“Asking for asylum in Switzerland, as in any European country, is not a game. Life is not a game at all, and for refugees who endure torture and persecution, even less so,” - such is the verdict of Jörg Schertenleib, an activist of the Swiss Council for Refugees. It was this public organization that was one of the first to complain to the authorities about the game “Registration in Switzerland”.
The paradox is that this game was developed in a government structure - the Office for Refugees, on whose website it was placed. And its creators had the best intentions: to give as much information as possible about the lives of refugees and thus attract attention to their problems.
To begin with, players could choose a character to transform into. There were six in total. The characters were almost real - each one's story was actually copied from people who had applied to the office for asylum. Having become a virtual refugee, the player did not just turn into a black Celestina from Angola or an Albanian Bagram from Kosovo. A click of the mouse - and he learned what Angola and Kosovo are, and also why people flee from there.
Celestina, for example, had her entire family massacred during the civil war, and her “kind” husband forced her to earn money through prostitution. Bagram was “pushed out” of his home by Albanian neighbors: they were outraged that he worked for a company created by Serbs.
When leaving their country, each virtual refugee could take with them five “essential” items of their choice. The list included: real or fake documents, money, drugs, weapons, a sleeping bag, medicine, books, a child or a spouse. By the way, the presence of family members on this list caused particular anger among public organizations.
“I do not consider a wife or child an item,” stated Jörg Schertenleib. Nevertheless, it is no secret: the size of the family accompanying a refugee affects his future settlement no less than the lifestyle he chooses in his new homeland.
In this regard, “Registration in Switzerland” also gave players a choice: you could do something useful for the country or study the language, but you could also do something not too pleasing to future fellow citizens, for example, steal or engage in prostitution. True, if a virtual refugee took the criminal path, a virtual but no less valiant Swiss police immediately stood in his way. After that, the game was over for the asylum seeker.
“We wanted to show how to behave if you want to get asylum,” explains the game's author Sibylla Sigwart, “and how difficult it is to obtain asylum in any case.” Indeed, anyone who had the chance to play “Registration in Switzerland” knows: of the six characters applying for asylum, only one “wins”. The other five are destined to be refused regardless of how they behave.
This circumstance caused a real wave of rage among non-governmental organizations. “This is a real incitement to xenophobia and hatred of foreigners, aimed mainly at young people,” stated the anti-racist group SOS Racisme.
“In our game, we tried to reflect as accurately as possible the situation with obtaining asylum in Switzerland,” explained the press attaché of the Swiss Office for Refugees, Dominique Boillat. “And in our country, only 10% of applicants receive refugee status each year. In our game, this status was obtained by one woman from Turkey. At the same time, two other women who did not fully meet the definitions of the Geneva Convention regarding refugees, but were persecuted in their homeland, received residence permits. The remaining three received nothing, but they could not claim anything under the same Geneva Convention. We are accused of the fact that these three cannot get anything, and this is discrimination. In fact, this is reality.”
The uproar raised around “Registration in Switzerland” by local human rights activists attracted attention to the game not only from the local man in the street. “We have a far-right Swiss People's Party, which is quite influential,” says Dominique Boillat. “Representatives of this party, which generally does not like the fact that we accept refugees, also criticized us. They said we spend a lot of money on stupid games. This is completely untrue, the game was very cheap.”
During the existence of “Registration in Switzerland”, the web page of the Office for Refugees was visited by 240,000 people. Today, the brown banner Swiss-Chek-in.ch continues to adorn its Public Relations section. But clicking on it is useless - the game does not load.
“I played it myself. And I think it is quite boring,” says the satisfied Jörg Schertenleib.
But the game of “Registration in Switzerland” is not over yet. “After such a number of reproaches against the game, we decided to make it unavailable to users, but temporarily,” said Dominique Boillat. “And at the same time, we asked several experts known for their balanced approach to answer the question: is this game really racist and discriminatory? Or does it simply reflect reality.”