The Danish Refugee Council thought a Facebook game set in a refugee camp would be a good way to raise awareness. Yes, really. It’s called the City That Shouldn’t Exist, but it's the ill-conceived Facebook game itself that should never have existed.
The controversial game, produced by the DRC, put players in charge of a virtual African refugee camp. Players must shuffle around supplies and people to ensure that the virtual refugees don’t virtually die, in what is meant to be a lesson to European youth on the complexities of international humanitarian work.
I couldn’t play the game, and neither can you anymore, because it's been removed from Facebook – not because of the furore which surrounded its launch, according to a spokesman for the DRC. But here’s the account of one journalist who did play:
“It’s 3.43am and you’re fast asleep when a siren on your bedroom wall starts flashing and howling. It’s a red alert from headquarters.
'A crisis?' you say, bolting out of bed. 'People in need? Time to suit up!'
'My hero,' sighs your partner from under the covers.
Your name is Mr. ECHO. Your suit is a James Bond-style tuxedo. And your mission is to save the lives of 100,000 refugees bound for the world’s biggest refugee camp, who desperately need food, water, security, shelter and medicine.”
In its first iteration, the setting for the game was explicitly modelled on Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, the world’s largest, which in the real world houses hundreds of thousands of real refugees. Their numbers are currently being swelled by the thousands of Somalis trying to escape the famine in their home country. In the game, if you pressed the right buttons at the right times, your refugees lived, and if you didn’t, they died. The winner of the game was to receive an all-expenses-paid trip for two to visit the camp. Apparently, the game’s working title was “The World’s Worst Vacation”.
Under intense criticism, the DRC backtracked and withdrew the game, releasing it a couple months later with all mention of Dadaab removed, and with ambitious distribution plans put on hold. In the end, the game, which cost R2 million to design, was played just 5,786 times.
But the project wasn’t as crazy as it seems. Humanitarian agencies have had some success in the gaming arena before. The World Food Programme’s 2005 release, Food Force, challenges gamers to put themselves in the shoes of WFP officials trying to coordinate emergency responses. It’s still running today, and has an estimated network of 10 million users. Each mission is preceded by a virtual briefing which outlines some of the major issues faced by aid workers. It’s designed to stoke the interest of children in food issues and how to solve them.
The City That Shouldn’t Exist had a similar aim: “The purpose was to introduce humanitarian work to European youth, to create some awareness around work being done which the youth in Europe are not aware of,” Anders Knudsen, policy advisor for the DRC, told Free African Media. In that, it failed, but some credit should be given to the organisation for trying. There’s a fine line between raising awareness and objectification, and it's an easy one to cross.
But cross the line it did. There is already enough of a problem in the international development world with objectification of the people NGOs are trying to help. The likes of Band Aid and Live 8 have come in for huge amounts of criticism because they’re seen to entrench negative stereotypes of Africans as poor, hungry and helpless – in other words, as not real humans. Pixellating these caricatures in a video game takes that one step further. And there’s also a racial element to the game which, from an African perspective, is hard to overlook. The hero of “The City That Shouldn’t Exist” is white, of course, and the refugees all black. This further reinforces the idea that Africans can’t do it for themselves.
There’s a notion doing the rounds in public relations circles that social media is the solution to every problem. Restaurants encourage you to “like” their Facebook pages, and hotels have Twitter feeds which spew out marketing material in 140 characters or less. Similarly, NGOs are encouraged by media advisors to embrace social media to spread their message, and task forces and planning committees spend days coming up with new and innovative ideas which they think will “go viral” and cure the disease or feed the people or save the children. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work like that – as the DRC has found out, to its cost.
Nonetheless, that won’t stop the NGO and others like it from trying. Raising awareness is crucial to the success or failure of NGO projects, because the more people know about an issue the more they are likely to give. But what NGOs need to improve is how this awareness is raised, because the long-term implications of the one-dimensional characters they use to sell their issues to the world are prejudice and stereotypes, neither of which help in addressing the root causes of any development issue. FAM
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