Video games and humanitarian crises—especially those caused by armed confrontations—have been intertwined since the very origins of digital computing. It is no coincidence that Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, collaborators on Allied intelligence projects during World War II, were also pioneers in game programming; nor that the modern concept of humanitarianism emerged almost simultaneously with the first video games.1 This entanglement between the production of militarized knowledge and the birth of video games is not merely anecdotal: it points to a structural relationship between the design of virtual spaces and the logics of conflict.
In 1999, concerned about declining enlistment numbers, the US Army invested nearly $5 million in the development of America's Army (2002), a war simulation game that reached more than thirteen million players. As Robertson Allen noted, the project marked the disappearance of the traditional geographical and jurisdictional boundaries of warfare, as combat operations became mediated through networked, placeless infrastructure.2 This transformation reveals two fundamental functions that video games have historically served in wartime or pre-war contexts. On the one hand, ideological recruitment: the architecture and spatial design of these games immerse the player in environments constructed to serve a specific political and military narrative, selecting what to show and what to omit, which conflicts to represent and from which perspective.3 On the other, simulation as a tool for training: virtual space not only disseminates an ideology, but trains specific modes of action and decision-making, normalizing particular responses to crisis scenarios.
Both functions have a direct consequence on how humanitarian crises are represented—or ignored—in video games. When virtual architecture is placed at the service of a military narrative, it tends to operate through three mechanisms: the omission of those aspects of conflict that do not serve the dominant story; the depoliticization of complex contexts, reduced to functional game scenarios; and the primacy of spaces emptied of civilian presence, where the only visible actors are combatants. The human consequences of armed conflicts—the forced displacement of populations, the destruction of infrastructure, the massive loss of civilian lives—are thus systematically kept out of frame, relegated to backdrop or simply absent.
This research draws on a database of 144 video games, of which sixty were analyzed in depth through a conceptual framework structured across eight chronological periods. Although video games emerged in the mid-1950s, it was not until 1972 that they consolidated as a commercial product. It is precisely in that same historical period that two concepts crystallized which would evolve in parallel with the video game industry: that of the refugee, defined in the United Nations Convention of 1951, and that of modern humanitarianism as an institutionalized field. Video games and the international humanitarian protection system were born and developed within the same historical context, which makes it all the more significant how virtuality represents—or ignores—the realities that humanitarianism seeks to address.
The corpus is limited to titles that situate the humanitarian crises they depict in the post–World War II period, taking the 1951 Convention as a conceptual threshold. The first game in the corpus to explicitly mention civilians affected by a humanitarian crisis is Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (1995). From that point, the corpus includes both real conflicts and fictional scenarios, spanning crises of different kinds: armed, climatic, biological, and even interplanetary, acknowledging that many of these are interdependent and trigger one another. However, one of the constants was that they all refer precisely to their geographic setting (even if it is fictional).4 The development of these titles has been predominantly American, Japanese, and European, with some exceptions—a distribution that reflects both the historical dominance of these industries in global game production and a question of cultural accessibility.5
The games fall into three broad categories: commercial entertainment titles; commercial games that go beyond entertainment, recognized as such by their creators or by external institutions; and “serious games,” whose core purpose—whether to inform, raise awareness, or convey a lived experience—coexists with, but is not subordinated to, entertainment.
The Politics of Naming
Since all games in the corpus deal with real or fictional events set after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the definition of refugee status in Article I of the United Nations Convention, it is relevant to examine which games explicitly invoke these concepts and which address them only indirectly. Notably, the terms used to refer to populations affected by humanitarian crises are not always organized around the concept of “refugee”: across the corpus one finds instead “survivors,” “civilians,” “internally displaced persons” (IDPs), “units,” and more narratively specific terms such as “robots” or “infected,” each carrying distinct ideological implications.
The concept of the refugee—referring to a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution on various grounds, finds themselves outside their country of origin—appears primarily in games of a more serious rather than commercial profile.6 Examples include We. The Refugees: Ticket to Europe (2023), Darfur is Dying (2006), Zaytoun, The Young Syrian-Palestinian Refugee (2013), Path Out (2017), and Bury Me, My Love (2017)—all games designed to raise awareness of the living conditions and complex circumstances experienced by refugees involved in various humanitarian crises.
These are not conventional commercial games, understood as those developed and distributed with a financial, profit-seeking objective, aimed at broad audiences and subject to the logics of mainstream entertainment.7 Rather, they are titles that attempt to represent reality more faithfully. We. the Refugees and Bury Me, My Love sold fewer than 5,000 copies each. Among games that explicitly invoke the concept of the refugee, however, certain exceptions exist in terms of commercial reach. Papers, Please (2013), which directly addresses refugees attempting to cross a border, sold over 1.8 million copies; and Endling: Extinction is Forever (2022), which depicts a group of climate refugees through the story of the last fox of her species trying to save her cubs, was nominated for a BAFTA award and backed by an international publishing team.8
It is also worth noting that in Fallout 3 (2008)—a commercial title estimated to have sold 12.7 million copies—the concept of the refugee is mentioned explicitly. However, it does not correspond to the legal status and modern definition of the term; rather, it is framed within a post-apocalyptic future following a nuclear war, in which many individuals have been displaced from hazardous zones. The term here also carries a clear spatial dimension: while all characters are survivors of a conflict, the label “refugee” is applied specifically to those who do not reside in cities—even though city dwellers are also displaced, they acquire a civic identity by virtue of their association with an urban space, whereas the refugees of Fallout 3 inhabit settlements outside urban centers and remain in search of a place to belong. This highlights a broader challenge when analyzing video games: the difficulty of applying real-world conceptual boundaries to fictional settings. In Fallout 3, the absence of any formal legal framework makes it impossible to determine whether its displaced characters should be classified as “refugees” or “internally displaced persons” (IDPs).
Across the database of analyzed games, the term most frequently used to refer to individuals who have experienced or are experiencing a humanitarian crisis is “survivors.” This term encompasses responses to various types of crises, from biological to armed conflict, and is consistently foregrounded by presenting those affected—including, in many cases, the protagonists—as individuals who have actively overcome the crisis and survived through their own agency, as in The Last of Us (2013/2022/2020) series.
This also connects to questions of identity and acts of self-definition. In several video games, the population groups most affected by humanitarian conflicts—or those that trigger the crisis itself—are distorted through a dualistic “us versus them” framework, stigmatizing and transforming them into something other than what they are.9 Detroit: Become Human (2018), for instance, proposes a future in which robots seek integration into a society that refuses to recognize them as equals. Along similar lines, Quarantine Zone: The Last Check (2026) posits that some refugees attempting to cross a border are infected by a virus, and the player’s role is to determine which of them should be permitted to pass. Conversely, My Memory of Us (2018) presents a dystopian scenario revisiting World War II, but with the Nazis reimagined as robots—a device that deepens the debate around the moral responsibility for evil, since robots, as machines that follow orders, complicate traditional frameworks of individual culpability.10
In God game genres, where humanitarian crises such as war compel part of the population to relocate, displaced individuals are typically referred to as “units”—civilians, or units identified by their occupation, such as “carpenter units”—who, once a territory is seized, come under the player’s control and function as resource-generating assets. This abstraction of human lives into instrumental categories is not incidental: it anticipates a spatial logic in which representation itself becomes an act of selection, deciding what is shown, and what is left out.
A Chronopolitical History
As previously noted, the entanglement between war and video games is structural. The Cold War prolonged and deepened this relationship: the space race, triggered by the launch of Sputnik in 1957, accelerated the development of microprocessors, integrated circuits, and real-time visualization systems.11 ARPANET (1969), funded by the US Department of Defense as a nuclear-resistant communications network, became the direct precursor of the internet. And ARPA and NASA’s investment in graphical interfaces and simulation systems gradually migrated from the military and space spheres into civilian entertainment.12
It is within this ecosystem that the video game was born as a cultural product. Tennis for Two (1958) was created by a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and Spacewar! (1962) was developed at MIT with federal funding. The transition to the consumer market came in 1972, coinciding with the release of Pong and the Magnavox Odyssey—the medium’s first video console and mass commercial success—and the progressive miniaturization of electronic components. The arrival of the personal computer in the mid-1970s further democratized both programming and play. The CD-ROM, consolidated as an industry standard in the mid-1990s, enabled more complex narratives and more detailed worlds.13 The internet transformed the video game into a social and global medium.14 And the arrival of the smartphone turned more than half of the world’s population into potential players.
However, video games have not only been shaped by technological development: they have also been actively deployed as a tool of geopolitical soft power, and have consequently been influenced by the political context in which they are produced and consumed. A particularly revealing case is that of Afghanistan, the Central Asian country that has served as the setting for numerous video games—fifty-one original titles and more than twenty expansions for other games. Of these, only six predate 2001 and only three predate 1996, when the Taliban came into power. Two of the games depicting Afghanistan released prior to 1996 centered on conflicts against the Soviet Union, and it appears in the other one, King of the Monsters 2 (1992), in a purely incidental manner. In the years following the Taliban’s rise to power in 1996, three games set in Afghanistan were published: Joint Strike Fighter (1997), and Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way (1998), and Syphon Filter 3 (2001)—all military titles. Following September 11, 2001, the first game depicting the country was none other than America's Army (2002).15 From that point onward, forty-six additional games were published, all of which are related to military action. The last two games released to represent Afghanistan were Insurgency: Sandstorm (2018) and Call of Duty: Mobile (2019). Both are set after the end of major combat operations in 2014, during a period in which both NATO and the United States military still maintained a presence in the country in an advisory and training capacity for the Afghan armed forces in their ongoing struggle against the Taliban.
Another conflict recurrently represented in video games is the Israeli-Palestinian war, particularly following the First Intifada (1987). Prior to this, only two titles existed (from 1981 and 1985), both of a military nature. In 1989, a game of the same name, Intifada, was published from the perspective of an Israeli soldier, and in 1990 two further titles appeared: Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator (a political simulation game) and Countdown (a game not specifically about the conflict, but which sets one of its scenarios in Jerusalem, which is linked to terrorism). The first cataloged game directly addressing the humanitarian crisis relating to the conflict is Raid Gaza! (2008), published one year after a land, sea, and air blockade was imposed on the city. During the summer of 2014, coinciding with further escalation of the conflict in the Gaza Strip, dozens of simple games quickly appeared on the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store—including Bomb Gaza and The Liberation of Palestine, representing the conflict from both sides.16
A similar pattern can be seen in relation to the Syrian war. Syria appeared in video games for the first time in 1985, in a game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—Golan Front—where it featured only marginally. Since then, it has consistently been portrayed as a country associated with armed conflict. The first explicit representation of the Syrian humanitarian crisis appeared in Endgame: Syria in 2012. From that moment onward, dozens of games about Syria have been published, focused primarily on the effects of the conflict on civilian populations and the massive refugee exodus toward Europe.
From the mid-2000s, the expansion of broadband, the rise of social media, and digital distribution platforms such as Steam (2003) transformed both the production and consumption of video games, allowing independent developers to reach global audiences without major publishers. This opened the door to perspectives previously absent from a commercially dominated industry. The Arab Uprisings (2010–12) made plain that the internet had become the space in which humanitarian crises acquired visibility and urgency, accelerating international response to events on the ground.
Video games absorbed this shift rapidly: Endgame: Syria appeared barely a year after the conflict began, and Darfur is Dying (2006) reached audiences that would have been impossible in the pre-digital era. Yet this democratization had clear limits: while the independent sector gained the capacity to represent ignored conflicts, major studios continued to produce war games from Western perspectives with multi-million-dollar budgets.
Deliberate Omission
The most commercially successful video games set in the context of humanitarian crises are first-person shooters (FPS) and third-person shooters (TPS), which continue to dominate the industry.17 In these titles, the representation of humanitarian consequences and the spaces in which they unfold tends to be highly limited. Of the corpus of titles examined, the majority (72 percent) of commercially oriented games make no reference to civilian populations, nor do they account for their presence in the spaces where the game unfolds. This shifts considerably in the domain of beyond-entertainment games, where attention to civilian populations and to spaces affected by humanitarian crisis is significantly greater. In commercial video games, the action is typically centered on military characters and dynamics, leaving aside other consequences of conflict. Furthermore, a disconnect is often created from the consequences of a player’s actions, such as killing people. These omissions are frequently understood as a design strategy intended to facilitate player immersion in the game system.
The Call of Duty franchise (2003–present), for instance, depicts numerous crises, ranging from purely armed conflicts to nuclear and even biological scenarios across a variety of geographic locations. The impact of these events on civilian populations is rarely represented in an explicit manner, with the exception of certain non-interactive cinematics in which civilian suffering is depicted as a narrative and dramatic force. For instance, in the campaign of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007), civilians appear during scenes of violence and terrorist attacks, and large numbers of non-combatants are shown hiding or attempting to flee the conflict. Similarly, the controversial “No Russian” sequence in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) places the player alongside a terrorist group carrying out an attack at an airport in which hundreds of civilians are killed in an indiscriminate massacre. In this respect, the franchise clearly delineates between active characters—the players, who are primarily soldiers—and non-playable characters—who are mostly other soldiers, or “combatants,” and only on rare occasions civilians.
An Empty (and Biased) Architecture
Countless games follow this pattern of invisibilization, taking it to a spatial level. In games such as Far Cry 6 (2021)—which is not tied to a strictly military context and is classified as an open-world game—the presence of individuals affected by humanitarian crises is incidental. This is evident even at the game’s outset, where a refugee camp appears in the south of Kyrat, within territory controlled by the Golden Path—yet the camp is essentially vacant. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of how humanitarian crises are represented in video games is the depiction of largely empty spaces. Battles typically take place in cities and towns from which the civilian population has already disappeared, or in environments where the remaining inhabitants are no longer represented as civilians. A paradigmatic example is found in Resident Evil 5 (2009), where the setting of an African village is populated not by civilians but by individuals infected with a lethal virus, who are presented as threats to be eliminated rather than as civilians to be protected.
In many titles, environmental cues further reinforce this sense of emptiness. Urban and domestic spaces tend to appear unusually clean and orderly. This can not only be seen in America's Army, but also in its Chinese equivalent Glorious Mission (2011), in Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (2022), a game framed around a pro-Palestinian resistance narrative, and even in titles that explicitly claim to address the humanitarian consequences of conflict, such as Massira (2019). Living beings are scarce and everyday social life is virtually absent. This stands in sharp contrast to real-world humanitarian crises, where refugee camps and informal settlements are characterized by extreme density, overcrowding, and the intense coexistence of human lives. One of the few games in which people—and specifically refugees—appear within the space as a central element is This War of Mine (2014), which depicts the Siege of Sarajevo through cross-sectional images of different buildings where the lives of its inhabitants intersect.
By contrast, space in video games tends to be disproportionately vast in relation to the human figures that inhabit it. When lives do appear—particularly in management or God game genres such as Tropico (2001) or Civilization III (2001)—they are typically abstracted and instrumentalized, functioning as resources allocated in service of a higher objective, such as resolving a conflict, stabilizing a territory, or improving the condition of a nation or region. The ratio between human beings and space is therefore minimal, and is further reinforced through axonometric perspectives that center focus on architecture rather than on human figures.
Further compounding the absence of civilians and lived experience are certain strategies related to spatial clichés and biases, such as the use of yellow and orange color filters in the representation of African and Middle Eastern countries. This is a means of simplifying and defining them within very narrow visual parameters, where night or rain exist only occasionally, and always in service of specific narrative purposes.
The Depoliticization of Conflicts
Humanitarian crises in video games are typically represented in a simplified manner, one in which conflicts are stripped of much of the political, historical, and social nuance that characterizes their real-world counterparts. In some cases, this simplification reflects a deliberate design choice aimed at foregrounding specific gameplay mechanics. For example, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) prioritizes stealth and tactical decision-making, while games with a clear political and social awareness agenda—such as This War of Mine (2014) or Cloud Chasers (2015)—place emphasis on survival and resource management.
In these instances, the political context is not entirely absent, but is subordinated to the logic of the game. In This War of Mine, for example, resource-scarcity mechanics recast survival as a series of moral dilemmas—whether to steal from an elderly couple or let one’s own group go hungry—so that the political causes of the war are pushed into the background, giving way to their ethical consequences, which are what drive the game’s development.
In other cases, however, simplification takes the form of caricature or selective representation, like real-world actors and scenarios being exaggerated, flattened, or only partially depicted in order to reinforce a particular point of view. This tendency is particularly visible in representations of conflicts set in African countries—such as those portrayed in the Resident Evil, Insurgency, or Call of Duty franchises—where complex political realities are reduced to familiar tropes of chaos, insurgency, and external intervention, frequently compounded by racist undertones. For instance, the portrayal of Jonas Savimbi in Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012) led his sons to file a lawsuit against the game’s publisher over his representation.18
Whether overtly or implicitly, many video games adopt simplified narrative structures to the point that they resemble propaganda. Two paradigmatic examples have already been mentioned—America’s Army and the Glorious Mission—both of which adopt clear ideological positions aligned with the interests of the states that developed them. But this same “us versus them” logic is not limited to that context alone. It extends, in varying degrees and across different areas, to fictional conflicts, which tend to be framed through similar processes of simplification, constructing a clear opposition between “us” and “the other” that connects directly with Jason Stanley’s propositions linking propaganda to the structural properties that underpin fascist frameworks.19 This logic is particularly evident in zombie games, in which players are positioned as refugees from biological crises and must survive against infected populations who are stripped of their capacity for political agency and reduced to existential threats, as seen in State of Decay (2013) or Survivalist: Invisible Strain (2025).20
Video games can be seen as ideological systems and tools used for the purpose of representation, highlighting—and in certain areas—hiding, part of reality. However, representation isn’t the whole story. Video games are, by definition, spatial systems, meaning that every game is, in the end, always an architectural project, which determines how the world is seen and understood, and does not merely represent humanitarian crises from an external point of view. Video games that depict humanitarian crises actively contribute to their spatial and political imaginaries. In other words, missing information, clichés, and over-simplifications are also part of how a reality—whether a war, a crisis, or a border under pressure from displaced communities—can be imagined.
Virtual architecture is never neutral; it is always an ideological framework of some kind. The positioning of elements, the color palettes and the labeling of humans represented in the game, are decisions which hold political consequences and implications about how they are perceived. The places where these virtual architectures are produced tend to be distant from the real crises they represent, lacking meaningful involvement from the affected communities. We should therefore question who holds the power to build virtual environments of wide public appeal, and what are the consequences of these biased representations for a refugee camp, a warzone, or even survival itself?
Claude E. Shannon, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” Philosophical Magazine 41, no 314 (1950): 256–75; Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (236), 433–460 (1950); Alan M. Turing, “Digital Computers Applied to Games,” in Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machine, ed. B. V. Bowden (London: Pitman, 1953).
Robertson Allen, “The Unreal Enemy of America's Army,” Games and Culture 6, no. 1 (2010): 38–60; Robertson Allen, America's Digital Army: Games at Work and War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne, eds., Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2009).
For instance, September 12th: A Toy World (2003), a game created in response to the events of September 11, analyses the consequences of terrorism on civilian populations in a country implied to be Afghanistan, but Afghanistan is itself never mentioned.
China, for instance, is a major producer of video games, but few of its titles circulate beyond its domestic market. Aphra Kerr, Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era (New York: Routledge, 2017); Jean Paul Simon, “The Production and Distribution of Digital Content in China: An Historical Account of the Role of Internet Companies and Videogames,” Digital Policy, Regulation and Governance 23, no. 2 (2021): 190–209.
United Nations, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 189 (July 28, 1951), art. 1, ➝.
Aphra Kerr, The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay (London: Sage, 2006); Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Although Endling occupies an ambiguous position—commercially distributed, but also included in the “Games Beyond Entertainment” category at the BAFTA Games Awards.
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Stephen L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 1: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond (New York: Crown, 2010); Stephen L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and the Billion-Dollar Battle to Shape Modern Gaming (New York: Crown, 2021).
Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (Lewes: Yellow Ant, 2010).
Syphon Filter 3 was originally scheduled for release on September 25, 2001. However, due to 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, Sony postponed the release until November in order to change the cover image, which originally depicted the main characters inside a courtroom with a US flag in the background amidst a swirl of gas. A few original copies had already reached retailers and escaped recall, which exist in the world to this day. See ➝.
These were subsequently removed by Apple and Google.
Matthew Thomas Payne, Playing War: Military Video Games After 9/11 (New York University Press, 2016).
“Angolan Rebel Savimbi’s Family Sues Call of Duty Makers,” BBC News, February 4, 2016, ➝.
Stanley, How Fascism Works.
Espen Aarseth and Stephan Günzel, eds., Ludotopia: Spaces, Places and Territories in Computer Games (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019).
