Indigenomicon

American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession

Jodi A. Byrd

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781478032649
  9781478029274
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478061496
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes "the image of the law of the Indigenous" as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin's Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: Time Plays and Slow Runs
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Playing Stories
• 1. What Remains
• 2. Silence Will Fall
• 3. Beast of America
• 4. “Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted”
• 5. The Knight at the End of the World
• Conclusion: Recursive Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index