Review of I Can End Deportation
March 17, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Last month a human rights organization called Breakthrough released a videogame that makes claims about the lack of equity in today's U.S. immigration laws. The game, called I Can End Deportation (or just ICED, which is also the acronym for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department) is a free PC/Mac download. The result is a missed opportunity, demonstrating both the promise and problems with social issues games in general.

In ICED, the player takes the role of an immigrant at risk for deportation. His goal is to avoid deportation by making careful choices about how to conduct himself in an American city. Drawing attention to yourself might catch the eye of police, while doing civic good might give them reason to turn a blind eye. The game also presents facts and quiz-style questions about immigration law, which the player answers by running over floating icons.

The game clearly takes inspiration from open world games like Grand Theft Auto, such as borrowing that game's "wanted" system as a way of ratcheting up the player's risk of an encounter with immigration police. If caught, the player is sent to a detention facility where he has to keep his nose clean, avoid the unfortunate conditions of the facility as much as is possible, and try to contact and fund an immigration attorney. Eventually the player will be brought up for trial, the result of which is essentially random; sometimes the player is be returned to his original life, other times he might be deported.

ICED takes a strong, clear position on immigration, one that amounts to something like, "the current legal process for immigration is broken." This is a valid and even a compelling position, one that differs from public discourse about the topic, which usually decays into panics about border laws and legal work programs. As Breakthrough Executive Director Mallika Dutt explains In a press statement: "We are trying to shift the conversation about immigration from one that criminalizes people to really having a conversation about due process and human rights for everybody in the United States."

But the result doesn't match the subtlety of the organization's position. As a game, ICED is a mixed bag. In theory, the idea of putting the player in the role of the immigrant and leading him through the minefield of choices and outcomes seems like just the thing videogames are built to do. But in practice, those choices are actually relatively few, and the outcomes are more evocative the brokenness of current procedure than deeply explanatory of such issues. Quiz questions, sound bites, and right/wrong answers seem to simplify the trade-offs of life as an immigrant rather than complicate them, a result quite the opposite of the game's goal and its creators' stated mission. The most effectively evocative moments are created by voiceover cues, and I couldn't help but feel that the game's budget could have been adjusted away from a basically empty 3D world and toward a more detailed, 2D one with more living texture. This would also have remedied the game's numerous technical glitches, such as clipping and collision problems, which make the result feel amateurish and unfinished.

To see these problems more clearly, it is necessary to consider a few aspects of the design in more detail.

Breakthrough has stated that "the game is "designed to show the harsh repercussions of an immigration policy that triggers mandatory deportation for people born outside of America who commit a crime in the U.S." This is a position that could be thoroughly explained through a simple, but rich procedural rhetoric. For example, an immigrant needs to work to earn money, but finding a job is hard without proper papers. The most obvious ways to earn money are through menial, underground, or downright illegal activities. The former earn little money and build reputations as safe havens, sometimes drawing heat by virtue of convenience. The latter offer completely legitimate excuses for legal intervention, massively increasing the chances of detention or deportation. In these latter cases, the effect of good citizen behavior is easily dampened or eliminated. This is the sort of situation Breakthrough chief Dutt is shooting for in her statements above, namely that immigrants are pushed into activities that might lead to arrest through inequity more than through intention. These situations will immediately feel unfair, a sensation that comprises the real goal of the game.

But the game doesn't really cash out this promise. You can try to get a job at a storefront in the city and experience rejection, but the game abstracts out the financial demands of rent, food, or support of a family in a home country. Later you might encounter the pirated DVD stand on the street, but you can only buy from it, not get involved in the lightweight black market trade that it represents. The result is a kind of half-made point, an allusion to the complexity of life as an immigrant without any procedural representation of that complexity. The player isn't really making choices that affect his fate, rather he is being steered through an elaborately dressed-up fact quest.

The same is true for experience in the detention center. The game wants to give the player a sense of the horror of the place, but once again the messages are mixed. The regimented and squalid conditions of confinement explained in the fact bubbles and voiceovers conflict with the complete freedom of movement the game affords the player. Even the most effective aspect of the game, solitary confinement, comes up short. If the player says the wrong thing to a guard, he'll get thrown in a cell, alone. The screen blanks and nothing happens for a long enough to elicit legitimate frustration and anxiety in the player. When the play resumes, the game offers the player the option of resigning confinement and accepting deportation. The intention here is clear: the desperation of incarceration sometimes becomes too much, and immigrants willingly choose to abandon hope.

Unlike some, I appreciate the sense of boredom the detention center creates, but I'm not sure its enough to drive the intended point home. According to Stephen Totilo of MTV News, the creators ratcheted down the feeling of frustration in the game to make it more palatable, a compromise partly driven by the sponsoring organization's goal to reach youth and teens. As it stands, the detention center scenario is basically a collection game, a process of finding all the little quiz and fact icons and triggering so that the game will move on to the final trail. This scene really deserved to be more hard hitting than it was, pushing the player to the inaction and torment of self-conflict rather than the blind acquisition of object collection.

In my recent book Persuasive Games, I called the deliberate construction of an unwinnable game the "rhetoric of failure." Such games present a scenario that can't be won under the rules provided. These games make a statement about those rules, arguing that they are insufficient for the task to which they are currently being put.

In early examples of this technique, the game was often so simple that the realization of failure was immediate and strong. Gonzalo Frasca's Kabul Kaboom and September 12 offer clear examples. My own game Disaffected!, about working at Kinko's, did something similar, although it prolonged the experience of frustrated work through the structure of arcade leveling.

In the book I argued that the rhetoric of failure is a precious technique that might risk wearing itself out. I still believe that to be the case. But the limp sense of dread crafted by solitary confinement suggests that ICED is a game that might need to increase rather than reduce its reliance on failure. In Kabul Kaboom, the player's experience is so limited that the failure is really all he experiences. Luckily, the scale and time investment in that game is very small, making the investment in that experience match the surprise of its failed rules. ICED had the opportunity to create a much more substantial sense of the complex and broken realities of immigration law before showing how they are subject to randomness, prejudice, and socioeconomic preconditions. So while I appreciate that the game dares the player to give up, I wish that sense of desperation were more tightly bound to the experiences actually encountered, rather than just implied.

For games like ICED, there is a risk that the substance and details of the design is actually less important than the public attention assured by the very concept of a "videogame about the injustices of immigration law." In the past, I have argued that many social issues games need not worry about quality, since their main impact is likely to come in the form of publicity anyway. While I don't think that Breakthrough cut corners on development and design with the intention of using the game as a press lure, the game's results might reside more in public response than in player experience.

GamePolitics.com and other news sources covered the anti-immigration Minuteman Civil Defense Corps' reactions to the game. Among other comments, MCDC officials called ICED an "illegal alien video game which teaches kids contempt for U.S. immigration laws." While one might or might not object to MCDC and their project, it's hard to argue that their criticism of the game takes the project seriously. Nevertheless, the MCDC has successfully shifted the frame of the debate from Breakthrough's concern over equity in due process to their own belief in the soundness of current immigration law.

Other responses have been more reactionary. Kurt Nimmo's article on Alex Jones' Infowars.com argues that the game "essentially trains illegal aliens how to sneak across the border and avoid border patrol agents and cops," which clearly it does not do. It is tempting to take Nimmo's view as a sign that he hasn't played the game (which is likely the case), but such an accusation isn't really a useful one. Later in the article, the critic returns to precisely the same rhetoric the MCDC used: the game, argues Nimmo, exists "in order to brainwash the masses -- especially the young -- into believing that illegal immigration is a 'human rights' issue and not one of security and national sovereignty." Breakthrough's own press statements make this statement possible. Notice how adept the author is in twisting the position into words that make it sound noxious.

There is an irony at work here: Breakthrough's own message about the inequities of immigration law required the design, development, release, and marketing of a videogame. The player's access to the details of this argument, insofar as they are effectively advanced, requires downloading an 80MB file and then playing the game for 30 to 45 minutes. The contrary positions of MCDC and Infowars.com ride on the back of Breakthrough's investment, using the game as a strawman to advance their own positions. Worse, we might have to admit that those contrary statements are just as effective as the pro immigration reform statements in the game itself. This situation differs from similar reactions in other media. There are plenty of anti-Michael Moore agitators, but there are equally as many people who actually viewed and considered the content of his films. Alas, the same is surely not true for ICED.

This situation poses a real challenge for games of this sort. Breakthrough clearly possesses a coherent, subtle, defensible position on immigration law. Immigration law is a topic with the subtlety and complexity to justify a complex simulation as a public intervention. But in attempting to translate the one into the other, the creators fell back on instantial assets like textual descriptions, quiz questions, and audio clips instead of really simulating the experience of life under the conflicting laws they hoped to undermine. The result is a mediocre game that nevertheless draws strong, equally defensible oppositional rhetoric from its foes.

So what's a political games developer to do? Some would argue that problem lies in the didacticism of games like ICED. If only these experiences were presented more subtly in a larger, more engaging game, such a position would argue, its political messages might come across more effectively. But the strategy of chasing commercial games is a non-starter; there's no way to compete with big budget AAA titles, and in the absence of such titles we shouldn't have to wait for more of the mainstream industry to "get political." Instead, I think the answer lies in crafting experiences of complex situations that really allow players to occupy those situations rather than just to trace their outlines. Let me experience the conflict of finding a job to support myself and my family and exposing myself to the risk of discovery. Let me suffer the desperation and disgust of incarceration. Let me feel the frustration of investing time and energy in civic progress that makes no difference in trial.

Such a strategy doesn't really demand any greater time, budget, or good intentions than Breakthrough probably had available. But it does demand more bravado, more risk, and less design by committee. For my part, based on playing games like ICED and creating games of its ilk under the auspices of non-profits and similar agencies, most these organizations are doomed as hosts of strong, well-crafted videogame messages about social issues. As Greg Costikyan points out, another, much better game addresses a similar topic, albeit in a different part of the world with a different political context: Escape from Woomera. I don't think it's any accident that game was created by a handful of people working under an arts commission rather than a non-profit agenda. It's up to strong-willed individuals and groups to pick up that torch and tease its flame back to life.

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