RafaelFajardo

Like Turista Fronterizo, media artist and scholar Rafael Fajardo’s Crosser (2000) and La Migra (2001) use familiar gameplay mechanics to raise questions of personal and national security revolving around border crossing. Like Turista Fronterizo’s modification of the Monopoly board, Crosser is based on the arcade classic Frogger (Konami, 1981), while La Migra is an emulation of Space Invaders (Taito/Midway, 1978). In the original Frogger, there are a total of thirteen rows that the player must cross in order to get to the destination. Three of these are free of obstacles or threats: the starting row, the middle row (which offers the player a halftime respite after crossing the highway and prior to crossing the river) and the final destination row of lily pads.

Crosser operates on a relatively reduced scale, with seven traversable rows of space: two are free of moving obstacles—the starting point on the Mexican side of the border, where the protagonist is surrounded by humble but colorful abodes and a series of prickly pear cacti, and the destination border checkpoint. Once the player makes it across the river in Crosser, she gets no respite as in Frogger but immediately faces the highway, replete with obstacles: first, a squad of Border Patrol agents on foot, then a lane of the authorities’ vehicles, and finally a stream of helicopters zooming overhead. In Frogger, the player goes from a precarious state to one of security, making her way home. In Crosser the topography is reversed, with the player starting out in the relative comfort of home, then having to cross the river and the highway in order to reach the goal, which instead of a secure lily pad is the looming monolith of a government visa office.

While game developers were once inescapably bound to the use of two-dimensional planes, games such as Turista Fronterizo and Crosser show the enduring appeal of simple play dynamics and aesthetics, especially for artists and avant-garde game designers.