Imagine risking your life to create a video game. That might sound dramatic to most of us, but it’s the unfortunate reality for Palestinian game designer Rasheed Abu-Eideh.
Rasheed has recently formed a team and begun crowdfunding for his video game Dreams on a Pillow, described as “a stealth-adventure game about a land full of people being made into a people without land.” The game is based on a Palestinian folktale surrounding the 1948 Nakba, about a mother, Omm, fleeing the massacre carrying her child, only to realise she has been carrying a pillow with her instead.
While there are the typical hurdles of acquiring funding, like competition and industry drought, Raheem’s inability to get funding is reflective of many attitudes around the world in this moment; anything centring the Palestinians and their plight is too politically risky.
We could blame the larger colonial powers and our own governments (and we should), but much closer to home is how video games, historically and currently, enforce narratives that not only de-centre Arab people but get players pretty comfortable with disposing of brown people indiscriminately. It is difficult to ignore the current effects of that.
Video games differ from film and literature because of their powers as empathy machines. Through play, gamers control bodies and move through virtual worlds, creating agency and helping them grapple with the real world. This is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, games can culture us, whether implicitly or explicitly, to be indifferent, scared, or violent towards people. On the other, it gives us the means to understand narratives that are different to our own, or ones that have been structurally hidden, much like Rasheed’s previous game Liyla & The Shadows of War which gave players a Palestinian perspective of the 2014 invasion in Gaza.
The games we play have the power to re-code our understandings; are the current atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and surrounding countries, just a few more in a long line of necessary ones? Or are they happening to real human beings who deserve freedom and safety from almost a century of violence? Supporting games such as Rasheed’s not only means acknowledging the right of Palestinians to be safe, but also their right to dream and tell their stories. Video games, like any art form, can keep histories alive and voices heard.
Additionally, the game looks incredibly interesting. The art style is gorgeous, depicting both peaceful scenes of the land’s natural and architectural beauty, and the aftermath of its destruction in the muted greys and oranges of smoke and fire. The pillow also appears central to the game mechanics, as holding it limits Omm’s movements, and setting it down begins to blur the boundaries between her mental and physical nightmares.
While Rasheed and his team are experiencing the typical highs and lows of video game development, they must also contend with what it means to speak loudly in and because of their current environments, meaning “a clear plan for the completion of the game has been put in place to ensure continuity in the case of Rasheed’s disappearance, injury, or demise at the hand of the continuously expanding Israeli aggression in the West Bank.”
With only less than a month left for the campaign, I’m hoping that Rasheed and his team receive the funding and time necessary to make Dreams on a Pillow, and for a time in future when their biggest worries can be bugs in their coding.
You can head over to the game’s LaunchGood page to support its development.
Josefina Huq is a creative writer of play, place, and short stories. Her work deals in extreme sentimentality while her research attempts to justify this as a good thing. @misc_cutlet / josefinahuq.com.au
