(In)Visible Walls: Borders in Video Games as Myths of the Present

This paper examines how video games about borders and migration function as contemporary "myths of the present," using postcolonial game studies and mythanalysis as its analytical framework. Its starting point is Papers, Please (2013), which turned border procedures into a playable system and inspired a growing body of games on immigration. The authors focus on three such works: Creatrix Tiara's "Immigration" pieces, Gonzalo Álvarez's Borders (2017), and Not Tonight (Panic Barn, 2018), which is set against the backdrop of Brexit. The analysis centers on the formal tools these games use to build their arguments, their positioning as activist works of resistance, and how they portray migrants as subjects possessing agency and interiority.

The theoretical core rests on the idea that myths, following Barthes, are immanent to their historical moment yet capable of generating new social and political bonds. Games can both reflect these myths and actively shape them, a process the authors connect to older narrative traditions such as Homer's Odyssey alongside contemporary refugee-centered titles like Bury Me, My Love and Path Out. Borders are framed as sites organized around the binary of "us" versus "them," and the paper draws on Dahl's concept of inclusiveness to argue that the central question is not only who may cross a border but who holds citizenship rights once inside it.

The paper's central claim is that these games operate as acts of resistance against anti-immigration discourse in potential host countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, while also forming part of a broader modern mythical structure concerning displacement, refuge, belonging, and togetherness. Drawing on Flanagan's notion of critical play and recent humanities research on refugee imaginaries, the authors interpret these works as interventions that reveal how ideological narratives divide communities and how alternative narratives might reunite them.