Game developer explores colonialism through the eyes of a penguin

1939. A harsh wind howls over the Antarctic. Scattered Nazi polar exploration camps are in turmoil, corrupted by the eldritch forces their expeditions sought out deep into the tundra. Oblivious to it all, a solitary penguin glides belly first along the ice before flying into an airborne spin reminiscent of Nintendo character Mario.

Origame Digital's "weird fiction" game Penguin Colony explores colonial myth-making and the eldritch horrors of HP Lovecraft through an unusual perspective; that of a carefree penguin.

Naphtali Faulkner, a Ngāi Te Rangi game developer based in Melbourne, sees no issue with the tonal dissonance here.

"The penguin is having a great time because it's supposed to be there," he says. "Antarctica is its home. It's these European guys who don't belong there who are having the worst day of their lives."

Each of the penguins who call Antarctica home are playable: baby penguins able to slip into narrow crevices, a teleporting penguin, or any number of waddling adults, all of them indifferent to the horrors inflicted on the fascist humans around them.

Colonial myth-making

Penguin Colony addresses revisionist histories at the heart of settler movements.

Faulkner cites the example of Celtic New Zealand, a pseudoscientific alternate history that claims Anglo settlers predate Māori populations.

In the game's Antarctic setting, Nazis' search for relics that support Aryan race myth-making leads them to the unknowable monsters from Lovecraft's 1930s novella At the Mountains of Madness, who they foolishly mistake for an ancient Aryan king.

"They just make that [history] up. The game's story is about exploring how they do this and the tools and mechanisms that allow this colonial myth-making to happen," Faulkner says.

He sees the same myth-making applied to Australia's origin story.

Reinventing Lovecraft

Drawing on the writing of HP Lovecraft in a game critiquing racist pseudo-histories seems paradoxical.

The American author, best known for creating the monstrous Cthulhu, was a notorious racist. Adaptations of his work historically dodge the issue, but Faulkner sees it as inseparable from Lovecraft's stories, the way his unknowable monsters colonise the world, and his overtly xenophobic depictions of Indigenous populations and subservient slave races, such as the giant amoeba-like Shoggoths that appear across his bibliography.

"Most adaptations are trying to scare you with gore or tentacles or otherworldly looking stuff. That's not the scariest thing about Lovecraft," Faulkner says. "The scariest thing about Lovecraft is how it makes assumptions about things and all the white characters just nod along with it."

An Indigenous approach to game design

Faulkner describes the dominant mode of "human-centred Silicon Valley design" in video games as a flawed, complacent approach that spoonfeeds unchallenging "content" to players.

Citing Wiradjuri professor Norman Sheehan's framework of "respectful design", which underpins his approach to game design, Faulkner states: "Indigenous knowledge says human beings don't create knowledge between their ears: the thing between their ears is a sponge that sees things out in the world and absorbs them."

The story of Penguin Colony, delivered through narrative vignettes, is fragmentary, opaque, and — most shockingly of all — partly missable.

Game objects, often called "collectibles", are usually clearly marked and precisely quantified. Here, they're not so easily discovered, although your direction is always implied by the direction of the wind, a deliberate move to recreate the mystery the medium once held pre-social media.

"When players realise that their playthrough didn't give them everything, but it did give someone something else, I think they're going to view the world [as] a little bit bigger than they thought it was before."

Faulkner recalls playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in 2004. Enterprising players around the world suspected Bigfoot was in the game. They were wrong, but that didn't stop players searching every corner of its 36 square kilometre map to follow what proved to be a delusional breadcrumb trail.

"It's a very Lovecraftian idea," Faulkner says. "Most Lovecraftian stories are an academic or a researcher finding an eldritch truth and trying to come to terms with whatever the hell it is. The only way you can do that is by telling players to go and role-play that outside of the game. If you tried to gamify that with stats and numbers, you would never get the same emotional feeling."

Old souls finding the new in an emerging medium

Faulkner was inspired by the work of the Japanese game studio FromSoftware which, through action games such as Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series, have used difficulty, complexity and deliberately obscure storytelling to make communities work together to decipher their games.

Faulkner, who describes himself as "an old Souls-head", hopes his game can challenge players and inspire similarly enduring debates — without the infamous difficulty of FromSoftware games.

He sees Penguin Colony as testing players in ways they're not used to experiencing.

For him, video games are an emerging art form yet to live up to its full potential, captured by a commercially driven American design sensibility.