Regarding her work with folklore, here are a couple of excerpts from Wikipedia:

By the mid-1930s, Hurston had published several short stories and the critically acclaimed Mules and Men (1935), a groundbreaking work of "literary anthropology" documenting African-American folklore. In 1930, she also collaborated with Langston Hughes on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts, a play that was never finished, although it was published posthumously in 1991. 

In 1937, Hurston was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti. Tell My Horse (1938) documents her account of her fieldwork studying African rituals in Jamaica and vodoun rituals in Haiti. Hurston also translated her anthropological work into the performing arts, and her folk revue, The Great Day premiered at the John Golden Theatre in New York in 1932. 

Hurston's first three novels were also published in the 1930s: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). 

...Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for a number of cultural and political reasons. 

Many readers objected to the representation of African-American dialect in Hurston's novels, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research. For example, a character in Jonah's Gourd Vine expresses herself in this manner: 

"Dat's a big ole resurrection lie, Ned. Uh slew-foot, drag-leg lie at dat, and Ah dare yuh tuh hit me too. You know Ahm uh fightin' dawg and mah hide is worth money. Hit me if you dare! Ah'll wash yo' tub uh 'gator guts and dat quick." 

...In 2001, Every Tongue Got to Confess was published posthumously. The book was a collection of field materials Hurston had gathered in the late 1920s to create her book Mules and Men. Originally entitled "Folktales from the Gulf States", filmmaker Kristy Andersen had discovered the previously unknown collection of folk tales while researching the Smithsonian archives when they were placed in computer catalogs in 1997.

I've included images of a number of her folkloric works in the post so you can keep an eye out for them in your travels.

Happy 123rd birthday Zora!

Thanks for all the stories.

Additional links: HERE, HERE & HERE