SteveTheGamer55 is live on YouTube. He’s streaming a session to his 4.6 million subscribers of GTA 5 RP, a Grand Theft Auto 5 mod that allows people to role-play with other players. “Really wanna show you guys some real-life scenarios,” he says, offering a little background on his character, a man headed to his job while on a work visa.
His character doesn’t get far before an SUV swings onto the sidewalk in front of him; masked ICE agents spill out of the vehicle. “Stop right there,” one of the uniformed players says. It isn’t long before SteveTheGamer55 is surrounded by agents. He hands over his ID while bystander players yell at the agents and demand his release. “Why are you harassing people?” one says, before the worker is finally let go. Later in SteveTheGamer55’s play session, he stands in front of a large iron gate reminiscent of those in ICE detention centers seen in cities like Chicago. More in-game ICE agents have gathered. He records from his phone. Just in front of him, a player in a red suit demands to see a warrant for his client.
The “special event” held on November 20, where players took on different roles that reflect real-life ICE raids, was the first initiative by New Save Collective, a baker’s dozen of gamers with backgrounds in activism and organizing, whose goal is to educate gamers and teach people about their rights when dealing with ICE in real-world situations. On November 21, at 7:30 pm ET, gamers will gather in Epic’s massively popular battle royale, Fortnite, to hold a closed scavenger hunt that will serve as a more casual educational opportunity. The group is working with several immigration advocacy groups, as well as collaborating with content creators, to spread their message online.
Online gaming spaces have long appealed to the right as a place to push conservative or even extremist ideologies. The US military has been open about its attempts to use games as a recruitment tool, and immigration authorities are no different. In October, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image aping marketing for the Halo series. “Finishing this fight,” the agency’s official account tweeted—a reference to Halo 3’s tagline—alongside an image with the text “Destroy the Flood” slapped over a blurry depiction of the game’s supersoldiers; the Flood are Halo’s alien antagonists. DHS has also riffed off of Pokémon’s “gotta catch ‘em all” tagline,” going as far as to post a video of ICE agents destroying property and arresting people, interspersed with the show’s opening.
A spokesperson previously told The Hill that the DHS “will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokémon, The Lord of The Rings, or any other medium.” But where movements like Gamergate peddled in harassment, hatred, and exclusion, New Save Collective’s goal is to foster a community that is kind, authentic, and oriented towards doing good.
“Most of us are immigrants, or children of immigrants, or children of refugees,” says one organizer who goes by PitaBreadFace online. (The organizer requested WIRED not use his name out of safety concerns.) “We’re here at this stage in the political climate to cultivate some belonging, but also move people towards a shared purpose that everyone seems pretty hungry for.”
PitaBreadFace says that he started digital organizing in games spaces in an effort to bring people together through their shared love of video games. “The right has built some pretty strong institutions within gaming that have co-opted and weaponized the social features of gaming for bad,” he says, pointing to Gamergate. “The actual demographic and culture of gaming is changing, but we haven’t built as many institutions as the right or those toxic forces.”
Games that serve as platforms are becoming popular places for kids and adults alike to gather in protest. On Roblox, players have held both pro-Palestine rallies and anti-ICE demonstrations. For New Save Collective, games like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto offer a similarly useful place to carry out their events. “Some of the folks who play GTA roleplay are [police] officers in real life or are lawyers in real life,” says Anosh Polticoal, who also requested to only be referred to by screenname for safety.
“For a [gaming] stream that’s educating the public in a world where many people may not have seen an interaction with ICE yet, [it’s] a way to get folks to know or get used to what that might look like,” the organizer says. “What their rights are as bystanders, as citizens, as non-citizens, as folks who are documented, undocumented. It felt like a really great way to see all that play out for an audience.”
Friday’s Fortnite event offers a chance for gamers across multiple platforms to learn about community building and how to speak up about xenophobia online. In order to play through the scavenger hunt, players will first have to be onboarded to the server; organizers say they’ve already dealt with people claiming to be ICE agents spreading misinformation and pro-ICE propaganda in their online communities.
Games like Halo or first-person shooters already have built-in messaging around “protect the homeland,” Anosh Polticoal says. “I think [ICE] have seen that as an opportunity to reach an audience that is already engaged in what they may feel is similar work. We want to make sure that our message is showing up in those same places—maybe you are not an immigrant, but someone in your life, in your community definitely is.”
New Save Collective is working with another organization, Define American, which focuses on shifting the portrayal of immigrants in media. Shauna Siggelkow, vice president of programs for the group, says the focus on games is part of that effort. “In order for politics to change around immigration, we first need to change the public discourse,” Siggelkow says. “Not just immigrants, but citizens, whatever your status is—it’s really important that we all understand our rights and practice those rights when we’re confronted by ICE.”
New Save Collective plans to continue holding future events and organizing gamers. The fight for these communities online is far from over. “Gaming wasn’t kind of a random genre that we chose,” says Siggelkow. “We’ve been tracking anti-immigrant myths and disinformation digitally for years. We really grounded this campaign in a lot of data and research. This really is a space that is critical for immigration narrative.”
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