University of Klagenfurt

“You Have a Long Way to Go”: Migrant and Displaced People as Authors in a Storytelling Game Jam

"You have a long way to go": Migrant and Displaced People as Authors in a Storytelling Game Jam KSENIIA HARSHINA, University of Klagenfurt, Austria AMENEH SAFARI, University of Bremen, Germany TOM TUCEK, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Games about migration and displacement are often framed through empathy: they invite…

• Ethical participatory storytelling for displaced people requires prioritizing participant agency over the final artifact, specifically by granting authors the right to withhold work or choose the level of disclosure.
• Game jams for migrant populations should offer diverse storytelling modalities, such as metaphor, abstraction, and fiction, to avoid the extractive pressure of forcing participants to share literal or traumatic autobiographical details.
• The labor of migrant-led facilitation is significant and often overlooked, involving high emotional and sensory loads for organizers who must navigate institutional gatekeeping and recruitment barriers.