A game in Vic puts a face to global inequalities and human mobility. 

Vic, 28 November 2025

Eleven students, an AERT Vic classroom and an apparently simple game board. But what happened that morning went far beyond a playful activity. The ORÍGENS session, led by Options Catalunya–Nepal within the framework of the education for global citizenship project Empatitza, turned abstract concepts such as inequality, privilege or forced migration into an experience experienced in the first person.

For a few hours, the students did not “learn” about human mobility: they heard it.



A game, many realities

ORIGINS is a pedagogical simulation game that assigns very different roles to the participants. Some represent institutions —bank, travel and visa agency, mafia—; others embody characters with unequal starting points: a young Catalan with educational projects, an Afghan woman fleeing the conflict, a young Senegalese with family responsibilities or an American citizen with a privileged passport.

From there, everything flows with a relentless logic. Negotiations, payments, procedures, obstacles and difficult decisions. The game progresses through rounds, but the feeling that remains is clear: not everyone plays with the same cards.



The privilege you don't see... until you're missing

One of the most revealing moments of the session comes when participants compare trajectories. The American character advances with almost automatic ease. The young Catalan finds obstacles, but has information and alternatives. In contrast, the young man in Senegal and the Afghan woman accumulate blockades, debts and negatives.

Passport, origin and gender become determining factors. And that is when an uncomfortable truth appears: formal equality does not exist in the practice of global mobility.



When the Mafia wins

The end result of the game surprised —and discomforted— many participants: the winning institution was the Mafia, which managed to accumulate more tokens and money.

Far from being an anecdote, this outcome opened a deep debate. When the legal pathways are rigid, slow or inaccessible, irregular circuits thrive. The game thus reflects a real dynamic: illegal routes are not born out of nowhere, but out of the shortcomings of the formal system.



From game to reflection

The session did not close with the point count. The final debriefing, led by the Options Catalunya–Nepal facilitator, was key to transforming the emotional impact into critical learning.

The students expressed frustration, impotence, surprise and even discomfort. They clearly identified:

the structural role of the passport,

inequality in access to resources and rights,

the power of institutions,

and the perverse logic that feeds irregular routes.

The game allowed to connect the experience with global realities: forced migrations, visa barriers, economic dependencies and shared responsibilities.



Educating to understand the world

The ORIGINS session is part of a clear pedagogical commitment: educating for global citizenship is not about transmitting data, but about raising awareness. In vocational training and baccalaureate students, the experiential methodology is especially effective, because it combines emotion, play and reflection.

As stated in the session report, the activity contributes to denaturing privileges, fostering empathy and promoting a critical look at the structures that sustain global inequality.



Beyond the classroom

Before closing the day, the students were invited to answer a subsequent questionnaire to consolidate learning and continue to deepen the topics discussed. The objective is clear: that the experience does not remain in a one-off impact, but that it becomes a seed of global responsibility.

Because understanding the world —as those eleven students in Vic discovered — often begins when someone forces you to look at it from another place.



Article elaborated from the Report of the session ORIGINS – Empathize Project (28/11/2025).