SYBERTEK: Migrants at Bay is an interactive digital work / game, created by CAM Collective. It puts the user in the position of a (mildly science-fictional) border control agent, sent to investigate the physical evidence left behind by some unspecified ‘migrant incident.’ The user spends their time scanning a stretch of beach, cataloging items left behind by the individuals of a migrant group who, presumably, have entered the user’s home country illegally via the sea. The user is supported in this by a flock of hovering drones, as well as security cameras and other infrastructural / technological systems. Ultimately, the user becomes merely an extension of these systems, acting as a pair of floating eyes in service of their nation state; tracking down and cataloging objects like a (nearly) human search engine.

These objects tell a rich, albeit extremely fragmented story about the lives of the people who left them behind. They establish relationships, illnesses, professions, hardships and hopes, all made more potent by the knowledge of the incredibly dangerous crossing we understand them to have made. And again more potent still from the fact that we, the user, have no way of knowing which of the authors of these object-stories may have survived their time at sea. For some, the only record of their untimely end, perhaps even of their life as a whole, now rests in our hands. But that’s not why we’re here.

We, the user, are not the archivist of their stories, their lives. We tell a far different story: one of ‘illegals’ and their intrusions upon the land, the power structure, which we and our technological menagerie exist to serve. Neither story is our own, we are merely the device by which it is told; but through the telling we empower one, erase the other.

There are definite parallels, both thematically and aesthetically, to the film District 9, which, while largely science fictional, also treads the path of horror (especially that of body horror). Both that work and CAM Collective’s tell a story of othering, systemic oppression, and racism, told through the lens of a minor cog within the dominant system’s architecture of control. Both hold up blasted concrete and whirring cameras and powerful military vehicles alongside the banal authority of dry governmental forms, and show us how they are used in equal measure as weapons against the marginalized.

I could easily write this entire response based on the connections between the two pieces. However, District 9’s message is a very clear one, and Migrants at Bay has more going on beneath its Unity-rendered beaches which I feel we can better tease to the surface with a different comparison. One that is both far older than District 9, and more deeply rooted in CAM Collective’s chosen medium. I want to talk (not for the first time) about Myst.

In Myst, the iconic PC game from 1993, the player takes on the role of a traveler, lost on a mysterious island. While able to interact with the objects around them, they are not a character in the traditional sense. Myst does not tell their story. As with SYBERTEK, we the player are merely a set of floating eyes, the pen through which the story of others is scribed. We do so through a series of technical, object-based puzzles. By moving this or that item or switch, recording this or that number and inputting it elsewhere, and so on. We are, very literally, a device. A recorder and object mover. And the story we are used to tell is a fascinating one.

The true story of Myst, the one which the player simultaneously reveals and upholds, is one of a powerful family of outsiders, colonizers, who first discover and then take control of a series of worlds which exists only in books. By learning to rework these books, these stories, they alter not only their present but their past as well; molding history as they see fit and towards their own ends, to create a new story in which they are both its masters and heroes. It is, needless to say, quintessentially Postmodern. It drops the player in a world of strange, de-contextualized and often fantastical objects, and then draws them into a story about the manipulation and control of narratives for the betterment of the establishment.

Migrants at Bay is to the Hypermodern what Myst is to the Postmodern. The flow of narrative is instead replaced with the flow of data. The future and history of its offscreen migrants, and their rich lives which we are shown glimpses of, are rewritten for the profit of the system not within the pages of storybooks, but rather the backed-up databases and servers of Neoliberal bureaucracy.

The user and their role as living recorder manipulate the objects of the gameworld only on paper. Their physical existence is no longer required, no pulling of levers or placing upon pedestals is needed; instead we need only to jot down their briefest description in the right box, on the right form, and complete manipulation of their meaning and function is achieved. Full people with entire lives (both inner and outer) are rendered as nothing more than a statistically relevant series of infractions, ticked boxes, and fodder for the tightening of political control and increased militarism. Erasure, or literal death, by forms filled out in triplicate.

Myst is a game which occupies a frankly unreasonable amount of my mental and creative real estate. It’s one of those works that I can’t help but return to, to draw comparisons with, and to reinvestigate often. Migrants at Bay, I can say enthusiastically, is a worthy successor to it; one for the Hypermodern era. Sparse, even lonely in action, while rich and layered in meaning. Possessed of a uniquely digital character which uses its technical limitations in ways that enhance, rather than detract, from its potency. Simultaneously human and inhuman, damning and promising of potential redemption. It’s quite good, is what I’m saying. Really quite good. Go play it.