A game for a cause.
Warning: this article discusses trafficking and child sex abuse.
“In empathy for the millions of girls who disappear from the face of the earth.
“-Missing: Game for a Cause, 2015.
Leena Kejriwal is an acclaimed Indian photographer and installation artist with a passion for city life.
And it was on one such expedition, she found herself in a situation she would never forget.
‘Why were they here?
How did they get here?’
And why was this being allowed to happen?
India alone has more than 98 million sex trafficking victims, according tothe Missing Link Trust website.
98 percent of them are female, and half of them girls.
The Missing Art Project garnered worldwide attention,appearing in The Guardian here.
“And I said, ‘Whoa, I like this.
I like what this game is doing,'” she says.
A phone call later, she found herself knocking on game developer Satyajit Chakraborty’s door.
Kejriwal’s proposition took him by surprise.
“We were as surprised as you are right now!”
This went against everything he knew games to be.
“No, no, no,” his mind was telling him.
Games are for escaping reality, not returning to the darkest parts of it.
Why would gamers want to play something like this?
With trepidation, then, he agreed.
But it quickly became apparent he didn’t understand the subject like Kejriwal did.
What he knew came from books and films, it wasn’t reality.
“He never entered a red light district before so he had no idea,” Kejriwal says.
So she offered to take him to one.
He was really curious and he was looking around and really seeping [it] in and understanding it.
“I remember him saying that it’s not what he imagined and it’s very strange for him.
He’d never seen something like that before.
And that’s what I want to always reflect and show.”
She also took him to the village area of Sundarbans where the highest number of trafficking victims come from.
These are poor villages away from the public eye where children disappear for money.
But there are also survivors of sex trafficking living there who have managed to return home.
It was one such survivor that Kejriwal took Chakraborty to see.
She froze,” Kejriwal says.
And this was after two years of her being back.
And when I touched her like this [she gestures], she was cold.
She’d become - her pupils dilated.
It had a powerful effect on them both.
“It was mind blowing,” Chakraborty says.
“It’s something I never expected and never dreamt about.”
He realised he’d had no idea what was really going on.
This is when things began to fundamentally change inside Chakraborty about what he thought the game should be.
“The audience can take it or not,” he says.
SoMissing: A Game for a Cause was born.
It begins in a dark room.
Misbehave and they beat and rape you.
You are forced into work the following day.
It’s a world that breaks people.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Every day, your daily income target rises, and the windows of opportunity shrink and shrink.
It’s a powerful thing to experience.
Chakraborty really wasn’t sure how it would do.
He certainly wasn’t encouraged after playtesters uninstalled the game, telling him they hated it.
I am feeling so horrible with it!”
he says, chuckling.
The game was an unexpected success.
“Imagine that!”
Today, people have played it from all over the world.
“These are countries which have a very high trafficking rate,” Kejriwal says.
But for Kejriwal, the place she really wanted to impact was India.
It’s now available in 12 of them.
It’s calledMissing: The Complete Saga and it successfully raised $50,000 on Kickstarterin 2017.
However idyllic it may look, though, sex trafficking is still the backdrop to the game.
And more fieldwork has been done to accurately portray the reality, and more interviews have been carried out.
This is still, beneath the RPG layers, a game for change.
Making Missing was something of an epiphany for him, he says.
We don’t get to there because of the fear of taking risks with those kinds of concepts."
“I would say it’s serendipity that I met him,” Kejriwal says.
Their hope is that The Complete Saga will appeal to Western audiences.
Whatever the reason, the goal remains the same: understanding and awareness.
Sex trafficking is a global issue.
It’s time a global audience was aware of it.
you might find out more about trafficking and the work Leena Kejriwal does onThe Missing Link Trust website.
