How a simple computer game simulated the dizzying U.S. immigration process
Students from the University of Arkansas learned just how complex the U.S. immigration process was. (Suranga Weeratunga/Deposit/)Brandon Bouchillon is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas. This story originally featured on The Conversation.People fear and mistrust what they don’t know—including people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. That lack of trust causes social and political divisions in the US and around the world, especially when it comes to immigrants.Inspired by research in Hungary that found computer games could help players reduce their prejudice toward immigrants, my colleague Patrick Stewart devised a role-playing game as part of an American national government course at the University of Arkansas. I helped to develop survey measures for tracking changes in trust during the game.Our hope was that by playing the game over the course of a semester, students would come to understand a bit more about what immigrants go through in...