Some voice-over scripts written for Malaysian game prototype: ORANG, a casual runner game that explores the Aborigines of Malaysia and its colonial impacts on the present.
From the voices of the villagers:
They took our land, our homes, our people. Do not trust them, and do not believe everything you hear.
The slave-raiders were mainly Malays and Bataks, They called us Sakai, ‘non-humans’, ‘savages’ and ‘jungle-beasts.’ Sakai was a word that meant ‘slave’. Our people are not Sakai. We hate being called Sakai. (Repetition for emphasis - word, SAKAI, is also hidden in game letters)
They came to our settlements and killed off all the adult men. They took our women and children and sold them to local rulers and chieftains to gain their favour.
As the world moved on, foreign empires came and went. We had no interest in these colonial authorities. We heard the world had a second war. Suddenly, our mountains and forests were filled with Chinese escapees and guerrillas. Some of us agreed to help because we heard that they were being tortured while the Malays weren’t.
The government does not understand our way of life. We have our own language, we do not want to conform. We trust our traditional leaders not the ones appointed to us, the ones who want to exploit us.
They tried to take away our spiritual beliefs. We believe in the life of nature, but they wanted us to follow their god, their Allah, the god of Islam.
Even the state of Kelantan issued that Muslim men who married our women, would be given a large sum of money, 10,000 ringgit.
The lands of our ancestors have been destroyed by factories, plantations, and other ‘progressive’ developments. Sometimes, they took without compensation. So we made blockades to prevent the logging companies from accessing the land. The government had given these companies permission to cut the trees of our ancestral forests.
The police tore down our blockades and arrested us. Yet we rebuild the blockade every night they tear it down. It will stand in the morning.
We are nomadic people. If something happens – like a death in the village, or we don’t find enough resources around our village area, or the area is not safe anymore for us, we just move.
The government has designated land for us to live. But as our communities expanded, the land did not, and some villages still don’t have a safe source of water today. So we went back to our traditional lifestyle.
We took shifts guarding the blockades. Before we used to go to the forest every morning and harvest rubber, work in our gardens, look for forest vegetables and fruit or hunt for animals, but now every day from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. we are at the blockade.
My name is Johari, I am 26 years old of the Temiar tribe. The police arrested me because I was taking photo evidence of how they tore down our blockade and the people who did it. They confiscated my camera, memory card, and two phones. They asked us who taught us how to make a blockade, but it’s not like that, we all made the blockade together, nobody taught us
Narrative, Narration, Level Design
Orang involves two main levels. In the beginning of the game, the player is asked to
participate in a game prototype of a ‘walking tour’ through the jungles of Malaysia. When
Level 1 starts, the player will appear on a long road in a jungle. A voice-over narration will
begin and inform the player that they can collect items which will give them cash prizes,
implying that collecting items is good. Each time a player collects the item, a cash sound11 will
occur in hopes to represent semiotics of land as wealth through audio. The more land the player
collects, the more cash they will earn. Thus like Temple Run, the narration, environment, and
game mechanics may help to establish the game genre’s expectations. The easy mechanics may
also help the player to focus on the narration (Anthropy & Clark 2014). However, if players truly listen to the narration, they will realise that the second plot thread and "voice" is imploring them NOT to collect, subverting game mechanic expectations.
The narration is also spoken in English for two main reasons other than practicality:
firstly, there are many Orang Asli languages and to mistranslate them may be misrepresenting
them and second, speaking in English may also represent suppression of traditional language
or language assimilation to colonial authorities. This can also reflect the Malaysian’s
government of national language integration in indigenous communities. Listening to this
second voice may also symbolize uncovering the truth in research about indigenous cultures or
government censorship. Though this does not truly reflect reality (since none of these
researched facts were censored by the Malaysian government), this game level design can
explore how having multiple voice-over narrations can portray different voices of history and
news and how the first narrator hopes to ‘censor’ or get rid of any negative history facts (such
as oppression). This may prompt the player to reflect on how media (audio and visual)
reconstruct racial myths and truths.
Like in NA, the narration in this game hopes to inscribe meaning in its mechanics.
Taking note of one’s environment was important in understanding how designers may relay
information through aesthetics and how players respond to them (Reinhard 2015). The narrator
in Level 2 never condemns the player for collecting their items but it is by narrating how
“foreigners” took the lands and made slaves of their people where the player may become more
aware of his role. Like in NA, it is vital that the player listens to the narration to understand
the aesthetics around him (why the people are portrayed in yellow glitch boxes and the symbols
on the blockades who ‘take back’) to understand the cost of his actions. Like in TSP, listening
to the narration informs the player of his role yet allows him agency to choose whether to go along with the narrator’s expectations and ‘script’ or to challenge it by avoiding collecting
items.
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This text is taken from my written essay for the University College London 2020: How can game mechanics and voice-over narration help to depict cultural oppression in an endless runner game?
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