Migrating Through the Web: Interactive Practices About Migration, Flight and Exile

Abstract

How to study a media object on the web that is at the same time a documentary, a reportage, and a game which combines both fiction and non-fiction elements? The author digs into the discursive and material structures and infrastructures of serious games, text-adventures, newsgames, interactive maps, and data visualizations, in which refugees and migrants become the subject of humanitarian discourse. Although the goal is to arouse empathy towards migrants, these "interactive practices" distinguish who is vulnerable and who is not. It supports the idea of a "migratory crisis", which, the author argues, is actually the symptom of a deeper crisis of the humanitarian system itself.