How can you help people understand what it’s really like to live through a major news story? Take the experience of people leaving their home countries to seek asylum in the United States. Video is one way of sharing what they go through, but it’s entirely passive. An online map with embedded images or video, similar to what the Dutch news outlet de Volkskrant did in its Refugee Republic project, is more interactive but extremely time consuming to build. So, how about a simple game?
That’s the approach ProPublica and WNYC took in The Waiting Game, which explains the complicated asylum process by showing what happens to refugees hoping to settle in the United States. Assistant managing editor Sisi Wei of ProPublica told Storybench that while many investigations are told effectively with just text and photos, this story had the team asking a different question:
“What if what we’re actually giving people is the experience or a simulated experience of needing to wait as long as people in the system actually need to wait?”
The answer was an interactive story that lets users choose an asylum seeker from one of five countries and follow that person’s journey to the United States. The stories are real, although the people involved are not identified.
The game takes a long time to play, with each individual frame representing one day, and that’s deliberate. “We are forcing you to spend a little bit of time experiencing each day.” Wei said. “It makes a difference for me if you spend 15 seconds or two minutes on it. It’s more and more powerful the longer you spend on it.”
Users also have the choice to “give up” at any point along the way. If they do, they’re told how much longer the real people in the story had to wait before having their asylum cases decided.
Wei says the game helps to tell this story because users can learn how the system works by experiencing it. But she’s cautious about using this approach in other cases. “The thing to always be careful of is most stories are not better done as a game, so to forcibly make them one, it actually worsens the story.”
