Baladi News - Journals
Game creators from Syria and Palestine share what it’s like to live in a conflict-ridden area, conveying their experiences through video games
Abdullah Karam, a Syrian refugee living in Austria, also wants children to play his game. Path out is an episodic autobiographical adventure developed by Cause Ceations, in which the player leads Karam through his escape from Syria. As well as starring as the protagonist, Karam features in occasional video clips in the corner of the screen, YouTuber-style, narrating the events and providing context. With his quips of “there you go, dead again,” Path Out has a lighter tone than Liyla.
“We wanted to share a perspective with the player that kind of makes them laugh, although the subject is pretty serious,” says Karam. “We wanted to build a connection.”
In the game, Karam is 18 years old, fleeing Syria at his parents’ behest to avoid joining the military. “You can see how much of a kid I was,” Karam says. “Like, they would tell me, ‘Pack your most important stuff,’ and I would ask them, ‘Can I take my Xbox with me?’”
In the first episode of Path Out, the tasks evolve from finding a lamp when the electricity goes off to navigating borders, landmines and Isis. Karam and the developers wanted to use the relationship between player and player character to help people understand what it’s like to be a refugee.
“That’s why the game is free,” he says. “To share this perspective and to tell everybody, no matter how much of a bad image you have in your head about refugees, here’s another one.”
Rasheed Abueideh is the designer of Liyla and the Shadows of War , a short mobile game in which the player character helps his wife and daughter, Liyla, escape from Gaza. Liyla is fictional, but the game features real events: strikes on schools, the death of four children playing on a beach. When Liyla was first released on the App Store, Apple refused ti categorise it as a game, feeding into a hsitorical precedent that Apple prefers games to be frivolous.
Source: The Guardian