We are pleased to receive Dr Bea Pérez Zapata and Dr Víctor Navarro-Remesal, academics at Tecnocampus/Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, who will present their talk Migrants and refugees in video games: genealogies and ideologies of crossings and citizenship.
This first ReMAP/Games Shed seminar will happen on May 29th, 3pm, at the UCL Knowledge Lab (room G02), with a streaming option for those who cannot attend in person.
Abstract
This talk will contextualise and analyse video games which reflect the experiences of migrants and refugees in the last decades. We first frame our talk within the media reception of migrants and refugees (Chouliaraki, 2013; Smets et al., 2019) and questions of refugeedom (Stonebridge, 2018; Cox et al., 2020), alongside the discussions around critical play (Flanagan, 2009), persuasive games (de la Hera et al., 2021) and newsgames (Gómez, 2015). We also connect our analysis to the creation of contemporary myths, understood as explorations of the world naturalised through repetition (Barthes, 1957; Vilasanjuan, 2021) and we explore the movement from serious games and newsgames to first-person refugee games and then to a more mainstream view of borders. For this purpose we discuss video games games from Against all odds (UNHCR, 2005) and Darfur is Dying (Take Action, 2006) to Path Out (Causa Creations, 2017), 21 Days (Hardtalk, 2017), Bury Me, My Love (Panic Barn, 2017), Not Tonight (Panic Barn, 2018), and Life is Strange 2 (Dontnod, 2018), among others. We analyse the gameplay, mechanics, avatarisation, and discourse of these video games to assess how they may function as acts of resistance towards anti-immigration views and prompt debates on displacement and belonging.
Register at: https://tinyurl.com/gameshedseminar1
See you there!
