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Short abstract:

The contribution illustrates the design and testing of a game about migration control. The goal of the game is to involve migrants and other social actors in the problematization of the semantic categories deployed in the data practices and infrastructures for migration management.

Long abstract:

In recent years, methods for challenging, complementing and overcoming traditional ethnographic approaches have received increasing attention. Games, for instance, have been described as powerful tools: they allow to experience, from a first-person perspective, power dynamics and knowledge asymmetries, to empower communities, to probe and explore alternative configurations of everyday activities. My contribution will focus on "My documents, check them out", a collaborative, role playing game which I designed in order to engage migrants, as well as other social actors, in the re-design of the semantic categories used in the databases for migration management. The game simulates some of the temporal and administrative constrains lived by migrants in their encounters with migration control. Furthermore, during the game players are invited to design, from scratch, an application form containing the personal data of their fictional characters. The applications are then uploaded into a software which takes a decision about them.

The game was tested in multiple settings and with unexpected results. For asylum seekers the game worked simultaneously as a learning tool but also as way for remembering and making sense of their experiences with the asylum process. However, the game proved to be a productive ethnographic device even when played by other actors (scholars, students, activists, lawyers). It allowed to reveal their knowledge and familiarity with the issues and dynamics that are re-enacted by the game as well as some of the tacit, implicit biases and assumptions shaping interactions with the bureaucratic mechanisms governing everyday life.