If you look around (or really, just glance at the numbers), digital games have apparently
ended up being, a lot more than spare-time fun. With over 3.2 billion people worldwide
playing in some regular way—Statista offered up that number in 2023—these
experiences are constantly leaping across all sorts of borders. Games aren’t simply
escapism. More and more, they seem to act as living platforms where stories of
moving—between places, or inside identities—play out as you watch, or more often, as
you participate.

The rise of online environments, whether that’s communal gathering spots or casino
platforms, is making the edges between “here” and “there”—between offline and online
migration—look awfully thin. Somewhere in these digital worlds, cultural adaptation,
small negotiations, and new hybrids are always in motion, and probably at a speed that
wasn’t possible before.

Games as narrative spaces for migration stories

It feels like recently, independent games have started carving out new ground for telling
stories about migration. There’s Papers, Please—that one’s about border work,
basically—and Bury Me, My Love, which drops you into a refugee’s journey. In these
titles, you get dropped into roles most people don’t experience firsthand: maybe you’re a
border inspector one moment, maybe a spouse on the move the next. Every time you
make a decision, the weight of migration gets just a little more real. Frostpunk does
something a bit different; it zooms out, if you will, letting you see the system-level trade-
offs leaders face when disaster uproots entire communities.

Some research out of Ghent University (2023) suggests that these games have a knack
for creating what academics sometimes call “productive discomfort.” You’re not just
sitting back—you’re stuck making choices, and those choices come with real tension.
It’s a feeling that, for some, apparently echoes the complexity of migration itself: the
stress, uncertainty, flickers of hope. There’s even evidence, a survey from IGDA in 2022,
that over 30% of players end up talking about these experiences with
others—sometimes telling migration stories, sometimes debating the bigger questions.
Games, at least some of them, seem to be starting conversations that stick.

Transnational identity construction in digital gaming spaces

For a lot of people who move between places, online gaming—whether they’re joining a
multiplayer roleplay world or has become a strangely electric space for working out who
they are. It’s not just play, its social glue. Papers from Nord University (2018) point out
that in Norway, for example, almost two-thirds of immigrant youth turned to games to
weave together strands of their old lives with whatever’s new. Inside these spaces,

identities don’t really stay in one piece—they’re picked up, taken apart, and put back
together, sometimes all at once, often depending on who else is around or which chat is
open.

It gets complicated. Players might choose an avatar that looks just like them or nothing
like them; they might switch languages mid-sentence. Communities form and fall apart.
And while physical life can be limiting, digital games are, for better or worse, places
where you can show or hide whatever you want—heritage, gender, the right accent, all of
it. This flexibility creates odd opportunities, pushing the boundaries not only of where
someone comes from but of how they decide to belong. Sometimes that sparks
resilience. Sometimes, just as easily, friction.

Games as touchpoints for shifting identity

Landing in a new place—by choice or necessity—can seriously shake up how someone
defines themselves. Social scientists throw around terms like identity expansion to
describe what’s going on: new words, new customs, clashing or blending with what’s
already there. Interestingly, some preliminary findings suggest that, lately, games seem
to be speeding up this process.

Think about it. Gaming spaces don’t really separate the local from the global anymore.
A player could join a guild with people from three continents, or chat late into the night
with someone going through something similar. These overlapping worlds end up
creating quick, frequent chances to experiment with new aspects of self; sometimes it
even helps recalibrate how connected they feel to either their origin or their new home.
There’s a sense, as time goes on and platforms become even more interconnected, that
millions now depend on these ecosystems to debate the line between hanging on and
fitting in.

Expressing self, and how the journey shapes the game

One thing seems pretty clear, digital games offer windows for expressing identity that
often aren’t available offline, especially in places where certain backgrounds—religion,gender, ethnicity—must be kept out of sight. The kind of migrant someone is makes a
difference here. Internal migrants tend to have one set of challenges. International
migrants are, as Penn State’s Geography department points out, dealing with bigger
cultural jumps, while forced migrants—refugees, especially—hold onto heritage in ways
that sometimes show up strongly inside game worlds.

Whether it’s online casinos, adventure quests, or social hangouts, each new platform
gives people the stage for redefining identity. Voluntary migration, compared to forced
or internal moves, tends to color which communities are appealing, how characters are
made, even the details of in-game rituals. Researchers keep spotting recurring patterns:
the type and intensity of someone’s migration journey often stamp themselves onto
digital habits, making gaming worlds messy, creative, and varied—almost as much as
offline life.

Conclusion

If there’s any single thread running through all this, it may be that games are
shifting—not just entertainment, but something neighboring cultural contact and self-
questioning. People with and without migration backgrounds both find themselves
thinking about who they are (or could be) inside these digital stories and spaces. At the
same time, these opportunities open up tricky territory.
With new ground for expression and hybridity come questions—who’s being included,
how are people and stories shown, who gets overlooked or misread? While some argue
that raising empathy and awareness through games matters, none of it’s perfect, and
the industry (along with players, honestly) faces decisions on representation and
privacy that won’t settle anytime soon. Still, the conversation around migration,
belonging, and digital identity is alive—and games, it seems, are sometimes helping
keep it interesting, if a bit unsettled.

Litro Magazine