A game developer for Syrian refugees, an award-winning Austrian company and UNHCR teamed up to create a game that reveals the life-or-death decisions refugees face.
By Ruth Schöffl in Vienna, Austria | 08 July 2022
Jack Gutmann was never one of those kids whose parents harassed him to limit his screen time and go outside and play. Rather, they encouraged Jack and his four brothers to spend as much time as possible in computer games so that they would stay indoors, protected from the conflict raging in the streets outside their home.
“I was scared and tried to escape reality,” said Jack, named Abdullah at birth and raised in Hama, Syria’s fourth largest city. “I didn’t want to see the war and I didn’t want to hear it.” When there was electricity, he played video games. When the electricity went out, he played on his laptop. When the laptop’s battery ran out, he designed on paper.
He never dreamed that years later – safe in Austria – his passion for computer design would equip him to produce an award-winning video game. An educational edition of Path Out was relaunched this year by UNHCR for World Refugee Day (20 June) to help schoolchildren in Austria and elsewhere put themselves in the shoes of a refugee and make life-and-death decisions on a perilous journey to safety. .
Jack, who took on a new name while building a new life in Austria, started drawing and coloring digitally as a child and mastered the Photoshop graphics program by the time he was fourteen.
“…computer games were my window to the world.”
“Digital art and computer games were my window to the world, out of my room in Syria, away from the war to a diverse world with very different people,” he says, reflecting on the crisis that erupted in March 2011. the same month he turned 15.
Millions of Syrians have been forced to flee their homes since the crisis began in 2011. Today, about 6.8 million Syrians have fled abroad as refugees, and nearly as many – 6.9 million – are internally displaced.
At the age of 18, faced with the danger of being drafted into the army, Jack fled his homeland – a perilous and circuitous journey to Turkey and then through a number of countries until he reached Austria in the heart of Europe. This was the first place where he felt really safe.
“I had no intention of staying in Austria,” he admits candidly. “But when I got here with my brother, we were really shocked because so many people helped us – positively shocked.”
Shortly after arriving, Jack met Georg Hobmeier, head of Causa Creations, a Vienna-based game design company that sees video games not just as entertainment but, in the words of his website, as “meaningful, enriching experiences that can connect us, challenge our perceptions.” and give insight into the world around us.” They have worked on themes such as migration, climate change and nuclear energy.
Wanting to turn his passion into a profession, Jack collaborated with Causa Creations on a joint project. The result was Path Out, in which the player recreates Jack’s stealthy trek from Syria, sometimes at the hands of people smugglers.
“We decided that Jack himself would be the protagonist of the game,” says Georg, adding that it was especially important to show that behind every refugee statistic there are complex stories and complex personalities.
In the Japanese game style they chose, the cute characters contrast with the harsh reality of the journey. Jack – the designer and character – is all dressed up in the yellow shirt he actually wore during his odyssey, which now has sentimental value to him.
From a box in the corner of the screen, real Jack comments on the players’ moves in Youtuber style, often with humor. “You just killed me, man,” he exclaims when the player makes the wrong move. “In reality, I wasn’t as clumsy as you.”
Originally released as a two-hour game in 2017, Path Out has won international and Austrian awards for “its effort to shed light on a serious problem.”
The new version that Causa and UNHCR have developed for schools will last less than one lesson and help students who may never meet real refugees learn that Jack lived a life much like theirs until his world was turned upside down and he had to leave everything behind. It was rolled out in German and English for World Refugee Day; other language versions to follow.
Jack the designer still writes his own happy ending. He felt safe as soon as he reached Austria, but it took a while for the country to become his true artistic and emotional home.
“It took me five years to feel my journey was over until I felt really relieved,” he says. Now 26, he speaks German and English almost flawlessly. He received vocational training, worked for a few years at a game development company and now further trains in 3D modeling and animation to become an even better game developer and designer.
He met an Austrian woman who also plays video games – albeit not by profession – and they got married last year.
And he retains his sense of humor, a quality he finds essential both in real life and in his game, Path Out. “The story of flight and war is bad enough; you need humor to deal with it,” he says.
Because the game reflects its reality, “it’s funny at the same time. After all, computer games are supposed to be fun.”
