The Ngāti Verse is a series of world-building artworks and gaming projects from Aotearoa New Zealand planned for launch in September 2022. Follow our blog here for updates and exclusive early bird founder's NFT art drops!
TE NGAKO - PROJECT SUMMARY
The Metaverse has been hyped for the opportunities it presents for virtual worlds to collide and overlap. The Ngāti Verse sets out to test this hype, to see what is real and possible, and to calibrate how Māori and other Indigenous artists might exist and operate within this space.
The Ngāti Verse will grow and expand over a series of three digital platforms, beginning with two simple 2D scrolling platform games and ultimately progress to an immersive Web3 virtual Metaverse environment. With each iteration in the series, the world expands, introducing new and increasingly complex ideas, characters, propositions and environments.
This process will enable us to develop a world-building methodology that is scalable, beginning with small achievable projects and expanding to more ambitious goals as our skills, research and understanding of the technology expands.
Our quest is to test popular Web3 ideas around the perceived value of digital art assets, including NFT gaming assets and the proposition of virtual land sales, to see if there is deeper value here in the digital space for Indigenous artists and communities.
KAUPAPA TOI: ART CONCEPT
The Ngāti Verse project is an artistic investigation of online and virtual spaces. The question that drives this project asks, are Indigenous people's values and concerns for data sovereignty, environmental sustainability, place making and shared spaces compatible with NFT art projects and Web3 Metaverse gaming environments?
This artistic query seeks to explore how we might decolonise virtual spaces which, although seemingly providing endless possibilities, are still most often conceived and designed to reinforce Western socio-normative cultural tropes, character stereotypes and gaming narratives. The Ngāti Verse project diverges from such Western-centric tropes from the outset, founding a series of gaming and virtual environments that locate Indigenous epistemologies of te ao Māori (Māori worldviews) as the central taikaka (heartwood) of the worldbuilding process, from customary Māori worldviews to contemporary political narratives. In creating such spaces, we seek to understand how a kaupapa Māori ontological and epistemological approach to digital technologies and game play might influence the way we explore, interact and ultimately develop applications for Māori artists in Web2 and emergent Web3 virtual environments.
Artwork One
Ngāti Verse One: Game On
The first artwork in the series is presented as a simple 2D scrolling platform game format. There are four playable characters, each representing a different perspective on the issues that emerged during the period of the Covid mandates. Art audiences will be able to explore this virtual recreation of Wellington City, walking past digital representations of our city’s many famous public sculptures, and interacting with up to 100 NPCs (non-playable characters). Each character and NPC speaks to various complex and nuanced narratives that emerged during the mandates.
Artwork Two
Ngāti Versus II: Global Unrest
The second artwork in this series will be a 2 player versus game, with 8-12 playable characters that expand the world beyond Aotearoa New Zealand, exploring similar movements of civil unrest in other countries around the world, including the 2021 storming of Washington in the United States of America under the Trump Administration. The environment will again be a 2D scrolling platform, with painted digital recreations of well-known locations where civil unrest was reported in the media.
Artwork Three
Ngāti Verse III: Metawhenua
Game three is a Web3 enabled immersive 3D virtual environment with potentially unlimited numbers of playable and interactive NPCs. This virtual world will be named Metawhenua. It will be dominated by Māori art, language, characters and narratives. This is the most ambitious of all the works in the series, and we are seeking support from Creative New Zealand for research and development of this project. The research component of this will focus on three different areas. Firstly, identifying the most environmentally responsible blockchain to use for art assets in this space. Secondly, automating programmatic protocols to authenticate original works of art through blockchain, enabling sales of high-quality Māori digital art through an in-game NFT gallery and marketplace. The third focus areas will explore how Māori artists might decolonise digital spaces, creating visibility for Māori characters in virtual environments and enabling avatars from the Ngāti Verse to go between Metawhenua and other Metaverse compatible virtual worlds. In this way, the Ngāti Verse opens up to a multicultural and multi-world digital art experience that is accessible to global audiences. A local and international location to launch this project will be part of the project research outcomes.
TE PAE TAWHITI: PROJECT AIMS
1) Explore the possibilities of blockchain technology from a kaupapa Māori paradigm to understand how this technology might best be utilised for artistic agency, with special consideration of accessibility, data sovereignty, intellectual property, technology ecology and environmental impact.
2) Create opportunities for Māori and general art audiences to experience high quality Web3 immersive virtual environments in which Māori art, characters, worldviews, language and issues are prioritized and given high visibility.
3) Decolonise virtual spaces by researching and developing a kaupapa Māori ontological and epistemological understanding of how Māori and other Indigenous artists might create, explore and exist within digital spaces in the emerging Web3 environment.
HE WĀ: CHRONOLOGY
The Ngāti Verse games and the Metawhenua virtual environment are chronologically located in contemporary times, as the cultural and political narratives that we want to explore are informed by our contemporary histories here in the present. In particular, we are fascinated by the heightened awareness and global awakening to cultural, political and environmental issues that has occurred during the worldwide pandemic. This framing sets the scene for the world-building chronology, beginning with an artistic recreation of Wellington City during the Covid mandate protests at Parliament in 2022. There will be a slight dystopian aesthetic and feel to this alternate reality to evoke a sense of the very real feeling of anger, discomfort and civil unrest felt during the time of the mandates. Art audiences will be able to experience this space as playable gaming characters in a series of 2D and immersive 3D virtual environments. With each iteration in this series, this digital world will expand, recreating similar scenes of civil unrest experienced overseas during the global pandemic, including the storming of Washington under the Trump Administration in 2021.
TE TAIAO ME NGĀ HANGARAU NFT: SUSTAINABILITY & BLOCKCHAIN / NFT TECHNOLOGY
The first edition of the Ngati Verse project will have in-game NFT art purchases available on a simple Opensea marketplace via the Polygon proof-of-stake blockchain. However, the subsequent ‘Ngāti Versus II: Global Unrest’ project will shift to a blockchain that has the lowest possible environmental impact. A 2022 report from the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute analysed the energy efficiency and total energy consumption of six proof-of-stake networks: Avalanche (AVAX), Algorand (ALGO), Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Tezos (XTZ), and Solana (SOL). The report noted that currencies such as the Avalanche blockchain used just 0.0005 percent of the energy used by the Bitcoin blockchain, and 0.0028 percent of the energy used by the Ethereum blockchain. This research is a key part of the overall project.