Boston Company's Immigration Game Draws Anger
BOSTON (CBS/AP) - A Boston tech company is catching criticism for developing a video game that lets players drive a truck full of immigrants through the desert, while trying to keep them from falling to the ground.
The proposed iPhone and iPad app by Owlchemy Labs is called Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration.
Targeted for release in March, the game lets players navigate through what appears to be the U.S.-Mexican border. As the truck drives over cliffs, mountains and dead animals, immigrants fall off the truck's bed. Scores are calculated by the number of immigrants helped crossing the U.S. border.
WBZ-TV's Jim Armstrong reports.
Developer Alex Schwartz said the idea came out of frustration friends faced while trying to immigrate to the United States.
"We kind of didn't want to typecast the game into being you're smuggling people from real local A to real location B. That's not what we wanted to do," Schwartz said. "We kind of wanted to make this abstract game about the generic idea of smuggling."
Company employees have been taking their laptops around Boston, showing the game to people and gauging reactions. "The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive," Schwartz said.
According to Schwartz, developers want to send a message that it's so tough to legally emigrate to the U.S. that it's almost easier to smuggle yourself over the border, despite the dangers.
But Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrants & Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said the game is in poor taste and trivializes the seriousness of immigrants willing to risk their lives under a broken immigration system.
"Last year, 170 human beings died crossing the border," Millona said in statement. "It's disgraceful that anyone would try to make money out of this tragedy by making light of it in a game."
Deivid Ribeiro of the Massachusetts Student Immigrant Movement agrees with Millona. "It seems totally inappropriate," he said. "It's dealing with people's lives. A lot of people have to do this because there's no other choice. And making a game out of it, making a joke out of it, that's not appropriate. We're talking about real people here."
Ribeiro adds that focusing on the border emphasizes the "myth that people keep talking about, that there's an invasion in this country and they're coming over the border."
WBZ-TV's Jim Armstrong and Associated Press writer Russell Contreras contributed to this report.
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