Paper accepted @ CHI Play 2026

Title: You have a long way to go”: Migrant and Displaced People as Authors in a Storytelling Game Jam

Conference: CHI Play 2026

Authors: Kseniia Harshina, Ameneh Safari, Tom Tucek

Abstract: Games about migration and displacement are often framed through empathy: they invite players to understand experiences of border crossing, bureaucracy, loss, or uncertainty from a safe distance. Yet this framing can become extractive when people with lived experience have little control over how their stories are told, interpreted, or shared. This paper examines a one-day, migrant-led participatory storytelling game jam with adults who had migration and/or displacement experience. We analyze seven shared participant-created game prototypes together with participant reflections, mentor reflections, and process documentation. Our analysis shows how small prototypes used interactive form to express migration as lived constraint, unequal possibility, ongoing change, and layered belonging. It also shows how the workshop conditions shaped what participants could make and how they chose to share, withhold, or continue their work. We argue that participatory storytelling jams should be understood not only through the artifacts they produce, but through the conditions that make authorship possible: participant control over form and disclosure, playtesting as community recognition, and institutional support for the labor behind migrant-led facilitation. The paper contributes an artifact-centered account of a migrant-led storytelling jam and a coding framework for analyzing compact autobiographical games across cases.