Photos of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach splashed across front pages worldwide and circulated over the internet in early September.
The picture of three-year old Aylan Kurdi’s limp body draped over the arms of a Turkish gendarme became an icon embodying the years-long plight of European migrants hailing from Myanmar, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and most recently Syria.
The image resonated with the public, demonstrating the perils refugees encounter in their quest for safety, something that often gets lost in mass media coverage.
A newly released mobile game, Cloud Chasers: A Journey Of Hope, was partly inspired by the clash between European governments and the more than 200,000 of at least 4 million Syrians seeking asylum. The game aims to illustrate that quest and the circumstances migrants typically face.
The story follows a father and daughter, Francisco and Amelia. They are traveling to Spire — a city that promises life in every sense of the word — after an unknown event turns much of their planet into a desert where clouds are the only water source and main source of currency.
The society is segregated with the poor working class restricted to living on the barren land and the rich living in the clouds.
“Media always gives you the story of when they arrive…when they are actually there, not why they leave,” said Moritz Zumbühl, the game’s co-creator and president of Zurich-based Blingflug Studios, which produced the game.
“One reason a lot of people have to leave their homes is because of economic situations,” Zumbühl told ThinkProgress. “We profit from the south to the north, the poor to the rich. [For example, Europe] takes more money from Africa than we send back.”
Also drawing from personal connections and research on migrations in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, Francisco and Amelia’s story is centered around choices, some of which are more innocuous than others. But no matter what decision is made, the consequences can’t be undone.
“There’s no way to save the game. All your decisions are final,” Zumbühl said. “If your decision is wrong, you may die, but because it’s a game you can try again.”
Events as simple as deciding to explore a plane wreck or speak to a passing stranger could either be a coup for Francisco and Amelia, such as the discovery of leftover supplies or learning valuable information, or detrimental, such as getting shot after wandering into an immigration protest, dying from eating the wrong berry, or being sold into slavery.
All along, players must monitor Francisco and Amelia’s water, stopping frequently to harvest it from passing clouds that are being sucked into a vortex by mysterious flying drones. In traveling through the five cities on their journey to Spire, users learn about Francisco and Amelia’s past through diary entries and bedtime stories.
In reality, “most journeys end not that well,” Zumbühl said, likening migration to the company’s name “blindflug” — a Swiss term that means blindly flying a plane without any guidance from instruments or equipment.
Cloud Chasers gives users a chance to put themselves in an immigrant’s position. “One thing a game can do, [is have you] try out things, and see what happens to them if they make bad decisions. They often die — as a player, it’s important to have death somewhere in the game so you have to have a chance to reflect.”
Cloud Chasers is Blindflug’s second game with the premise of exploring a serious topic balancing solemnness. The studio released First Strike, its nuclear war simulation game last year, where users have to think and react quickly to the threat of annihilation. With Cloud Chasers, players will simultaneously feel a wave of sadness when Francisco and Amelia die from thirst or a snake bite or other unplanned event and still get an appropriate dose of can’t-wait-to-play-this-again fun.
Of course other game developers have tackled serious issues, including sexual harassment and depression, But the timing of the game’s release comes at an important political juncture as European countries struggle — and some outright refuse — to accommodate the growing influx of Syrians fleeing the war in their home country and U.S. presidential hopefuls take digs at current immigration policy and weigh involvement in the Syrian refugee crisis.
“The point of the game is to fail and fail hard,” said game designer Jeremy Spillmann in a promotional video. “The point is to die and die because most people die. They never make it to the borders and we only hear about them through numbers and statistics.”