ICED: Videogames in the Battle Between the Citizen and the Human

ICED, which stands for “I Can End Deportation,” is a videogame released in 2008 by the human rights organization Breakthrough. The game places the player in the social and legal environments faced by undocumented immigrants in contemporary New York. This article presents ICED as a type of popular solution to the challenge of using videogames for meaningful social criticism and analyzes its mode of production as the key source for this popular potential. The creators use design techniques and gaming tactics common in virtual worlds to create a humanitarian game that problematizes the idea of free will. Instead of making free will a tool for progressing in the game, ICED uses roaming to create a frustrating game experience. This frustration is an affective lesson about undocumented immigration and the social and legal environment that casts individuals in a world void of freedom and some basic human rights.