How could these experiences of play help?

Jean-Michel Blottière, Co-President Games for Change Europe said it in the best possible way:

We don’t pretend we can solve the extremely complex issues involved in two days. They will take far longer to understand and master. We don’t think videogames are a kind of “magic wand” to be waved at Immigration or Integration. We certainly don’t claim we are specialists in answering these questions. Instead, our plan was simply to bring together game designers, researchers, activists, artists and others who recognize the importance of the topic, experts who are willing to explore how videogames can help. Two of the most important areas where videogames have proven to be successful are to educate, and to tackle critical issues without preaching. Combine those strengths with a game’s proven ability to build self-esteem in players, and they seem a perfect way for exploring such an important and timely subject. Video games already offer extremely powerful alternative education models. Would it be possible to create games that would educate migrants and refugees who don’t speak the language of the country where they’ve just arrived, but who can master the universal language of video games? We wanted to see if it is feasible to create videogames that would help restore the self-esteem of people who have been deprived of their social position, their everyday way of life, and find themselves living in tents in mud pools or hiding in trucks; people who are trying to cross borders, most of the time without success, even losing loved ones in the attempt. We know video games can influence gamers for better or worse. Some of them merely strengthen “fixed mental attitudes,” reinforcing stereotypes about women and other cultures. Europe is made up of old countries, proud of their “identities.” But it should be possible to create videogames which could help French, English, German, Italian citizens to better understand “others,” “strangers,” “invaders.” Can video games assist in changing these “fixed mental attitudes” as well? We could add to this list many other topics ripe for exploration. Social entrepreneurship can offer the possibility of a meaningful and productive future for refugees who see no future at all. Videogames can restore pride in one’s traditions and culture. There are even more needs to be addressed such as getting “papers” please, and locating lost family members. Marie Gillespie told us how important cell phones are for refugees to get information about which border is open or closed; to alert coast guards when Zodiacs are about to sink; or to help sick people to explain, via translation tools, their symptoms. What will work? What won’t? We don’t know. Not yet. This was a beginning dialogue. The dialogue began. Where it goes after this is up to you. Au travail!

The idea would be to play these games, either individually - in the case of video games and VR - or collectively - with the boardgames and then discuss the experiences, the challenges, the struggles, the frustrations they encountered but also ideas and insights that might have come up during the play session.

Immersive play

Immersive theatre often uses game mechanics and techniques to induce a sense of agency in the participant. Site, specific, interactive, immersive forms of theatre help in getting

immersive” as defined by the concept of ‘immersive theatre’; to describe performance where the audience member is an active participant and experiences the piece from literally being inside it. This can include walking around the set, touching things and interacting with performers. In many immersive shows, the decisions that the audience members make have a bearing on the actions of the actors and the direction of the story. Consider questions of empathy. What kind of emotions will the audience be feeling? What kind of environment were they in before they entered the show? Are they stressed/anxious? How can we remedy this? Design decisions are frequently questioned throughout the process to check how they will impact the audience. Immersive theatre often includes elements of gamification. As with apps where users are rewarded for their time spent using them, gamification in theatre is often used to encourage audience participation and risk-taking. For example, renowned immersive theatre company Punchdrunk are known for their ‘one on one’ experiences, where an audience member finds themselves alone with an actor. Naturally exhilarating, fans of Punchdrunk will often spend their shows deliberately seeking these out and ‘collecting’ them like Easter eggs in video games.

Akin to this, multi-sensory techniques used in immersive theatre, such as Sensory Labyrinth Theatre add another deeper, more meaningful and more empathetic layer to these practices. This type of immersive theater was created by Iwan Brioc, Artistic Director of Theatr Cynefin, as an applied theatre methodology inspired by Enrique Vargas’s ‘Poetics of the Senses’. In this form of play, that relies greatly on game-like mechanics to enter the labyrinthine ways of human connections (as described by the Brioc himself on his website): "individual audience members journey alone through a darkened three-dimensional labyrinth and along the way encounter moments and meetings that provoke subconscious sensory memories (sensory portals) into which they are gently invited to fall. In accepting this invitation constructs such as time and space, me and you, the inner and the outer start to collapse. Framed for the audience as ‘theatre,’ this space also takes on the added dimensions of the aesthetic space – memory and imagination: so that consciousness and this conditioned process of construction we call ‘reality’ can become an observable phenomenon – observed by the ‘character’ of the traveller in the performance. One function of this technology is to support the emergence of ‘communitas’-the quality, first described by anthropologist Victor Turner, without which community is just a term to describe a group of people and not a feeling of common humanity with a shared meaning within that group of people. Sensory Labyrinth Theatre has the capacity to bring about ‘communitas’, an unifying sense of meaning from having touched together the ineffable mystery of our being, undermining any cultural, religious or ethnic barriers that otherwise divide us."

Mixed realities (when we mix everything up and shake it up a bit more)

Using game elements doesn't necessarily mean that the experiences or projects created don’t have to be games, per se: There are some very interesting programs using tools like Storyboard That to create graphic novels, while others interview immigrant family members and publishing the interviews on StoryCorps, a podcasting site for oral histories. A good way to start is by reading this guide about Community Storytelling best practices and how to's. These tools use storytelling as their core mechanics, which is commonly used in games as well, while not exclusive to games.

Other enthralling tools that can be used for immersion and gamelike scenarios are, for example, BreakoutEDU - To play, you figure out a series of puzzles that open a series of locks. As a result, participants are embodying the push and pull factors of immigration through the core mechanics of a breakout and escape game. Other tools can be used for creating location-based games using ARIS or TaleBlazer,. An example, just for you to get an idea around this topic is Jewish Time Jump, an ARIS location-based augmented reality game about the immigrant experience. Set in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1900, it is playable on a smartphone.