The BBC was smart to use a game to highlight Syria’s refugee crisis. I’d love to see more of it.

A storm in a teacup has arisen over the BBC’s use of a game to highlight the horrors facing Syria’s refugees.

‘BBC bosses blasted for making Syrian Journey computer game about refugees fleeing the war-torn country,’ the Daily Mail thundered on Monday. ‘Sickening’ game often ends with migrants drowning in the Mediterranean.

The criticism was misplaced. What’s sickening is the policy that allows so many refugees to drown, and the lack of public debate around it – not using an interactive story to highlight the issue.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for constructive analysis here. The game is extremely stark, and misses a sense of positive agency. Its stripped down narrative lacks nuance and context.

But then again, the article was never really intended to spark a discussion of Syria refugee advocacy, was it? It came across as a good old piece of BBC-bashing, with a healthy dose of classic Daily Mail outrage thrown into the bargain.

The Guardian’s Keith Stuart rode to the rescue, picking apart the Mail’s bluster in a piece: “Why the BBC is right to make a game about the Syrian refugee crisis“.

Mostly, this is down to a misunderstanding about what games are – or can be. It’s telling that the Mail’s expert refers to Syrian Journey as a “children’s game” despite the fact that no such claim is made on the game’s home page. 

The inference is that all games are for children, and that this is not a medium that can support or explore serious subject matter. It is, in short, an old-fashioned moral panic, a dated reaction to a medium that has been maturing for over 40 years.

Indeed.

Games are without peer, in my opinion, in their capacity to evoke a sense of moral involvement. I was first struck by their extraordinary power in an old flash game (whose name currently eludes me, someone please remind me!) in which I was tasked with shooting terrorists in a marketplace.

Standard fare, it seemed at first, except there was a twist. When you pressed the shoot button, there was a delay, and by the time your rocket arrived the terrorist had moved on, replaced by a civilian family. The family was massacred by your missile, the scene dissolved into wailing grief, and all around the young men turned into more terrorists. It was a chilling, visceral experience, impossible to replicate with a less interactive medium.

Returning from Port-au-Price, I was similarly impressed to discover Inside the Haiti Earthquake, a game which allowed you to experience the disaster as a survivor, aid worker or journalist.

To anyone who doubts the range and variety of advocacy games on offer, check out Games for Change, a group run by Asi Burak – a former Israeli army officer, and producer of the 2007 game PeaceMaker, where the player tries her hand at ending war in the Middle East.

No longer are these games niche products for the already converted. This War of Mine went mainstream last year with its gritty portrayal of civilians caught in conflict, and gained overwhelmingly positive reviews on the PC games distribution site Steam.

“For soldiers, war is about victory. For us, it was about getting food,” begins its stunning trailer. Everyone in the field of conflict advocacy should watch it.

And yet, somehow, suggesting the use of games is still often met with blank stares. The BBC is to be applauded for creating this experience, even though the outcome is rather more miserable than many are used to. There is not much empowerment and resilience here. That’s the point.

During the UK election debate, only the Green Party’s Natalie Bennett had the courage to question Britain’s Syrian refugee policy, and, bizarrely, only the UKIP’s Nigel Farage lent his support to allowing more Syrian refugees into Britain. The rest of the candidates did their best to avoid the issue. For some reason, the UK has heaved a national shrug over this crisis, hoping to avoid it by keeping it contained ‘over there’.

So when a game comes along which highlights the murderous consequences of Europe’s refugee policy, it’s perhaps not surprising that some people are shocked.

They should be.

How horrifying does the footage have to get before we wake up to the mass grave in the Mediterranean?

I have a mixed relationship with Vice. I still associate it with a lackadaisically sensationalist hipster style of reportage – an over-easy ‘whoa, cool’ attitude to the darkest dramas unfolding across our planet.

But it’s also giving us some of the most compelling foreign news coverage on the net, and for all my prejudices I find myself turning to it increasingly often.

I watched its trailer for Europe or Die – Libya’s Migrant Jails through the gaps between my fingers.

Some of the imagery is so casually awful, I hesitate to share it. The clip is suffused with the visual tropes of a horror movie; the below sea view of the boat, the lingering shots of drowned bodies, set to an atonal dread-filled soundtrack.

Is this really the way?

And yet, and yet. Europeans surely need something to wake us up from our casual ignorance of the mass grave lapping against our shores.

More than 3000 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea last year, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, and growing insecurity in Libya. The stories of those who survived is the stuff of nightmares. Pope Francis last year issued a global appeal for solidarity to stop the vast cemetery on our doorstep. Aid agencies are deploying cutting edge story-telling tools to sound the alarm. Horrifying incidents are reported by newspapers with numbing regularity.

But to no avail.

The major European programme to rescue migrants at sea – Mare Nostrum – has been discontinued, replaced with Operation Triton, which is more interested in keeping people out than saving them. There are already indications that this year will see more drownings than the last.

I remember learning as a child of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’. Their plight became one of the iconic images of that era, a reference point shared across the world, and I still have memories of those reports.

By contrast, it feels like the crisis of the Mediterranean boat people, if the term is appropriate, is causing barely a ripple, tutted over briefly and then forgotten.

For all its Hollywood thriller sensibilities, maybe Vice has the right approach. At the very least, it’s trying.

How else to give this horror the attention it deserves?