For Author Jodi Byrd, Video Games Aren’t Just for Playing

Most conversations about the economy begin with money, markets, or labor. Jodi Byrd begins somewhere most may not begin to start looking: with story.

For Byrd, professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, the systems that shape contemporary life are never simply economic or political. They’re also narrative. 

The stories people tell about land, history, and belonging determine how power is understood and often, who disappears from view in those stories.

Those questions drove much of Byrd’s conversation with Courtney Lewis, Crandall Family Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, during a visit to the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, where they discussed Indigenomicon, Byrd’s newest book. 

Sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke, the conversation was actually part of a larger project from its Research for Indigenous Studies & Engagement in the United States program (RISE-US). Their latest interdisciplinary initiative, Year of American Indian Pop Culture, aims to "celebrate and critically engage with the dynamic presence of Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples in the U.S."

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Drawing from Indigenous critical theory, game studies, literary criticism, and cultural analysis, Byrd's talk explored how seemingly ordinary forms of entertainment—from open-world video games to collaborative online encyclopedias—can reveal the deeper structures through which colonialism continues to shape everyday life.

Rather than treating video games as simple representations of history, or just simple novelties altogether, Byrd approaches them as systems. 

“Video games are all just codes and systems and laws,” they explained. This makes them especially revealing places to examine the assumptions that organize contemporary culture. Those assumptions are rarely explicit. Instead, they emerge quietly through rules, mechanics, and the digital worlds games invite players to inhabit.

That perspective shaped even the title of Indigenomicon. Byrd described it as a play on H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon, reworking its language to explore what they call “the law of the Indian” while questioning the ways Indigenous peoples are so often imagined as already gone.

Or as Byrd put it, “already produced as dead.” 

From there, the book moves toward a broader question: how do systems, genres, and cultural forms continue to reproduce those assumptions, often without naming them? Byrd suggests one of the answers lies within language itself.

A concept they call “disambiguation” emerged from a desire to slow down the ways ideas circulate across academic fields. Certain words, like “relation” for example, travel easily between disciplines, acquiring meanings that eventually become flattened. 

Byrd wanted to interrupt that process, creating what they described as “a pause” that allows concepts to be understood on their own terms rather than folded into inherited assumptions.

They offered Wikipedia as an example. 

Searching for “Chickasaw” produces a list of meanings: a language, a nation, towns, military vessels, even a Boy Scouts council. Everything appears equal, stripped of history or context. 

“There’s an implied neutrality,” Byrd explained. Yet that neutrality obscures the histories of settler colonialism that produced those overlapping meanings in the first place.

Those questions of language lead naturally to land.

Throughout the conversation, Byrd returned to what they call “grounded relationality”—an understanding of land not as property or resource, but as relationship. It’s a subtle distinction with significant consequences. 

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They argued that Indigenous critical theory begins from a different premise than settler colonial studies. “Land is life,” Byrd shared, contrasting that understanding with Patrick Wolfe’s well-known formulation that “land is necessary for life.” The difference is more than semantic; it reflects fundamentally different ways of imagining responsibility, community, and sovereignty.

What makes Indigenomicon especially compelling is where Byrd chooses to pursue these questions. Their examples arrive not only through philosophy or political theory but through games many audiences already know.

While playing the social simulator Animal Crossing during the pandemic, Byrd found themselves digging up fossils when a character casually remarked that the island sat atop an ancient burial ground. 

In another moment, they encountered Indigenous imagery embedded within an otherwise unrelated game. “Settler colonialism will come at you sideways,” Lewis remarked during their conversation because it captured exactly what Byrd’s work demonstrates. 

The assumptions embedded in games are often easy to miss until they suddenly become impossible to ignore.

The same dynamic appears in the critically acclaimed action-adventure Western Red Dead Redemption 2. For many players, the fictional town of Valentine is simply part of the game’s landscape. For Byrd, it is also the Nebraska town where they grew up, a white border town neighboring the Rosebud Reservation. 

Returning to that place virtually became an unexpected meditation on memory and erasure. The game’s title itself, Byrd argued, carries “the genocidal implication” that Indigenous people belong only to the past, disconnected from contemporary political life. 

“Everything becomes about fascism,” they said, “and not removal or allotment.”

Byrd’s work asks readers and players to resist those inherited narratives. The point is not simply to critique video games or expose hidden meanings. It is to cultivate a different way of paying attention, one that recognizes how culture quietly teaches people what to see, what to forget, and what to imagine as possible.

If stories have helped build the worlds we inhabit, Byrd suggests they may also help us imagine different ones.