Let's Play the 'Refugee Crisis': A Postcolonial Deconstruction of the Refugee in Post-2015 European Videogames

This extended abstract offers a postcolonial critique of European videogames about refugees produced after 2015, a period shaped by the so-called "refugee crisis" and the growing influence of far-right ideology across Europe. It argues that games engage with refugee representation in two contrasting ways. Independent "empathy machine" titles such as Bury Me, My Love, Path Out, and Salaam adopt a politics of care aimed at rehumanizing refugees, yet the author contends that rendering refugees as ludic objects to be saved reproduces colonial logics of heroic Western intervention and Orientalist assumptions about the right of the Western gaze to observe distant suffering. Mainstream European AAA titles, including The Witcher III, the Horizon series, and Baldur's Gate 3, adopt a less overt, depoliticized approach, presenting refugees as optional side quests or as passive subjects whose treatment is left to player choice between saviourism and sadism.

The central claim is that both approaches ultimately reify the refugee as a passive morality object, a mobile signifier through which European consciousness can seek altruistic redemption or enact increasingly fascist fantasies of control. The paper draws on Bogost's account of persuasive games and on theorizations of games as sites of political struggle over domination, inclusion, and marginalization. Its methodological aim is to apply postcolonial frameworks to the production of European identity through games, positioning the refugee as Europe's twenty-first-century subaltern.

As an extended abstract, the work is primarily conceptual and theoretical rather than empirical. It does not report survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings. Its scope is confined to a selected set of European games released between roughly 2015 and 2024, and its analysis is framed as a forthcoming close reading of how these titles afford or constrain players' responses to the visual grammar of the refugee crisis.