Abstract
This article provides a comprehensive, worldwide overview of the major video games that have addressed the phenomenon of migration, and the political, social and cultural issues that migration raises. We develop the concept of ‘transcultural understanding’ to explore how such migration-related video games can structure the development of players’ understanding of, and capacity to respond to, the contexts of cultural diversity. Our deeper, comparative analysis of three migration-related video games—Escape from Woomera (EFW Team, 2003), Papers, Please (Lukas Pope, 2013) and Everyday Racism (All Together Now, 2014)—enables us to evaluate the contextual knowledge required and the issues raised for each migration-related video game to achieve its goals. This article advances the research areas of ‘media, migration and global communication’ and ‘games studies’, and offers insights for scholars, educators and game developers who are interested in addressing the internationally significant issue of migration through their professional work.
Introduction and Overview of Migration-related Video games
Migration-related video games can now be seen to form a relatively diverse group or sub-genre. Compared to some of the video game industry’s favoured topics—such as, for example, war—few migration-related video games have been produced. Nonetheless, migration-related video games have grown in visibility and have been produced in an increasingly broad range of contexts—including educational, art and commercial contexts—in recent years. Accordingly, we argue that video games are now a key media form for the representation of migration, and for exploring the political, social and cultural issues migration raises. Each individual migration-related video game may have its own strategy for representing migration, and in order to establish the capacity for migration-related video games to structure the development of players’ understanding of contexts of cultural diversity we have adopted a comparative approach in this article.
Gabriel (2015) analyzed 11 ‘serious games’ which critique the regulatory, political and employment contexts in which migration occurs, and we have added an additional eight video games (see Table 1). These games span a range of production contexts, including projects created by charities and activist groups, commercial games, NGO projects and scholarly experiments. Stylistically, these games are also diverse, and include first person adventure games, point-and-click games, digital board games and simulation games. This diversity reflects the breadth of time over which these games have been created, given the trends in popularity of genres, the availability and complexity of game-making tools, and the kinds of creators who have been able to make migration-related video games over time. We can see in Table 1, for example, the predominance of these games as art projects early on, which gradually morphs into the dominance of university research projects, NGO commissions and commercial games in more recent times as game making has become more accessible and accepted as a way to represent potentially complex topics such as migration.
A Chronological Outline of Key Migration-related Video Games
Additionally, most migration-related video games are found on open distribution platforms—many are free downloads or played online through a web browser—rather than the closed, proprietary systems typical of the video games industry, such as the home video game consoles of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, where controversial, challenging or complex material is more closely regulated and limited. Again in Table 1 we see the more recent emergence of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android platform as distribution platforms, though these are not without their own issues. ‘If you want to criticize a religion, write a book’, reads Apple’s App Store Guidelines. ‘We have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store’ (Apple, 2013). As Gabriel notes, the producers of the video games, Smuggle Truck (Owlchemy Labs, 2012) and Papers, Please (Lukas Pope, 2013) were forced to make changes in order to be published on the App Store (2015, p. 106). These regulatory measures often mean that migration-related video games often exist outside of the core video games industry. There are multiple implications for this, including the accessibility of these games for a general audience, and the widespread willingness of commercial companies—rather than video game makers whose motivations and measures of success may lie outside of profit, such as artists, activists and academics—to create migration-related video games.
The large majority of these games simulate the migrant’s experience for the player by directly asking them to play as migrants. Key points of difference can be found, however, in Homeland Guantanamo (Breakthrough, 2008—where players are tasked with being an undercover journalist interviewing people in the Guantanamo Bay military prison), Papers, Please (which asks players to become an immigration officer at a border checkpoint) and 1378 (km) (Jens M. Stober, 2010—which, controversially, allows the player to take on the role of a border guard shooting at attempted escapees moving between East and West Germany).
Therefore, in this article, we have chosen to focus our analysis on three games that reflect this range of contexts, styles, and representational focus in the growing area of video games representing migration: Escape From Woomera (EFW, 2003—a non-commercial work of activism that features the migrant’s perspective), Papers, Please (a commercial work that asks players to take on the role of a migration official) and Everyday Racism (All Together Now, 2014—a mobile game where players witness racism from the perspective of four possible characters [one from a migrant family, one international student, one Australian Aboriginal man, or players may choose to play as themselves], created by a charity and three Australian universities).
Transcultural Understanding, Migration and Video Games
‘Transcultural literacy’ is the capacity of all individuals in society to live meaningfully in spaces that are confluences of cultural meanings and practices, spaces that overlap and interrelate with one another (Kostogriz & Tsolidis, 2008). According to a history of the global governance of media and communication through the intergovernmental institution of UNESCO, global society’s strategies for managing resources for cultural diversity have shifted from addressing structural inequalities in global cultural flow, to educating individuals to develop transcultural literacy in the context of the free flow of culture and regard for cultural diversity (Hepp, 2015). At a local level, education in a multicultural society is not simply about assisting minorities to acquire literacy in the dominant culture to assimilate into the nation-state; more than this, educators are called to facilitate the transcultural literacy of all individuals in society (Kostogriz & Tsolidis, 2008).
Concepts of the transcultural situate one’s own sociocultural context within a broader context of cultural diversity. In contrast, cultural intelligence (CQ) assesses how well individuals are able to function effectively in an unfamiliar cultural context (Earley & Ang, 2003). In its original concept, CQ measures the extent to which individuals acquire knowledge of the new culture, sustain his/her commitment to function effectively in it, and translate their newly acquired cultural knowledge into culturally appropriate practices (Earley & Ang, 2003). Based on their review of the 10 years of research on CQ, the pioneers of the concept of CQ recommend that future research expands research into how individuals develop CQ and analyzes units other than the individual (Ng, Van Dyne, & Ang, 2012, pp. 48–49).
Consistent with these recommendations, this article explores how migration-related video games can structure the development of players’ understanding of, and capacity to respond to, the contexts of cultural diversity. We use the term ‘transcultural understanding’, rather than ‘transcultural literacy’ or CQ, to focus on how we can use video games to redefine our knowledge about our cultural contexts within a global, culturally diverse society.
In mainstream news, films and games, experiences of migration tend to be either idealized in terms of upward socioeconomic mobility or catastrophized in terms of human and national insecurity (Orgad, 2012). The complex tensions between human and territorial rights are often simplified in media representations of asylum and immigration, with national media framing migration according to communitarian values that prioritize the sustenance of national society, and global media promoting cosmopolitan perception of migrants’ shared humanity (Balabanova, 2014). United Nations campaigns call for us to attend and respond to the issue of forced displacement and migration, by guiding us to imagine how we might feel if we were refugees, and reasoning that we will cultivate a higher level of morality as we engage with refugee issues through the celebrity and humanitarian organization brands that advocate for refugees (Chouliaraki, 2012). However, it would be more ethical for us to create media that recognizes and raises awareness of the fact that forced displacement and migration are symptoms of a historically unjust global society in which refugees are exercising their limited agency; in this context, our responses are judgements we make regarding justice, and they do not just depend on what we would personally prefer or how we feel (Chouliaraki, 2012).
An emerging account of a first-hand experience of migration on social media suggests that the vision of a personal future shaped by migration can be characterized by a local experience of ambivalence (Orgad, 2012). Since migration behaviour occurs in the context of multiple considerations (e.g., environmental, political, demographic, social, economic, personal), researchers have developed a game (Island World) to experiment with migration scenarios and collect data on player actions, in order to inform policy decisions about migration (Stoll, Malave, Campbell & White, 2013). Critical views of particular territorial contexts of migration are deliberately encoded in many games; however, a dominant decoding of these views requires awareness of developers’ intentions in relation to local contexts of development; without this awareness, misunderstandings about patterns of migration experiences can result (Gabriel, 2015).
As listed in Table 1, many of the games that have represented migration simulate the experience of migrants to highlight specific politics of injustice and the limited agency migrants exercise in these contexts. Audience research shows that the interactive, simulated features of documentary games such as Asylum Exit Australia (Chocolate Liberation Front, 2011) can contribute to civic engagement with social issues by encouraging reflection on personal situations within a credible representation of the social reality of forced migration (Nash, 2015). However, although documentary games can offer players opportunities to think critically about social/historical reality by interactively engaging players in consciously performing the experience of the game’s characters, the gaps between the design of the documentary game EFW, the real experience of a detainee in Woomera (an immigration detention centre in an arid and remote part of south Australia), and the player’s experience encourage the player to focus on progressively completing the quest rather than reflecting on issues of mandatory detention of asylum seekers (Poremba, 2013).
Comparative Analysis
The three games selected for our comparative analysis represent three distinct approaches, contexts and styles when it comes to migration-related video games. EFW, one of the first video games to specifically and directly deal with themes of migration and the experience of refugees, was created in Australia as an art project with a political and cultural agenda. It is a first-person perspective game that is designed to make an intervention partly through representation alone (as the detention centre it is set in was unable to be photographed or filmed at the time), and it was deeply controversial at the time of its creation in 2003. ‘Apart from postings on gaming message boards, pro-refugee e-lists, and games industry news sites, EFW has made it into classrooms, onto TV comedy shows, and, significantly, onto talkback radio’, wrote one commentator at the time (Swalwell, 2003). Papers, Please is a commercial, independently produced video game by an American, Lucas Pope, living in Japan from 2013. It asks the player to take on the role of a migration official working on a fictional border in 1982, creating a level of temporal and spatial abstraction for the player from the reality of the issues it engages with. It was a critical and commercial success. Everyday Racism, a project created by a charity and three Australian Universities in 2014, allows the player to take on one of four roles, including an Australian Aboriginal man, a second-generation Muslim woman, and an Indian student. As an app on iOS and Android mobile devices, it delivers the player incidents of racism over the course of seven days in real time, including audio recordings, simulated emails and cartooned events (such as an encounter with a shop assistant), asking the player how they would respond to each.
EFW is a video game that is deeply framed by the context within which it was created. Worked on in 2003 and 2004 by a group of video game and media professionals living and working in Australia, EFW has the player take on the role of Mustafa, an Iranian asylum seeker being held at the Woomera immigration detention centre in South Australia. The player is told that their request for asylum has been refused, and instead of returning to Iran, where Mustafa fears death, the player must try to escape from the centre. EFW is played in first-person perspective within a detailed recreation of the detention centre. Players can move around the centre and interact with fellow detainees and guards: as the player successfully moves towards escape, a ‘hope’ meter increases, however, when the player is required to listen to the experiences of fellow detainees the hope meter depletes, as it also does if Mustafa is placed in solitary confinement when caught breaking the rules. If the hope meter empties, the game is over and Mustafa loses the ability to attempt an escape.
EFW can, therefore, be approached through a lens of representation. EFW was created as an overtly political critique of Australia’s John Howard-era policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers arriving in the country by boat. At the time, this policy was highly contested within Australian society and politics, and although Australia’s refugee policies have shifted since to offshore detention under the Labor Gillard government and, contemporarily, the Liberal Abbott and Turnbull governments, it remains a divisive topic, as illustrated in the third season of the Go Back to Where You Came From series broadcast in 2015 by the Special Broadcasting Service, Australia’s multicultural public service media organization.
Particularly important to EFW was the question of media access. Media access to Australia’s detention centres was heavily restricted, and any sort of representation in any form of the experiences of detainees within these centres was limited. Although Poremba (2013, p. 359) argues that EFW succeeds more ‘in crafting insight into the enacted subjectivity of Woomera refugees’, than by ‘immersing players in a physical space’, the game’s creators have suggested that representing the Woomera environment was in itself a key motivation for creating the game. Katharine Neil, the project’s leader, said in a 2013 interview that she felt that this represented an advantage for approaching the project as a video game, given the ability to recreate real spaces in games without the need for access in the same way that other forms might require. ‘Our statement was “You say we can’t have access—here’s access”’, said Neil. ‘Here’s access for everyone. You say we can’t take photos, or film, inside these places—okay, fine! We don’t do photos. We don’t do film. We do games’ (Golding, 2013). The centre was carefully created with assistance and input from ex-detainees who had been in the centre, and a floor plan that was leaked to the team by someone in the Department of Immigration. ‘We can model stuff based on people’s memories’, Neil explained, ‘What other medium can do that?’ (Golding, 2013).
Papers, Please, on the other hand, takes a conscious level of abstraction to its representation of migration. As Papers, Please is a commercial game, rather than an art or activist project relating to any specific situation, creator Lucas Pope has chosen to transport the player to a fictional Communist country more than three decades earlier in history. The player, as a migration official on the Arstotzka border, must make ethical decisions (negotiating between commitment to humanity, nation and family) regarding the acceptance or denial of entry to the territory, on a case-by-case basis, and in the context of his/her everyday life (family circumstances, work performance).
Papers, Please is partly a game about process, and the bureaucratic systems that underpin global migration, and can therefore be thought of through Bogost’s lens of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007). For Bogost, video games can use processes persuasively, as a ‘way to make claims about how things work’ (2007, p. 29). Papers, Please therefore attempts to make certain claims about how the bureaucratic systems that govern migration function through their simulation. Indeed, the basic rhythm of the game remains fairly steady: the player is presented with a would-be migrant, who offers their documentation. The player checks the documentation against an increasing level of complex standards, including date validation, country and city of issue, name, headshot and gender, and additional visa entry cards. Sometimes, would-be migrants will acknowledge that their documentation is insufficient, but will give reasons as to why they should be let in anyway. The player can let them in, deny them or have them arrested, but incorrect admissions will see the player’s pay docked, which impacts on the ability of the player to feed their family. That this will inevitably result in either the player harming their family as a result of their compassion, or the player excluding those in genuine need in order to protect their family is part of Papers, Please’s procedural rhetoric, and its representation of systems. Accordingly, Papers, Please is less concerned with modelling individual ethical decisions than it is with the impact of the bureaucratic systems that govern such decisions.
Finally, Everyday Racism represents the experience of racial minority individuals in Australia through a process of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2000), offering players tweets, emails and audio recordings in a hypermediated (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) smartphone aesthetic. It is unsurprising that Everyday Racism would choose this connected, social media-era aesthetic, as it takes clear inspiration from longstanding social media campaigns, such as the Everyday Sexism project, which includes a website, Tumblr blog and Twitter hashtag where users publically share experiences of sexism and campaign for change. Everyday Racism offers players the opportunity to experience subtle and overt racism from the perspective of an international student and a second-generation Australian in a similar scenario-based sense to Papers, Please, where players are confronted with a situation and asked how they will respond.
The national definition of characters and target audience in Everyday Racism reflects the project team—All Together Now is Australia’s only national charity focused on addressing racism, and the three partner universities are all based in Australia, although Deakin University’s Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation works within a global perspective. Each of the three characters was modelled on people who shared identities with the fictional characters and who worked with All Together Now on the project. Accordingly, compared to Papers, Please, Everyday Racism has the potential to communicate a greater sense of intimacy with these stories.
Each of these three video games faced a different reception from players and the wider community when it came to their representation of migration. Significantly, beyond its direct representation of migration, EFW was also intended to be a statement regarding the cultural status of video games, and the potential for the medium to represent topics normally considered ‘off limits’ for what might be disregarded as an unserious or frivolous medium. Thus, the industrial circumstances that surrounded the production of EFW also bear some attention. In the early 2000s, video game production remained a costly prospect, which meant under-resourced, arts-focussed and non-professional developers were often rarities. Today, production software and hardware can be cheap if not free entirely, while distribution platforms can be relatively easily accessed via the internet—all systems from which Papers, Please and Everyday Racism have benefitted. The contemporary proliferation of small-to-medium Australian video game development studios also speaks to this shift in the material nature of industrial production in this context (Apperley & Golding, 2015). However, in the era of EFW, independent video game production was piecemeal and fraught (Ruffino, 2012).
In this context, EFW was highly controversial, and it is for this more than anything else that it is widely remembered today. When federal funding body the Australia Council announced that it had awarded $25,000 to the EFW team, the game was launched into the national spotlight where it received a largely critical reception from all sides of Australia’s refugee politics. Howard-era Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock said that the Australia Council decision to award the game $25,000 ‘reflected badly on the Australia Council and its judgement’ (Golding, 2013). Joy Belush, the mayor of Port Augusta (near the Baxter immigration detention centre), accused the Australia Council of ‘acting like traitors’ (Golding, 2015). Even those who had been advocating for an end to the policy of mandatory detention criticized EFW: Margaret Piper, executive director of the Refugee Council, said that the game was ‘trivialising something that is enormously serious’ (Golding, 2013), while Sev Ozdowski, Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, said ‘The idea of using issues in detention for entertainment is simply sick’ (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2016).
In contrast, Papers, Please has won many major awards in the global games, technology and media industries, including the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the 2014 Independent Games Festival, and the ‘Best Simulation Game’ at the 2014 British Academy (BAFTA) Game Awards. It has also been well received by critics (Metacritic, 2013) and players (Steam, 2013) alike. Little of the controversy that followed EFW has been associated with Papers, Please, despite the fact that the game has arguably a much greater potential for immoral acts (e.g., the player could choose to vindictively refuse entry to any migrant). There are two likely explanations for this: first, that in the 10 years between EFW and Papers, Please, the potential for video games to represent ‘serious’ topics has become more commonly understood and accepted; and secondly, as Papers, Please represents a fictional location, three decades earlier, players can approach the game’s subject matter at a remove.
Everyday Racism has also been recognized with awards, funding and mentorship courtesy of the United Nations, in UN competitions such as the Intercultural Innovation Award and PEACEapp that encourage the pioneering development of media, in particular digital games, to facilitate dialogue and peace in contexts of cultural diversity. However, Everyday Racism was polarising for users. On Google Play, it has scored 2.5 out of 5 stars based on 184 reviews (Google Play, 2016). A significant proportion of negative reviews related to technical issues. However, another theme of negative user reviews regards the game’s representation of racism—these reviewers claim the game was biased towards a particular racial (minority) or political (progressive) perspective, arguing the game itself was racist by omitting or negatively portraying the perspective of the dominant culture. However, according to Everyday Racism creators All Together Now, a survey suggested that since playing, 76.5 per cent of players have increased awareness of racist talk and actions, while 60 per cent have spoken up against racism since playing (All Together Now, 2016).
Nonetheless, the technical problems identified in user reviews for Everyday Racism raise questions of access that are mirrored in EFW. At the time when Ruddock, Belush, Piper and Ozdowski made their comments regarding the game, EFW had not yet actually been completed, let alone played by any of them. Today, the game has still been played by relatively few people, as the amount of funding the project received was at the time only enough to create a prototype: in other words, EFW was never formally released or distributed. The prototype, however, was made available and is still available online, and has been displayed at an ever-growing list of art galleries and museums. Yet the technical difficulties in getting a non-commercial piece of software from 2004—built as a modification of a piece of software from 1998—to run on a contemporary computer means that EFW remains, as it was in 2003, more of a spectre of media representation of migration than something with which people have first-hand experience.
Nonetheless, the discourse that surrounds EFW leaves it as a key project in the history of video games and as a pioneer in allowing video games to engage with ‘serious’ issues. That migration and seeking asylum were the issues at the heart of this moment is illustrative, and helps frame the context for more recent video games, such as Papers, Please and Everyday Racism, that represent migration.
Construction of Space
EFW simulates the experience of being ‘arrested in space’ (Witteborn, 2011, p. 1144) as a consequence of unauthorized immigration. The player’s character is confined within a place of policing. Here, the state exercises its authority over a particular institutional category of migrants—unauthorized immigrants. The game is situated in a specific scenario of irregular migration in which individuals who have entered the state’s territory without its authorization are living in detention and restricted in their capacities to exit. As the characters’ presence and imprisonment in space suggest that they have transgressed federally regulated borders, the space represented in the game signifies the territory of the sovereign state as it is policed physically, legally and normatively.
Compared to EFW, the highly regulated border of the state territory is represented more literally in Papers, Please. Papers, Please is located at the physical territorial border that demarcates, from the perspective of the sovereign state, the domestic from the international. In EFW, unauthorized mobility is spatially contained indefinitely within the Australian state’s territory; in contrast, in Papers, Please, mobility is paused very briefly at the point of entry to the state’s territory. Whereas EFW assumes that the physical, legal and normative boundaries of state territory are objective and absolute, Papers, Please problematizes the border, as a subjective ethical space where legal boundaries are open to change and normative boundaries are contingent.
Whereas the normative spaces of EFW and Papers, Please are rooted in the state’s political and legal regulation of territory, the normative spaces of Everyday Racism are constructed through individual social actors’ expressions of cultural dominance. Everyday Racism shows how individuals within a particular society are differentially positioned in space according to the cultural backgrounds they are socially ascribed. However, when local society is realistically represented and cultural distance between the player and the playable character is coupled with cultural proximity between the player and negatively represented non-playable characters, players are likely to, and indeed do, resist the narrative and literacy goals of the game (as the negative reviews of the game show).
Construction of Social Relations
All three games concretize macro-level relations (between state, society and culture) at the micro-level (in interactions between individuals). EFW and Papers, Please foreground the extremely unequal relations between the state and its immigrants by representing immigrants as individuals within state institutional systems, whereas Everyday Racism draws attention to the unequal status of different cultural groups as they relate within Australian society, by showing how social actors maintain these relations of inequality through everyday acts of discrimination based on cultural difference.
In EFW and Papers, Please, immigrants’ identities are defined and their mobility is regulated within state institutional processes of detention, surveillance, and border control. In both games, individuals experience the material and emotional consequences of navigating the oppressive regime and punitive actions of the state. In EFW, the unauthorized immigrant cannot escape being labelled by the state as deviant. In Papers, Please, the immigrant is dependent on the customs official’s subjective decision-making in the context of the state’s regulations of the day. Immigrants are defined as individual cases as their own legal documents are presented in one-to-one interactions with the customs official; immigrants are relativized as their applications to enter the territory are assessed one after another, with the assessment outcomes of each immigrant contingent on the assessment outcomes of immigrants ahead in the queue.
The three games position immigrants within different hierarchies of power and options for resistance. EFW positions unauthorized immigrants within a slight hierarchy based on the distinction between playable and non-playable characters. Unlike the non-playable characters who wander within the detention centre, the playable character demonstrates some agency and resistance by strategically attempting to escape his conditions of coerced immobility, although his attempts to escape are extremely limited and proven to be ultimately futile. This sense of imprisonment reflects the position of asylum seekers within the Australian government’s management of immigration at the time of the game’s development. The strong reaction to EFW from the Howard government illustrates that the game challenged the existing hierarchy of power. In the hierarchy of Papers, Please, the institution of the state has the power to create, change and enforce immigration regulations; the customs official is a financially dependent delegate of the state who implements the state’s immigration regulations with some subjective discretion; and potential immigrants have different probabilities of entering the state’s territory as the strength of each immigrant’s case for entry depends on the interplay of multiple factors related to the state, the customs official and chance (e.g., their position within the queue and their legal documents relative to the regulations of the day and the circumstances of the customs official). In contrast to EFW and Papers, Please, Everyday Racism intentionally prompts a response to each act of discrimination, suggests a choice between multiple options of response (including the seeking of support from authority figures), and gives individuals the capacity to resist discrimination effectively.
Discussion and Conclusion
Through their various constructions of space and social relations, the migration-related critiques that the three games present differ in their emphases as well as in their goals and requirements for players’ existing and envisioned transcultural understanding.
EFW focuses on the desperate and deteriorating circumstances that define individual unauthorized immigrants’ experiences and inform their actions. This emphasis on the experience of extreme human insecurity is a common representational strategy (Orgad, 2012). In this strategy of ‘intercultural bridgework’ (Sobré-Denton & Bardhan, 2013), the cultural distance between the different life worlds represented by the player and the character is bridged as the human experience of the consequences of a particular state policy is communicated through realistic representation and shared through simulation. By using interactivity and simulation to encourage personal reflection on the reality of forced and unauthorized immigration, the game promises to promote civic engagement towards social and policy change (Nash, 2015). However, while the implicit representation of the role of the Australian state in policing unauthorized immigration might suggest that any change in the lived realities of unauthorized immigrants depends on the reform of institutional policy, this point is likely to resonate only with players who are familiar and politically aligned with developers’ political aims. Chouliaraki’s (2012) critique of United Nations campaigns can be applied to this case: EFW raises the profile of the voices of unauthorized immigrants and translates them in an emotionally meaningful way, while this rebalancing of the cultural structures of migration discourse is a worthy goal, what is missing in public understanding of unauthorized migration is an explanation of how unauthorized migration is symptomatic of inequalities in the political and legal structures of global society, and a more nuanced appreciation of global justice as a justification for alternative forms of state and civic action on unauthorized migration.
A critique of the political and legal structures of international society is what Papers, Please offers, as it thematizes through repetition the idea that the regulation of migration is arbitrary, changeable and subjective. Although the representation of immigration in a fictional world means that diverse players can engage with a variety of ethical issues and scenarios from a position of cultural distance, this position is also one of political distance since the players’ appreciation of the theoretical complexities of migration management are not followed up with an explicitly defined path of practical action beyond the game. However, Papers, Please can be used as a resource for the training of reflexivity in migration-related decision-making, given that it is accessible to culturally diverse players, adaptable to various policy contexts and effective in deeply engaging players with a wide range of scenarios and trajectories.
By simulating minority experiences of discrimination and encouraging interactive responses, Everyday Racism promises to cultivate players’ empathy for minorities who experience discrimination and socialize appropriate behavioural responses. Everyday Racism aims to enhance ‘transcultural literacy’—the capacity of all individuals in society to live together in spaces of cultural diversity (Kostogriz & Tsolidis, 2008), as it promotes the agency of different individuals to address discrimination whether they identify with majority or minority culture. It can be an effective strategy of ‘intercultural bridgework’ (Sobré-Denton & Bardhan, 2013, Chapter 3) to position a player who identifies with the cultural majority in the role of a cultural minority character in a realistic, recognizable representation of local society; this is because the bridging of cultural distance is combined with sociopolitical proximity—the experience of empathy and the training in practical actions towards change can prepare players to take small steps to address discrimination on an everyday basis in the local contexts where they can act most effectively and continuously. The sustained accumulation of many small actions can lead to the consolidation of cultural change. However, the effectiveness of this strategy is challenged by the identification of the player with non-playable cultural majority characters who are negatively represented as perpetuators of discrimination. The game is likely to be more effective in deepening transcultural understanding by opening up the ethical space for players to encounter more nuanced representations of cultural difference and to negotiate for themselves the complexities of action—following the model Papers, Please has been able to develop in its commercial context.