What do video games have to offer refugees?
A new feasibility study explores what video games have to offer forcibly displaced and stateless people — not only as players but as creators.
By Dr. Jess Rowan Marcotte (Consultant for Refugee Engagement with Video Games), Petar Dimitrov (Innovation and Transformation Lead, UNHCR North Macedonia) and John Warnes (Innovation Officer)
Have you ever played a video game? Do you remember picking up your first game controller? Do you remember the first time that you lost? Maybe you ran into an angry mushroom that made you restart a Mario Bros level. Maybe the screen slowly filled up with Tetris blocks as that iconic theme song played in the background. Maybe your first game was Candy Crush, and you reached a level that seemed impossible.
Did you give up or did you try again? Was it fun to try anyway, even when it was difficult?
In video games, players usually fail before they succeed. They face challenges and surprises that are often unpredictable the first time around. To keep trying in the face of failure requires tenacity, resilience, patience and attentiveness, just for starters.
Games are known to be excellent tools for fun and leisure, which is innately important, but they can also improve learning, boost mental health, support social and economic inclusion, and generate livelihood opportunities. Because of these possible benefits, UNHCR is conducting a new feasibility study that examines what video games have to offer displaced communities, not only as players but as creators, and to ask what these communities want out of video games.
🎮 If you’ve experienced forced displacement, you can further this work by taking a survey!
The right to rest and leisure
Having enough rest and leisure is how a person maintains physical and mental health, overall happiness and wellbeing. Leisure time allows us to recover, get inspired, and prepare for the challenges ahead. It is, in and of itself, essential to leading a fulfilled and dignified life. In fact, rest and leisure are so important to a person’s wellbeing that they are broadly considered human rights. For these reasons, leisure activities — like reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a game — should have a place in the design of humanitarian interventions.
When it comes to digital leisure, there are over 5 billion people online, spending an average of six and a half hours a day connected. As a growing proportion of our personal and professional lives takes place online, so, too, do leisure activities. Given the internet’s prevalence, most of us probably take it for granted. But not everyone has the same ease of access.
If you had a single hour of internet per day, what would you do with it? Would you spend that hour sending work emails and studying Wikipedia? Or would you catch up with your friends and family, maybe read the news and watch an episode of your favourite show? In other words, how much of that hour would you spend engaging in leisure activities — ones that bring you joy and relaxation?
Thanks to recent UNHCR research into the Digital Leisure Divide, we know how crucial digital access is for the well-being of refugees. Digital access allows refugees to stay connected to loved ones, find community, express their challenges and experiences, access important information, and much more. We also now have a sense of how challenging it can be to maintain that access. For example, many refugees have access to mobile devices, but may have intermittent access to internet connectivity or charging stations to keep these devices powered. Some refugees further experience restricted digital mobility because of lower digital literacy rates (this is especially true for women, girls, and the elderly), and a general lack of online content in their native languages.
Given the prevalence of games and their role in digital leisure — as shared activities and online community spaces — this research led us to ask the core question of a new feasibility study into video games and the forcibly displaced: What do video games have to offer displaced and stateless persons, not only as players but as creators?
Gaming improves physical and mental health
Beyond the intrinsic value of rest and leisure, play has been shown to release endorphins, improve brain functionality, support injury rehabilitation, and stimulate creativity. It also happens to be one of the best ways to learn skills and acquire knowledge. When it comes to playing video games, evidence suggests that it is time well spent!
Across the world, people use play to learn to cope physically and emotionally with unexpected, potentially harmful events, invent new, sometimes useful tools and practices, and learn to cooperate and co-exist with others. Current research suggests that playing games can have many positive impacts in areas such as learning and education, mental health outcomes, rehabilitation after an injury, and much, much more.
A study of more than 3,000 young children from across six countries found that playing five or more hours of video games per week was “significantly associated with higher intellectual functioning, increased academic achievement, a lower prevalence of peer relationship problems and a lower prevalence of mental health difficulties.”
Meanwhile, just 14 hours of gameplay across eight weeks showed a self-reported positive effect on communication ability, adaptability, and resourcefulness in adult learners. Other studies show positive mental health impacts for military veterans managing mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and people coping with stress during COVID-19 lockdowns.
There’s no reason to think these benefits would not apply to displaced populations, if they are empowered to access play opportunities. Indeed, in Turkey, an online game-based intervention for Syrian refugee children called Project Hope has been shown to have had a positive effect on education, language acquisition, and mental health. After participating in this short pilot program, the children showed “significant improvements in Turkish language acquisition, coding, executive functioning and overall sense of hopefulness”.
Being a part of a community and being included
The benefits of sports as a tool for social inclusion and overall wellbeing are well recognized in the humanitarian and development space. Alongside their benefits to physical health and stress relief, sports build camaraderie and teamwork skills like cooperation and communication. Although the barriers to accessing video games are different (and perhaps higher, in some cases), just as sport provides psychosocial support and community, so, too, can video games.
If you’ve ever seen a child proudly giving a tour of their Minecraft base to a parent or a friend or experienced such a tour for yourself, it is easy to see how video games can create meaningful moments of socialization and intimacy. What you may not know is that players who game online together regularly create strong social ties that extend into offline social support for each other. This has been found to be especially true for e-sports and games involving teams that engage in shared play with shared goals. So, the friendship and teamwork that makes sports so special is also present in the gaming sphere.
Sports can also provide opportunities for integration with host communities, simply by enabling displaced and stateless people to do the same things in the same forums as everyone else. In some ways, this shared forum is more easily available in an online space than in person. Although digital devices can be costly, that investment removes the need for organization, physical proximity, and travel. This expands the opportunities to socialize and belong to communities for people with disabilities and those who simply feel more comfortable in an online forum. It also means that, for, example, displaced and stateless children with online access can more easily and regularly share online spaces with their counterparts without needing a special opportunity or organized activity to do so.
Digital skills and livelihoods through video games
After fleeing war or persecution, one of the most effective ways people can rebuild their lives in peace and with dignity is by gaining access to work opportunities. Games can help!
For starters, being immersed in digital environments improves digital literacy — a near-universally important skillset across modern professions, and one that is especially crucial for remote work. More specifically, skills from gamemaking — for instance, programming, animation, storytelling, and communication — can be transferred to other areas, boosting employability. Some games teach the basics of many of these skills through their play and through player-created content. These skills can also be self-taught through online tutorials.
One potential outcome of UNHCR’s new feasibility study is an event or series of events during which forcibly displaced people could start learning how to make games. Learning to create games can be empowering and help marginalized people tell their stories. Lual Mayen, who was displaced from South Sudan as an infant, and Jack Gutmann, who fled Syria as a young adult, are two examples of game designers who have lived experience of forced displacement — and who are using their skills to shine a light on that experience.
Both have worked to make games that inform people about the difficult journeys refugees are compelled to take to survive. Path Out, which Gutmann helped design with the Causa Creation team, enables players to experience for themselves his perilous journey out of Syria. Mayen’s game, Salaam, allows players to buy supplies for refugees; these are delivered with the help of UNHCR and other organizations. For these designers, video games have been a conduit for self expression, professional growth, and the ability to help others.
Tapping into the potential of video games
Any one of the benefits we have discussed would be cause for taking the humanitarian potential of video games seriously. Put together, they suggest video games could be a powerful force — although by no means a panacea — for improving the lives of displaced and stateless persons. It is time for humanitarian organizations to include video games and digital play in their strategies.
Seeing this potential, UNHCR North Macedonia and the Innovation Service are running a study to explore how refugees engage with gaming and which skills they’d like to develop.
We know that displaced and stateless people have unique and important insight into their own experiences. We believe their expertise must drive decisions that affect them.
We’ll be drawing information from existing literature and data, surveys of displaced communities and UNHCR staff, and interviews with stakeholders with experience in UNHCR as well as experts who run inclusive game-oriented events. We’ll also host a co-design workshop to ensure that forcibly displaced people help shape the interventions that affect them directly.
One major question we’re hoping to answer is: What do forcibly displaced people want for themselves when it comes to video games? This is an opportunity for us to discover whether current perceptions and assumptions about the needs of refugees and forcibly displaced people match their own stated wants and needs.
For now, we’re aiming to be open and curious — and we know we might encounter some failures before we succeed — which happens to be a good approach both to video games and life itself.
We are currently conducting a survey about video games in the humanitarian context. If you consider yourself a refugee, or someone who has fled violence or persecution, we want to hear from you.
The survey is available in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic (you can select your language at the top right corner). Please feel free to share the survey widely!
