Missing: The Complete Saga set to combat evil trade involving girls and women
A new game is in development that will be used to combat the growing problem of sex trafficking and slavery. Missing: The Complete Saga is set in rural India, where thousands of girls and women are captured and forced into sex work every year.
The Complete Saga is the sequel to Missing: Game for a Cause, which launched last year to widespread acclaim. Since its launch, it’s garnered more than 500,000 downloads, and is used as an educational tool in Bengali schools.
While the original Missing took the form of a top-down point and click story, the new game is a 3D role-playing adventure that follows the life of an Indian village girl called Champa.
“We got this amazing response all over the world with the first game,” says Missing director Leena Kejriwal, an artist and activist who has been involved in the fight against trafficking for 15 years. “That success has given us the confidence to address a bigger, wider audience with a bigger, deeper game.”
Kejriwal and her team are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to help fund development. Proceeds from sales of the game will go towards creating training programs and recovery centers for girls who escape, either through their own means, or via police raids.
In the game, Champa is targeted by sex traffickers who want to take her to one of India’s fast-growing cities, where demand for sex workers is high. Even if Champa manages to avoid this fate, her sister and best friends are also in danger.
Kejriwal notes that, in real life, Champa would likely fail to escape the traffickers, who target girls in poor neighborhoods, usually tempting them with offers of good jobs in the city. Parents, unaware of the danger, are often acquiescent.
“If they are targeted there is not much they can do about it,” she says. “They are really unaware, and so are the immediate people around them like their families.” In order to make its point, the game is designed to allow players more freedom and agency than in similar real-life situations.
“We are really big on awareness," says Kejriwal. “Our main motto is ‘why wait for a girl to be trafficked to save her?’ The issue is not really addressed in India, where sex and trafficking education is negligible. That’s why we want to use art and multimedia to increase awareness among girls and boys.”
The game is not merely a warning against the tactics of traffickers. It’s also an attempt to educate boys, and to spark conversations that might reach the men who pay for sex.
“We want the game to speak to the people at the other end of the spectrum, the men who are creating a demand by buying sex,” says Kejriwal. “We want them to feel what a girl goes through: Her life, her emotions, her frustrations, her total lack of agency.
“If you put yourself in the footsteps of the girl then you are more likely to think carefully about what is going on and to see that there is no consent and to see the kind of people who are running these outfits.”
Life for captured girls is harsh. “These are places you can’t move out of, physically or psychologically,” says Kejriwal, who spends much of her time speaking with survivors. “They live in intense fear. Their captors use all kinds of torture and psychological tactics to keep them in place. They don’t see the light of day for months.”
Missing: The Complete Saga‘s later story also deals with the aftermath of sex slavery. Kejriwal says that most of the girls who manage to escape suffer long-term trauma.
Missing’s Kickstarter campaign
“We are working with psychologists who have helped survivors,” she says. “Even a short time in these horrific spaces can leave a big mark on a girl’s emotional life. It can take a lifetime’s work to get someone out of it. Every survivor has a big journey on her return. It’s a deep and difficult psychological situation. You really have to take these girls by the hand and pull them back to show them how much strength they have inside. We want to work towards helping these girls. This game is about awareness and it’s about making the lives of these girls better.”
You can back Missing: The Complete Saga‘s Kickstarter here.
Source: Polygon – Full
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