by Outi Kaarina Laiti
In 2024, the exhibition Digital Natives? Saami Games Now! made its debut at Kumma Gallery during Helsinki Design Week and the Night of the Arts, bringing Saami made digital games into the heart of Finland’s capital and into direct conversation with contemporary game culture. For many visitors, this was their first time engaging with Indigenous made digital games as something to be played. Games and play in general have very little space in museums. The exhibition challenged persistent stereotypes that position Indigenous cultures as belonging only to the past, or technology as something that erases Indigeneity rather than carrying it forward.
I curated the exhibition to highlight over a decade of Saami game design, development, and community led experimentation, as well as a decade worth of behind the scenes work that has largely remained invisible. Since 2014, I and allied developers have created dozens of initiatives, including Saami Game Jam, youth programming workshops with the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, and Indigenous led collaborations with Skins Workshops. This work has led to over 40 games, but in my view the most significant impact has occurred elsewhere. In particular, the curation process of this exhibition made clear the need to expand this work into museums, not only for the obvious reason that museums are colonial spaces that should be reclaimed.
First, too often only “successful” games are celebrated. By success, I mean games that take a finished form and are made available for others to play, whether for free or commercially. In game development, there are countless demos and discarded projects that never see daylight, and in an Indigenous context these also carry valuable knowledge. The pressure to succeed can be especially heavy in Indigenous game development, where there may be only one opportunity to try. Through the curation, I wanted to highlight that failure can be beautiful and that it carries important data for future game developers. And what is failure, anyway? This exhibition resists narrow definitions of success by valuing process as much as product, a perspective deeply aligned with Indigenous approaches to creation and knowledge sharing.
Second, it is crucial to be present in urban spaces such as Finland’s capital, which still circulates outdated and stereotypical images of Saami people through tourism. City space can and should be used to build environments that respond to Saami needs. This exhibition also served as one of the few environments in Helsinki where North Saami was visible, and it could function as a learning environment for Saami language education.
In Helsinki, there is a public school in Pasila with a North Saami language nest program (grades 1–9), and the University of Helsinki offers courses in North Saami. These communities need living language environments.
Third, and closely connected to language environments, there is a need for game development terminology in Saami languages. When I curated this exhibition, the original exhibition materials were multilingual, including English thematic texts for the game jam and audio content in Skolt Saami, Inari Saami, and North Saami. These are the three Saami languages spoken on the Finnish side of Sápmi. The exhibition was fully translated into North Saami, the most widely spoken Saami language. However, developing North Saami terminology for game making became a process in itself, requiring us to examine the nature of making games. Is game making like cooking, cleaning, or building, such as carpentry?
Saami histories of games offered guidance here. Traditional Saami games include analog forms of play using materials such as reindeer bones and wood. The act of making these games is described with a verb associated with the creation of Saami handicrafts. That same word was chosen to describe digital game making in the exhibition. Games such as Sáhkku and other analog forms of play remind us that Saami game making has always existed as part of knowledge transmission and social connection. In addition, traditional Saami handicraft, duodji, has long lived on through the craftsmanship of games.
The exhibition is now preparing for a powerful new chapter. On 31 March 2026, Digital Natives? Saami Games Now! will open at Siida Saami Museum, where it will run for six months. This iteration includes Saami board games from the museum’s collections, tracing a long and continuous lineage of play, design, and craftsmanship. Bringing the exhibition to Siida Saami Museum also shifts the center of gravity when games are presented within Saami cultural space, on Saami terms, and in dialogue with Saami histories and futures.
Looking Ahead to Spring 2026
When the exhibition opens on 31 March 2026, visitors will encounter:
- Playable Saami digital games alongside the themes that shaped their creation
- Commercial games such as Raanaa – the Shaman Girl and Skábma – Snowfall
- A video reel documenting games and designers from the past decade
- Saami board games from museum collections
- Multilingual exhibition materials in English, North Saami, Skolt Saami, and Inari Saami
- Saami game design presented as a living, evolving practice
Read more:
DIGITAL NATIVES? SAAMI GAMES NOW! Exhibition Highlights Indigenous Voices in Game Development
This exhibition is made possible with the support of the Kone Foundation project Biocultural Heritage and Non-Linear Time and Siida Sámi Museum.