UB students design two videogames recreating the experience of being an immigrant in Barcelona
Seven 3rd year students of the bachelorʼs degree in Design of the University of Barcelona have created two social videogames on multicultural cities and immigration. Stereotype my Ass and Empty City are the names of both proposals, which try to raise awareness on the situation of the immigrant collective, and to deny rumours and misunderstandings on the impact of migrations in the city. These projects have been carried out in the Serious Game Design Workshop of the UB, led by the lecturer Joan Morales, and with the counselling guidance of SOS Racisme. Both videogames will be presented on Wednesday, June 13, at 6.30 p.m., in the Museum of Design, as part of the Barcelona Design Week.
Seven 3rd year students of the bachelorʼs degree in Design of the University of Barcelona have created two social videogames on multicultural cities and immigration. Stereotype my Ass and Empty City are the names of both proposals, which try to raise awareness on the situation of the immigrant collective, and to deny rumours and misunderstandings on the impact of migrations in the city. These projects have been carried out in the Serious Game Design Workshop of the UB, led by the lecturer Joan Morales, and with the counselling guidance of SOS Racisme. Both videogames will be presented on Wednesday, June 13, at 6.30 p.m., in the Museum of Design, as part of the Barcelona Design Week.
Everything started with the EDIVI call, a network of higher education centers of design dedicated to create educational experiences in the field of social innovation and sustainability. On the occasion of the 13th edition of Barcelona Design Week, EDIVI asked the centers of this network to work on the topic of intercultural coexistence and migration. Starting from this point, students of Design of the UB thought of suggestions and gathered information from an interview with SOS Racisme. “We thought it would be a good idea to have the guidance from an entity like SOS Racisme, known for its social work with immigrants, to understand the problems on which the students had to work”; says Joan Morales. After the interview, he continued in touch with SOS Racisme to keep them updated about the studentsʼ work.
Putting yourself in an immigrantʼs shoes
Both projects result from this framework, Stereotype my Ass and Empty City are simulation games aimed at citizens with a dual objective: to highlight the positive aspects of cultural exchange and to raise awareness on the difficulties newcomers have to face through migrations, which are sometimes forced due shocking situations.
UB students Carolina da Costa, Bea Hernández and Judith Ricolfe are the creators of Stereotype my Ass, a videogame aiming to raise awareness on the tendency to jump into conclusions about others due gender, origin or credo stereotypes, among others, and specifically, on the consequences it has on work discrimination. The title of the game is already a rebellious call towards discriminatory attitudes.
In Empty City, UB students Anna Adell, Jhon Quiroz, XinYu Lu and Zhengrong Du show the process through which newcomer families have to go to integrate into the new place. The game offers a simulation recreating the experience of the shock an immigrant has to go through when facing a new social and cultural environment and the administration battles to overcome, which can sometimes be frustrating and hard to understand.
Both games are presented as a videogame project. Students have developed the design of characters, game rules, scenarios, interaction mechanisms, “and mostly, educational and communication strategies to make a social problem communicable and to experiment it through a ludic experience”, adds Morales. The idea is for both videogames to become a reality in the future. Actually, the University is working on this “in order to start a collaboration so that students of design and arts work together with students of multimedia and computer engineering so that we get a complete result of these projects”, says Morales.
Presentation at Barcelona Design Week
Stereotype my Ass and Empty City will be presented on Wednesday in the Barcelona Design Week, in a roundtable organized by EDIVI with other participating schools in this call. Other participants are SOS Racisme and the rest of social entities that collaborated in different projects of each school to talk about the several possibilities of design teaching as a transformation and social improvement agent.
More information on Stereotype my Ass and Empty City in this link.