Migration and interactive narrative in video games: scale, ethics, and experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT A number of contemporary video games (and particularly independently developed or ‘indie’ games) explore migration in ways that are designed to elicit productive discomfort in Western audiences. In this article, I build on a combination of games research, narrative theory, and migration studies to examine how these games enrich and complicate the cultural representation of migration. My focus is on how different scales of migration converge in game experiences (and in the narratives bound up with those experiences), immersing the player in moral dilemmas that have no clear solution or ideal outcome. I study four indie games that deploy this conceptual and emotional dynamic within different genres: Papers, Please (2013), Bury Me, My Love (2017), Frostpunk (2018), and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018). By putting the player in touch with a variety of fictional migrants, these games walk a fine line between empathy for individual migrants and understanding of the large-scale factors that shape the lived experience of migration and the discourse surrounding it. Games thus mirror the real-world complexity of migration but also afford opportunities for more critical, or distanced, reflection than is possible in engaging with, for example, factual representation in the media.