Janet Haven

I'm very late to the discussion on Ethan Zuckerman's blog about the efficacy/validity of Second Life's Camp Darfur. Many excellent points on all sides have been made in the comments, and so I'll keep this brief. Basically, I'm with Ethan on this one, but for slightly different reasons than he's articulated. It's not just Camp Darfur that I find a bit off-putting; it's most "renactments" of tragic circumstances in the name of education or awareness-raising. The problem I have with them comes down to control. One of the most prevailing aspects of life in the United States nowadays is control over your environment: you can visit the supermarket, pick up your dry cleaning, watch a video, read the New York Times, or talk to your friends at nearly any time of day or night. Your choices are, in essence, overwhelming. Games like Second Life are even more about choice than real life; the whole point is that you choose your personality, profession, tools, finances, indeed, your very state of being.

My experience in refugee camps and with refugees has been limited, but probably more direct than that of many Americans. I volunteered at a refugee camp on the Hungarian/Romanian border for a while, visiting to play games with rooms full of the children of eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians who had been picked up trying to enter the European Union. I've visited with Palestinians in Jordan who grew up in refugee camps and whose families still live in them. Some of my closer friends have worked for years with refugees from the various countries that make up former Yugoslavia. None of this makes me an expert by any means, and yet it seems clear to me that the main characteristic of a refugee existance, and the main source on ongoing, constant anxiety, is the lack of control. In a camp, an individual can make few decisions for self or family. Life is about boredom, listlessness, lost opportunity, and fear of a totally unknown future. To be sure. the camps in Sudan have the additional horror of unexpected physical attack, which presumably drives anxiety through the roof when combined with the crushing nothingness of everyday life. I believe that it is human nature to try and better one's situation (and indeed, games like Second Life exist largely to meet this desire). In a refugee camp, that tendency is thwarted at nearly every turn. Most refugees can simply do nothing but wait, passively, for someone else, be it a international agency, their own government, or a man with a weapon, to make the decision that will change their lives. Or, like the Palestinian refugees still in Jordan, they simply wait, and wait.

This is why I find the idea of any kind of reenactment of these spaces so frustrating; it's a false emotional situation. As people who are choosing to visit a virtual world, we have all the control; we can come to Camp Darfur, look around, and then leave. Then we can come back. Maybe there will be someone interesting there, or something interesting happening. Then we might stay, and explore. Or leave again. Or sit and think. It's our choice. And because that choice always exists for us, but rarely or never for the refugees whose experience we seek to understand, I think Camp Darfur and other projects like it miss the crucial element that they wish to convey.