ICED: Videogames in the Battle Between the Citizen and the Human

Abstract

ICED, which stands for “I Can End Deportation,” is a videogame released in 2008 by the human rights organization Breakthrough. The game places the player in the social and legal environments faced by undocumented immigrants in contemporary New York. This article presents ICED as a type of popular solution to the challenge of using videogames for meaningful social criticism and analyzes its mode of production as the key source for this popular potential. The creators use design techniques and gaming tactics common in virtual worlds to create a humanitarian game that problematizes the idea of free will. Instead of making free will a tool for progressing in the game, ICED uses roaming to create a frustrating game experience. This frustration is an affective lesson about undocumented immigration and the social and legal environment that casts individuals in a world void of freedom and some basic human rights.

Notes

¹ Unless otherwise stated, information was collected through in-depth interviews in April 2009 with the director of Breakthrough Mallika Dutt, game designer Heidi Boisvert, deputy director Mark Sokol, and multimedia strategist Madhuri Mohindar.

² The designers Boisvert and Rodriguez had access to the high schools partly because of the credibility of Breakthrough and Hunter College, which assured administrators that the process would be carried through responsible. ICED was pitched as a didactic tool, with an emphasis on human rights. Students volunteered, and the proper permissions from parents were given before participation (M. Dutt, personal communication, April 23, 2009).

³ To have students similarly informed on the issues, Boisvert and Rodriguez gave an introductory lesson on current immigration policies, the relationship these have to human rights, the ways in which these policies, particularly detention, contradict human rights principles (Boisvert, personal communication, April 23, 2009).