The migrant’s voice between agency and authenticity in Path Out

In this article, I analyse the free-to-play RPG Path Out (2017), which includes video commentary from the migrant whose story the game is based on, to examine the performance and politics of encountering ‘the migrant’s voice’ in a gameplay setting. First, I discuss the tendency in migration scholarship to ascribe agency to any instance of migrants speaking about their conditions and the importance of accounting for the process of mediation in evaluating whether or how migrants are able to speak out. Second, I consider the importance of performing authenticity for migrants to be taken seriously when telling their story. By analysing how Path Out replicates yet undermines these two tendencies, I argue that the video commentaries within the game turn out to be a lot more ambivalent than merely an opportunity to provide ‘a voice to the migrant’.