The Huni Kuin videogame caught me off guard, mainly because I wasn’t expecting any content about videogames. Shanken almost slips it in — Amazonian shamanic knowledge, ancestral stories, now a game. At first, it feels like flattening, like something sacred turned into interface. But I’m not sure it’s that simple.

Gamification gets dismissed quickly, and often for good reason. But that’s not the whole picture. What we do in live coding is somehow similar — building systems and patterns hat unfold in real time, responsive, unstable, alive. A game works like that too. It’s not static or purely consumable; it shifts with the player. Each experience is slightly different.

So it’s not just representing a culture. It’s something you enter.

The key difference here is authorship. The Huni Kuin weren’t just depicted — they helped shape the system. That changes it. It becomes less extraction, more construction. Like what Pauline Oliveros describes: using technology to open perception rather than fix it in place.

Shanken’s concern about gamification as colonization is valid. But the issue isn’t the medium — it’s control. Who builds the system, who sets the rules, who decides what’s possible.

Added a Youtube video link to the game if anyone is interested