JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
If something is already stolen, is it wrong to steal it back? That is the central question behind the new video game Relooted.
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MASASA MBANGENI: (As Nomali) We're here for one reason - to get back what was taken.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) How are you going to do that?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Sometimes you just have to be outlaws.
SUMMERS: Players are thrust into a futuristic version of Africa. It's a heist story, almost like "Ocean's 11," but the goal is to repatriate African artifacts from museums.
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MBANGENI: (As Nomali) Another alarm on the glass. I'm in.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Make sure you've planned your escape route before you pick this artifact up. There's a turret up ahead.
SUMMERS: The main character, Nomali, joins forces with her grandmother, a retired South African history professor, and an eclectic group of allies. The artifacts they reclaim are based on real pieces of art.
MOHALE MASHIGO: It was a very, very long process because we had two researchers - and it wasn't because we couldn't find enough. It was because there were so many, and we needed to kind of choose which ones would make it into the game.
SUMMERS: That's Mohale Mashigo, Relooted's narrative director. She wanted to tell a story that explored the history of how African art was stolen by Western museums. And she told me the only way she could drive that story home was by using artifacts from the real world.
MASHIGO: I think I understood that there were so many artifacts out there, but once you start really, really doing the research, the scale is unfathomable. Like, even when I'm talking to you now, I actually can't believe how many artifacts are truly out there. And I came up with this kind of scale of - in order to tell the stories - right? - because this is still storytelling, we needed to find artifacts that had big stories. And so I made the distinction between tea cups and thrones. And I said, if I walked into Buckingham Palace and stole a tea cup, I'm sure they would be upset. You know, I might wind up in jail.
But if I stole the king's throne, it would be something much bigger, something that is, you know, cultural heritage for people. And so we looked for those big cultural heritage moments. And what we found was because those things are taken out of context, the history of a people is often then dismantled. So there are people in Africa who don't have access to those things that would tell them stories of who they are and where they come from.
SUMMERS: I wonder if you could tell us about one of the artifacts that a player can recover in Relooted and give us a bit of the story behind it.
MASHIGO: So the one I'm always shocked by when we were researching is a case of the Vigango statues. This was in the '80s in Kenya, and they belonged to the Mijikenda people. And important members of, you know, their society - fathers, mothers, sisters - when somebody died, they made these funerary statues, these wooden funeral statues, and they put them out in what was basically a place with trees, you know, where their ancestors funerary statues would be. And in the '80s, a bunch of people arrived, saw these beautiful funerary statues and just took them. And for me, I think that one was so important because we think of this kind of looting or taking of, you know, artifacts as something that happened in colonial times. But it was in the '80s, and that one was particularly shocking to me.
SUMMERS: There is this really sort of complicated question at the heart of the game, whether orchestrating a heist to capture these objects, whether it's stealing or recovering. And it's not just a question in the game. It's a question that I think a lot of historians ask too. How does the game seek to answer that question?
MASHIGO: So our protagonist, Nomali, goes into this not knowing, so she - you know, the inciting incident of the game is she picks up her brother, Trevor, who has been kidnapped because he likes to get himself into trouble.
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LAZOLA GOLA: (As Trevor) Nomali, sis, I've never been happier to see your angry face.
MBANGENI: (As Nomali) You are unbelievable.
GOLA: (As Trevor) You got my SOS and location pin.
MBANGENI: (As Nomali) Oh, you've got a lot of explaining to do.
MASHIGO: And when they go back to Johannesburg, he tells her that their grandmother is working on something with him, and she's shocked because her grandmother is a retired history professor and Trevor is a delinquent. And she's at the end of her life, and she worked on a treaty. We made up a treaty in the game called the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, and she worked on it. And she feels like she worked on it on her whole life, and she wasn't able to get anything back.
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MBANGENI: (As Nomali) Can't give back what you don't have.
ABIGAIL KUBEKA: (As Prof Grace) Exactly. But that also means they cannot report the artifacts missing or stolen.
MBANGENI: (As Nomali) Stolen? Who is stealing them?
KUBEKA: (As Prof Grace) Us.
MASHIGO: And so Nomali reluctantly joins the first heist to show them how dangerous it is. But she realizes after the first heist that nothing will stop them. And so one of the characters in the game says, is it stealing to take back something that was stolen?
SUMMERS: There is something that you said in other interviews that has stuck with me. You make the point that you wanted to be intentional about not merging African cultures in the game and that you wanted to give them their own sort of identity. Can you say more about that?
MASHIGO: We were very intentional in making all of the places in Africa real places. If we were going to really be this team that puts together this, you know, African futurist heist, we wanted to be intentional about saying, Africa is not a country. And even in the codex for all of the artifacts, it's got a map of Africa and it'll show you where, and then it'll also include the ethnic group that is involved with it. So it's not just good enough to say the Vigango are, you know, funerary statues found in Kenya. They belong to the Mijikenda people. It kind of humanizes African people and gets across this idea that it is a huge continent with so many people of different - you know, of different ethnic groups and beliefs.
SUMMERS: What do you hope players take away from this game or what do you hope they better understand about the world that it inhabits?
MASHIGO: Well, you know, it's so funny because people keep saying it's edutainment. And I say, well, all entertainment is edutainment if you think about it. You always learn something from the things that you consume. So firstly, we're game developers. So we want people to have fun. It is a really, really fun game loop once you've figured out - you know, once you've cased the joint, figured out where to put your team members, made sure you prepared anything, and then you take the artifact and you just run. I think that's what's important. It's fun, but also we're inviting people to learn something they may not have known or something that they don't know a lot about. It's an invitation to learn. We're not going to, you know, beat you over the head with it.
SUMMERS: You know, video games, they don't always have a strong stance on an issue. And this game is a game where stealing from museums is essentially justified and part of the justification is using real global history. How have players responded to this story, and what do you make of the response that you've heard so far?
MASHIGO: In Paris for the Paris launch of the game, I got to interact with some players, and there was a mother and son who came up to me. And firstly, she said, thank you very much. My son plays video games. I never imagined that he'd be able to play something like this, where he sees people that look like him. And he then asked, well, how can I get involved in games? You know, I, too, want to make games. And it was one of those moments where I felt a little like I wanted to bawl a little bit because we've had our heads down for seven years just working on this and to see how it impacts people - of course, there's a small group of people who feel that it is an attack because it doesn't sing to them.
SUMMERS: Mohale Mashigo is Relooted's narrative director. Thank you so much.
MASHIGO: Thank you.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing in non-English language). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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