Skip to content
1981
1-2: Playing with Voice: Listening for Audio-Visual Expressions and Representations of Voice, Vocality and Speech Acts in Games
  • ISSN: 2057-0341
  • E-ISSN: 2057-035X

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the free-to-play RPG (2017), which includes video commentary from the migrant whose story the game is based on, to examine the performance and politics of encountering ‘the migrant’s voice’ in a gameplay setting. First, I discuss the tendency in migration scholarship to ascribe agency to any instance of migrants speaking about their conditions and the importance of accounting for the process of mediation in evaluating whether or how migrants are able to speak out. Second, I consider the importance of performing authenticity for migrants to be taken seriously when telling their story. By analysing how replicates yet undermines these two tendencies, I argue that the video commentaries within the game turn out to be a lot more ambivalent than merely an opportunity to provide ‘a voice to the migrant’.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00090_1
2025-05-27
2026-04-21

Metrics

Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Armstrong, Kimberley (2008), ‘“Seeing the suffering” in Northern Uganda: The impact of a human rights approach to humanitarianism’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 42:1, pp. 132.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Banet-Weiser, Sarah (2012), Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, New York: New York University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Chan, Stephanie (2017), ‘Path Out uses real-life commentary to tell a tale of escaping Syria’, VentureBeat, 7 November, https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/path-out-uses-real-life-commentary-to-tell-a-tale-of-escaping-syria/. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  4. Cheng, William (2014), Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Collins, Karen (2013), Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Couldry, Nick (2010), Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism, Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Davis, Jade E. (2023), The Other Side of Empathy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Deck, Andrew (2023), ‘AI translation is jeopardizing Afghan asylum claims’, Rest of the World, 19 April, https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-translation-errors-afghan-refugees-asylum/. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  9. Ensslin, Astrid (2013), ‘Recallin’ Fagin: Linguistic accents, intertextuality and othering in narrative offline and online video games’, in B. Light, G. Crawford and V. K Gosling (eds), Online Gaming in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games, London: Routledge, pp. 22435.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Evans-Thirlwell, Edwin (2017), ‘How a Syrian refugee’s story became a JRPG’, EuroGamer, 4 August, https://www.eurogamer.net/path-out-syrian-war-refugee-rpg. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  11. Falk, Olivia (2017), ‘Path Out review – maybe one episode is enough’, COGconnected, 11 November, https://cogconnected.com/review/path-out-review/. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  12. Fanon, Frantz (1967), Black Skin, White Masks (trans. C. L. Markmann), New York: Grove Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Gee, James Paul (2003), What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Georgiou, Myria (2018), ‘Does the subaltern speak? Migrant voices in digital Europe’, Popular Communication, 16:1, pp. 4557.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Hamlin, Rebecca (2021), Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Hashimoto, Kazuma (2023), ‘The “JRPG” label has always been othering’, Polygon, 20 June, https://www.polygon.com/23677598/jrpg-label-history-othering-discrimination-japanese-role-playing-game. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  17. Hills, Matt (2007), ‘From the box in the corner to the box set on the shelf: “TVIII” and the cultural/textual valorisations of DVD’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5:1, pp. 4160.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Keane, Webb (1999), ‘Voice’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 9:1, pp. 27173.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Keogh, Brendan (2013), ‘When game over means game over: Using permanent death to craft living stories in Minecraft’, in Proceedings of the 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, vol. 20, pp. 16.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Mochocki, M. (2021), ‘Heritage sites and video games: Questions of authenticity and immersion’, Games and Culture, 16:8, pp. 95177.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Nakamura, Lisa (2013), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Nakamura, Lisa (2020), ‘Feeling good about feeling bad: Virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy’, Journal of Visual Culture, 19:1, pp. 4764.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Nguyen, Josef (2016), ‘Performing as video game players in Let’s Plays’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 22, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016.0698.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Pfeifer, Michelle (2023), ‘“The native ear”: Accented testimonial desire and asylum’, in P. Rangan, A. Saxena, R. Srinivasan and P. Sundar (eds), Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 192207.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Ruberg, Bonnie (2020), ‘Empathy and its alternatives: Deconstructing the rhetoric of “empathy” in video games’, Communication, Culture & Critique, 13:1, pp. 5471.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Schöffl, Ruth (2022), ‘UNHCR video game lets pupils experience a refugee’s perilous journey’, United Nations Refugee Agency, 8 July, https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/unhcr-video-game-lets-pupils-experience-refugees-perilous-journey. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  27. Shaw, Adrienne (2013), ‘Rethinking game studies: A case study approach to video game play and identification’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30:5, pp. 34761.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Spivak, Gayatri (2005), ‘Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular’, Postcolonial Studies, 8:4, pp. 47586.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Sterne, Jonathan (2021), Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Ward, Mark (2010), ‘Voice, videogames, and technologies of immersion’, in N. Neumark, R. Gibson and T. van Leeuwen (eds), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 26779.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Weidman, Amanda (2015), ‘Voice’, in D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny (eds), Keywords in Sound, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 23245.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. White, Chris (2017), ‘Path Out review’, GodisaGeek, 26 November, https://www.godisageek.com/reviews/path-review/. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  33. Yang, Robert (2017), ‘“If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes”: Empathy machines as appropriation machines’, Radiator Design Blog, 5 April, https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes-then.html. Accessed 15 September 2023.
  34. Causa Creations, Karam, Abdullah and Main, Brian (2017), Path Out, https://www.path-out.net/. Accessed 15 February 2024.
  35. Schlichter, Annette (2011), ‘Do voices matter? Vocality, materiality, gender performativity’, Body & Society, 17:1, pp. 3152.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. United Nations (2022), ‘Path Out’, United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, 29 August, https://unric.org/en/path-out-video-game/. Accessed 15 September 2023.
/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00090_1
Loading
/content/journals/10.1386/jivs_00090_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Let’s Play; migration; performance; refugee; RPGs; subaltern; Syria
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test