At the start of Skábma: Snowfall, Áilu lives a blessed life. Under the watchful eye of his adoptive uncle, he tends to a herd of reindeer in a remote Arctic village, dreaming of a day when he may one day master his own herd.
But soon things begin to change. Disease and disorder spread among the wildlife, and before long, young Áilu is called upon to beat back a pandemic armed only with a shaman’s healing drum.
The game was developed over the course of the current global pandemic, and it’s easy to see our present hellscape of disease and disorder lurking in the background of Skábma: Snowfall, a forthcoming PC release from the tiny Finnish studio Red Stage Entertainment, PID Games, and Epic Games. But the sickness at its heart is much older.
Áilu, after all, is Sámi. Indigenous people of northern Europe, the Sámi have, for centuries, been under assault from southern colonizers, divided by borders and dissected by racist biologists who taught them that their culture, built on a sacred connection with the natural world, was “uncivilized” and a source of shame.
“There is so much loss of culture inside the Sámi community,” explains the game’s writer and Red Stage cofounder Marjaana Auranen, whose Sámi name is Eira-Teresá Joret Mariánná. “That is, I think, the biggest motivation of telling this story—[to show] that there is hope to regain a culture, and battle against the demons … threatening Sámi culture.”
Slated for release next spring, Skábma: Snowfall is already being hailed by critics and designers as a notable step forward for self-representation in the video game arts. It will be the first major video game release to be designed and acted by a Sámi-led team, the first to be produced entirely in the endangered North Sámi language, and the first to be firmly rooted in Sámi folklore and tradition.
“It looks truly amazing,” said Mikkel Sara, CEO of Norwegian Sámi game studio Miksapix Interactive, who previewed Skábma: Snowfall. “I know that there are more people here in the heart of Sápmi [Sámi traditional territory] who also are eager to experience [this]. There are very high expectations of the game.”
Who Are the Sámi?
In and of itself, it’s not so unusual for Sámi to see themselves depicted in art and popular culture. As an ancient Arctic people living within some of Europe’s most ethnically homogenous countries, Sámi have long been a fascination, even an obsession, of non-Indigenous Europeans.
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Well into the 20th century, Christian missionaries and state-sponsored biologists meticulously documented Sámi customs and dress, even as they sought to suppress them. Church and state even conspired to dig up and desecrate Sámi sacred sites and graves, measuring their skulls and skeletons in pursuit of evidence for an “uncivilized” proto-Aryan race.
More recently, Sámi have been depicted in blockbuster films like Klaus and Frozen 2, where they are usually side characters who aid in settlers’ quests. In these depictions, Sámi are almost always historical, in formal traditional dress, and nomadic.
Actual Sámi identity is much more complex. To start, their traditional territory is divided by four colonial powers (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia,) nine living Indigenous languages, and four non-Indigenous ones. Programs of forced assimilation in those countries drove further divisions, between nomadic reindeer herders and settled “forest” or village Sámi, who were more aggressively stripped of their traditions.
By choosing a historical setting, Skábma: Snowfall is able to allude to these impacts without fully depicting them—there is, for example, a sinister French naturalist overstaying his welcome in Áilu’s village. But even depicting historical Sámi can be fraught with issues.
“Defining what is traditional and what is not is also narrowing the image of Sáminess,” Outi Laiti, a Sámi game researcher and designer, wrote in an email to WIRED. Reindeer herding, traditional crafts, and nature worship are all part of Sámi cultural heritage. But most Sámi are Christian, many don’t know traditional crafts, and few would know much about what to do with a reindeer herd. To call these things traditional could imply those people are somehow less Sámi.
That has left Sámi artists like Auranen with a delicate task. “There is a fine line between negative stereotypes and stereotypes that are needed,” she said. “People don’t know about Sami culture. They don’t know who we are. And in that sense, the stereotyping comes in handy.”
“But … we are fighting against those stereotypes at the same time as we are owning them,” she said. “People expect us to be in this showcase in the museum, and they are disappointed … that we are not as exotic as they want us to be.”
But one benefit of having Sámi people like Auranen driving the development of a game about Sámi is that the creators are free to shape the design based on their perspectives. Auranen knows she is not offering an exclusive version of Sáminess—instead, she’s offering her own interpretation, drawn from her own experience of growth and discovery.
A Crash Course in Cultural Heritage
The central theme of Áilu’s journey is “loss and regaining,” Auranen said, and it’s a theme that hits close to home. Auranen’s father was one of the “lost generation,” Sámi who grew up without access to their traditional language or culture. As a result, Auranen herself was deprived of that education. “All those little details, they never passed to me,” she said.
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Creating Skábma: Snowfall, then, became like a crash course in her own cultural heritage. She and her cocreators—including Sámi actors, singers, and artists—immersed themselves in their lore and traditions, studying dress and handicrafts to pepper the game’s world with authenticity. That concern even extended to the game’s central mechanics and philosophy.
“Very early on we made the decision that the … shaman drum is the main weapon,” said Sahin Cengiz, Auranen’s cocreator on the game. The traditional drum is one of the core symbols of Sámi spirituality, used to commune with spirits in nature. Áilu beats the drum to speak with trees and animals. He also uses it to fight his enemies—but as a shaman, he doesn’t kill, instead restoring them. “It was always about healing,” Cengiz said.
Of course, Cengiz noted, the Sámi stories also furnished plenty of material for the game’s own brand of gothic horror. Áilu faces his share of infernal spirits and eldritch horrors drawn from Sámi storytelling tradition. “The stories that Sámi people have for years told, for children, are very grim,” Cengiz says.
“They are meant to educate!” Auranen laughed in reply. “If you don’t want your child to go to the river … in the middle of the night, you have to tell them there is something that’s going to eat them. It’s the only way to stop them killing themselves.”
Against the backdrop of the historic erasure of Sámi spirituality by Christian missionaries, Auranen’s reframing of these stories takes on an even greater significance. Siv Ellen Kraft and Trude Fonneland, Norwegian researchers of Sámi spirituality, call the process “religion-making.”
“Cultural elements from the past are reframed, transformed, retrieved, and added new and positive value in order to create awareness about Sámi identity, culture, and politics,” they wrote in an email to WIRED.
“In Skábma, Sámi religion is portrayed as a living and valuable symbol. Here, Sámi religion is no longer a cultural stigma and a reminder of a pagan past,” they wrote, “but a powerful, authentic, and magical symbol for a living Sámi culture.”
Games by Sámi, for Everyone
Auranen doesn’t want her next game to be a reflection on Sámi trauma. Though she would like to see Skábma: Snowfall get a sequel or two, she admits the process of writing its story “has been emotionally draining.”
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“It is my culture and there is so much baggage and trauma in there, and I’m facing them every day when I write,” she said. She does plan to keep writing Sámi characters, ideally in more modern settings, where they might help bust the myth that Sámi “dress up every day.”
As for Skábma: Snowfall, when it eventually sees release Auranen hopes it will encourage pride and cultural curiosity among a younger generation of Sámi gamers, who will be free to celebrate their culture without the burden felt by past generations.
On the game’s website, she dedicates the work to “all the young Sámi, who are facing the challenges and stress of keeping their culture alive, while [the] outside world makes it harder and harder every day.”
“I hope that the present generation can finally be proud of their culture,” she wrote, “and live without the shame that the generations before had to carry.”
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