"What if your life was put at risk because of something you could not change - your heritage, your appearance or your beliefs?"
Asylum: Exit Australia does not seek to answer that question, rather, it seeks to take participants on the same journey - both emotional and physical - experienced by real-life asylum seekers.
The online simulation presents web users with the dilemmas faced by many people fleeing violence in their countries.
It opens with a hypothetical scenario: Australia has been taken over by a government hostile to 'people like you' - the user. Subtly ominous background music heightens the tension.
An amount of money and a level of health are assigned to each new user - for example: $2897 and good health. More cash opens more possibilities, but it is randomly assigned to convey a sense of 'luck of the draw'. Users choose their own age range.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
"Your challenge is to get out of an Australia that has suddenly become hostile, and in which the lives of you and your family are threatened," says a message on the Asylum: Exit Australia website.
"Your success in migrating to another, safer country depends on difficult choices in a world of forged documents, rickety boats, aggressive authorities and overcrowded camps. It also requires no small amount of luck," it explains.
The simulation leads to myriad results that are based on asylum statistics, the producers say.
Less than one per cent of actual asylum seekers are successfully reunited with their famililes in a safe country, says co-Executive Producer Dan Fill. As frustrating as it may be for users, the simulation stays fairly true to those figures, he says.
REAL EXPERIENCES
Asylum: Exit Australia took executive producers Dan Fill and Frank Verheggen over a year to create, and is based solely on real experiences recounted by asylum seekers who have come to Australia.
The Refugee Council of Australia's research coordinator, Rebecca Eckhard, also sat on the project's editorial board.
"We were able to pick her (Eckhard's) brain all throughout the process," says Verheggen.
"She was very patient with us. She also arranged a number of people who have come to Australia as asylum seekers for us to talk to. It really opened our eyes," he adds.
Finding balance was a delicate feat, says Fill, with hardline groups from both sides of the asylum debate wrangling for influence.
"... We saw it as a great challenge to create an experience that is approachable for a wide audience – rather than preaching to the converted," says Verheggen.
The producers said they trod a fine line between keeping participants interested (the simulation takes around 45 minutes to complete) but never trivialising the subject matter.
"We wanted to make the experience engaging enough, but at the same time never make it feel too much like a game. We did not want to trivialize the often terrible experiences asylum seekers go through," says Verheggen.
THE ASYLUM JOURNEY
The journey begins with a trip to a community centre, where a local authority confirms that you and your family are in danger. The first chill of discomfort is felt when he asks which of your loved ones you will miss the most, and whether he can have that person's name in order to contact them if you disappear.
The user must then choose whether to type in the name of a parent, child or partner, or whether to tell the authority you'd rather not.
The community leader's advice is to try and make as many contacts as possible in the hope that someone may be able to help your family escape, but also warns that it is dangerous to share information with strangers.
Faced with this conflict, one must decide with whom to talk, and with what information to entrust them as they cross paths with authorities, people smugglers others trying to flee.
The simulation ends with an outcome based on your choices and the resources assigned to you randomly - for example dying on the boat, or failing to escape Australia. As per the statistics, a small number of positive outcomes do exist.
GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM
SBS commissioned Asylum: Exit Australia to complement a documentary that follows six Aussies on the reverse journey taken by real asylum seekers to Kenya, Iraq, Jordan and Malaysia and DR Congo.
Some of the participants are openly racist and for some it is their first time overseas. They are stripped of their passports and wallets, and board a rickety boat. They experience early-morning raids by authorities and meet real refugee families in camps.
Go Back To Where You Came From screens June 21, 22 and 23 on SBS One at 8:30PM.
