‘Grand Theft Auto’ Helps Shape New Game About Immigrants In America, In GameFile
‘ICED’ players perform good deeds, answer immigration questions, try not to get deported.
By Stephen Totilo

There were times in the last two years that Heidi Boisvert wasn’t sure if the game she was teaching herself to make should be fun. It’s a game about immigration that puts players in the virtual bodies of one of four fictional people not born in the United States. The player’s goal in “ICED”? To not get deported.

The player runs through a fictional city, dashing through icons that represent acts of civic good like planting trees, donating blood or volunteering at a soup kitchen, and answering questions about immigration in America. But if they give wrong answers, a “Grand Theft Auto”-style “wanted” system is activated, sending government agents who are determined to detain and deport. Boisvert said that she and her colleague wanted to be sure that there was “not necessarily a pleasure component, but … engagement with the game as a game at the same time we’re educating people about these ideas.”

Should people enjoy the game? Not really.

“ICED,” which stands for both the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department and “I Can End Deportation,” launched on Monday, Presidents Day. It was produced by Breakthrough, a group that hopes the game will raise awareness of what it sees as severe flaws in the United States’ immigration program that has resulted in the detention or deportation of hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of people in the last decade.

“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,” Breakthrough Executive Director Mallika Dutt told GameFile in an interview last week. She said 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.

Critics of the policy complain that even minor infractions, sometimes having occurred years in the past, simply don’t always warrant being kicked out of the country. But Boisvert and Dutt said Americans often turn a blind eye to this issue.

“People only think about the immigration issue as undocumented people coming across the border,” Dutt said. “And our point is the immigration story is a much bigger story about legal, permanent residents, about student-visa holders, about all kinds of people, about veterans, and it’s about how we really need to think about immigration policies that reflect due process and human rights.”

OK, but how do you make a game out of that?

The answer is to break a lot of rules. Initially, the game was all but un-winnable. Deportation was a near-inevitability, even for players who performed noble civic actions. Dutt said that the New York City high school students who provided feedback for the game found that initial approach too stark. “It was difficult for people to be in a state where they were trying to win a game but all of the outcomes were negative,” she said. So they added more modest goals, like being able to get out of the detention center players are thrown into if they are caught by an ICED agent in the city portion of the game.

In that detention center, however, players can be put in solitary confinement, sometimes without really doing anything bad. Upon confinement, the game goes black, and players lose the ability to control the game for seven seconds. “It feels like much longer because you don’t have the capacity to do anything,” she said.

Players who wait can get out of solitary, but will then be offered voluntary deportation, which essentially entices players to speed their way to a Game Over. This, Boisvert said, is true to the experience of immigrants who have worked with Breakthrough. Many said that in times of emotional weakness, immigrants are simply asked to get out of the country.

Another touch that breaks standard game rules is the manner in which the programming determines how a player’s deportation hearing might be judged. “We actually randomly programmed the outcome so they would reflect the current legal terrain,” Boisvert said. “So for example, you may get back to city, may get deported, or you may stay in detention.”

The game was made in cooperation with students from three New York City high schools. The students offered input on the game’s setting, characters and how much it should borrow from more commercial adventures. Dutt said the students wanted the game to feel as open-ended as possible.

The developers tapped local actors to provide the voices. Most are unknowns, though the character Ayesha, a 16-year-old hailing from India, is voiced by rapper Kid Sister, a friend of Kanye West’s. Her involvement, the developers said, came as a result of some lucky friend-of-a-friend connections.

“ICED” is not a game with multiple points of view. It just shows one side. Dutt had no apologies for any critics who find the game unrelentingly bleak. She said there isn’t another side to tell on this issue, that what the game portrays is the reality: “We want this game to spark some of that dialogue, to really get people thinking about what’s going on and whether or not this is the kind of America we want to support — or if there is another vision of what we can have going forward.”

Gamers who want to get involved in that dialogue can download a PC or Mac version of “ICED” from IcedGame.com.

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