Co-creating the future of refugee gaming
At the first RefJam Co-Design Workshop, refugees came together with UNHCR to share their perspectives on how to run video game events for displaced people — and to create innovative game controllers.
By Dr. Jess Rowan Marcotte, Consultant for Refugee Engagement with Video Games, and Petar Dimitrov, Associate Innovation Officer (Digital Innovation)
In the digital age, access to digital leisure isn’t just beneficial — it’s indispensable for leading a fulfilled and dignified life. This is just as true for people forced to flee as for anyone else. Recent research by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, on the Digital Leisure Divide has illuminated the vital necessity of ensuring displaced individuals have access to digital leisure to support their overall wellbeing. This access serves as a crucial avenue for refugees to rest, recuperate, maintain connections with loved ones, build community, access essential information, and more.
For many, video games lie at the very heart of digital leisure. Such games act as both shared activities and online community spaces with the potential to transform the lives of forcibly displaced people, as outlined in our previous article on what video games have to offer refugees. Since that piece was published, our teams at UNHCR’s Innovation Service and UNHCR North Macedonia have been busy deepening our feasibility research on this topic, to better understand what forcibly displaced people might want from games.
We’ve focused, in particular, on consulting the foremost experts: refugees themselves.
The workshop
In September, we met with a small, diverse group of refugees in Helsinki to co-design elements of what we’re calling “RefJam” — a game-making event for people forced to flee. Research with many populations suggests that game jams can be valuable spaces for learning and self-expression, empowering those who take part. We believe that providing refugees with support and mentorship for learning activities related to digital livelihoods in a jam context could have an immensely positive impact. This first co-design event aimed to test those assumptions.
The co-designers at the workshop included two young transgender refugees (one transmasculine person and one nonbinary person) from Eurasian regions where this part of their identity puts them at risk, a woman who was first internally displaced and then had to leave her country to come to Finland, and two men from the Middle Eeast and North Africa region, one of whom was an older man. Together, we explored the complexities of designing an event aimed at diverse refugee audiences.
Here’s how we spent our time together:
Breaking the ice with games
To break the ice and start to get to know each other, we played Spaceteam, which is known as a “cooperative shouting game” for up to eight players. It was exactly as chaotic as advertised! Each player is the captain of a ship and also one of its officers, taking orders from each other in rapid succession to keep the ship afloat. Through crashing a few ships and getting eaten by wormholes, we got better at working together and grew closer as a group. A great start to the day! In the end, we were one perfect disaster of a crew of captains, but we did manage to make it to level two.
Discussing refugee communities’ views on video games
We were curious to know what our group was interested in when it comes to video games. Did they see a potential for the medium to improve refugee lives and livelihoods? What do their communities think about the medium — and what might they need in order to feel good about participating in a gamemaking event?
With a focus on “my community feels”/“my community needs”, the following statements were crafted and revised in collaboration with our refugee co-designers, based on their experiences:
- My community feels guilt about engaging in leisure activities. A person might say: “I’m a refugee and I have work to do, I shouldn’t be smiling.” My community needs a chance to rest and play, to connect and be happy with other people.
- My community is struggling to meet basic needs and maintain mental wellbeing. I know people who would be very excited to learn to make games and pursue careers in the gaming industry, but not everyone can afford the time investment. My community needs to be supported in order to be able to get started.
- My community is wary of taking part in refugee-specific events. My community needs to not be treated with assumptions about what it means to be a refugee. We need to be treated as people, not identities.
- My community is traumatized. It can be painful, often at a subconscious level, to be approached with certain concepts, assumptions, and language. My community needs to work with people that understand these traumas and the cultural contexts we are coming from.
- My community might be intimidated to be around experts who seem to know everything about game design. A refugee-only space might be more comfortable, especially when delving into this area for the first time.
Making bespoke game controllers
The second day of the workshop began with a game design activity to give participants a taste of what making something playful and creative can be like. Together, we approached game design through the idea of control — and controllers.
The way a player interacts with a game and the game reacts to the player, from the most basic level of moving around the screen to much more complicated actions, has an important impact on how it feels to play with a game. This “game feel” is described by Steve Swink, in his 2009 book of the same name, as “the tactile, kinesthetic sense of manipulating a virtual object. It’s the sensation of control in a game.”
To explore this core game design concept, we made alternative controller prototypes using a collection of weird and wonderful materials hand-picked by our facilitators in the grocery and houseware stores around downtown Helsinki, as well as a microcontroller board called Makey Makey.
Looking at modern video games, the thought of making one might seem completely impossible for a beginner. The fact that our co-designers were able to go from mostly no experience with designing hardware to building working controllers in about three hours provided a confidence boost.
The beauty of working directly with materials is that they can surprise you and inspire you. In focusing on controllers, which are physical things that give players agency in a game, we were able to drastically change what it felt like to play those games while relying on everyday materials that can be found around us. This reframing of the everyday can have powerful creative implications for how we see our ability to transform the world around us and find innovative solutions.
By early afternoon, we had five prototype controllers:
- A skeleton Halloween decoration whose buttons worked when the figure clapped its hands or kicked its heels.
- A water-based midi controller that played beautiful music using sounds on Patatap.
- A classic arcade controller with tiny rubber ducks instead of arcade buttons that could be used to play Super Mario.
- A salty playdough and cardboard controller designed to work with a racing game.
- An eight-button silicone octopus fidget toy and playdough controller with the most satisfying and tactile buttons.
One reason we included this controller-making activity was to give our participants a smaller-scale experience of what it is like to learn game-making in a group context. This helped concretize our joint thinking about a larger-scale video game event. The exercise facilitated discussions about different stages of the planned RefJam event, from workshops on the basics of game design all the way to supporting participants once they’d made their first game.
Key takeaways
1 Community outreach must begin as early as possible, far before the event invitation, to ensure we reach those with the most interest and the most to gain from participation. One assumption we made in the leadup to the workshop — after positive feedback from many displaced people and humanitarian workers — was that hundreds of participants would eagerly sign up. After all, engaging with video games in the humanitarian context is novel and exciting! But it proved challenging to reach people in Helsinki. That experience, and the insights from our participants, taught us a valuable lesson: using word of mouth and building connections with community leaders is one of the best ways to reach people. We intend to work hard to earn trust and build these connections.
2 People may have difficulty identifying as a refugee at all or may feel shame or guilt about their status and their support needs. The constant reminder of their “otherness” can be exhausting. We learned from our co-designers that these differences are one reason why some refugees may be reluctant to attend refugee-focused events. For others, talking about their experience is an important part of both processing and advocating for themselves and others. These differing attitudes signal a need for different spaces to accommodate diverse perspectives and priorities at RefJam. Some participants may be eager to create a game about displacement, while others may not wish to discuss the topic at all, or choose to do so in a way that creates some degree of removal.
3 Refugee communities have additional support needs when it comes to being able to participate in non-essential activities. The workshop reaffirmed that taking time away from meeting basic needs can cause serious strain. So, fairly compensating refugees for their time and effort is an essential part of making these initiatives accessible and useful.
4 This co-design workshop also enabled us to, once again, ask and answer a central question: Do refugees want refugee-focused game events and do they think that RefJam is an idea worth pursuing? The answer was, unequivocally, Yes. As long as the event avoids essentializing refugee identity and painting with too broad a brush.
What comes next
Keep an eye out for publications arising from the feasibility study of which this workshop was a part. We’ll be releasing a series of short reports featuring more of what we learned from our surveys, interviews with experts, workshops, and desk research.
From there, we’ll be connecting with people across the world to develop RefJam, and other events like it that recognize the agency and talent of refugee communities. We know people forced to flee have a huge amount to contribute to video games, and that gaming could help to support the wellbeing, self-reliance, and self-expression of these communities.
Watch this space! 👀
Read more about this workstream and gain a greater understanding of the digital leisure divide. Do you work at the intersection of video games and forced displacement? Are you interested to support or complement our work in this field? Get in touch at hqconref@unhcr.org.
