More than half of the nine developers who worked on the game have either obtained a US visa or tried and failed to do so. Most of them are from China, but the team also intentionally recruited talent from other countries in the hopes of incorporating more diverse immigrant perspectives.

“Everybody knows somebody that’s on a visa, but not all of them are vocal about that part of their identity,” says Andrea Saravia Pérez, an immigrant from Colombia who joined the team in February as a narrative designer. “How can we develop a project that’s interactive and shows people this immigration system that a lot of Americans are not familiar with?”

There’s growing interest across the gaming industry in making political games, says Yang. When her team brought H1B.Life to the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, she says they received a tremendous amount of interest and support because they are tackling an important societal issue without expecting to make much profit. (The game was supported by a philanthropic organization and the developers also plan to raise additional funding from a future Kickstarter campaign.)

Yang says she has also heard from people in Germany and Australia interested in licensing or adapting the game for different countries. “The whole world is turning right, and life is getting more difficult for all immigrants,” she says.

“If we can just put people in our shoes, I think it can create a very positive impact,” says Saravia Pérez. “As long as players come to have fun and are able to sympathize and understand it a little bit more, I think that we’ve done our job as a team.”

Technicalities Versus Emotions

The H-1B visa program, created in 1990, is one of the most reliable US immigration pathways for white collar workers with college degrees. In recent years, the program issued about 85,000 visas annually, but since there are often more applicants than slots, a lottery system determines who ultimately is chosen. And if you don’t get it, you have to wait an entire year before you try again. Every person who has gone through the process has their own success or failure story to tell, me included.

The team behind H1B.Life started developing the game by interviewing immigrants. So far, Yang says they have talked to over two dozen people about their H-1B journeys and used those interviews to make the game more realistic and accurate. The biggest challenge now is to figure out how to balance explaining complicated immigration rules accurately and ensuring the game is still entertaining.

A family has told an inquest that they were not responsible for memorialising the Instagram account of teenager Noah Donohoe after their family email account was linked by Meta to a request to freeze the account following his death.

The court heard today that Noah Donohoe’s Instagram account had been memorialised a day after the teenager’s death was reported on by the BBC, without the knowledge of Donohoe’s mother, effectively making its content inaccessible.

Computer Weekly has previously reported calls by former detective chief inspector Clive Driscoll for Meta to conduct stronger checks before agreeing to memorialise Instagram accounts.

The court heard that the incident caused significant distress to Noah Donohoe’s mother, Fiona Donohoe, and had potentially hampered investigations by the coroner into the circumstances of the teenager’s death.

“The immediate impact of it was that even Noah’s mother was not able to access material from his Instagram. We had to go through a process with the court to get the material,” said barrister Peter Coll KC, representing the coroner.