Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

Rafi shows off his ICED! shwag before the game release.

For our first February Fireside Workshop, we held game launch party for ICED!, an RPG which focuses on issues related to immigration and deportation. It was particularly nice to hold this kind of workshop in Teen Second Life, where we're already starting off in a 3D graphic engine, and moved to another 3D graphic engine to play the game!

25 teens from around the grid dropped in, and we had some incredible discussion come up in regards to deportation. From the start, many of the teens asked the hard questions. Are things actually wrong with the current immigration system? Isn't it a good thing to deport citizens if they commit crimes, even minor ones? Part of what became evident, both through the discussion but especially the game play, is the lack of justice that currently exists in a system that lacks due process, where people that break the law don't have a chance to get a hearing, and where immigrants are often held for indefinite periods of time.

Workshop participants congregate by the GK bonfire and discuss ICED.

These discussions lead to broader, systemic questions, such as what universal human rights are and why there aren't currently effective systems in place to enforce that these rights are respected. At the end, it really felt like the teens in attendance got to experience the issue in a new way, and through the game were able to get an experiential sense of the unfairness of many aspects of the current US immigration system.