In the game, which is still in development, players assume the role of an American service member stationed at Camp Bucca, a detention center that was located near the port city of Umm Qasr in southeast Iraq, at an undetermined time during the Iraq War. Throughout the game, players interact with Iraqi prisoners, who are clothed in the camp’s trademark yellow jumpsuits and occasionally have black hoods pulled over their heads. The player must interrogate the prisoners, choosing between methods like waterboarding or electrocution to extract information. If an interrogation goes too far, the questioner can kill the prisoner.

Players also have to move captives around the prison camp, arranging them in cell blocks throughout the area. Camp Bucca is best known for incubating the group of fighters who would go on to create ISIS: The group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was held there for five years, where he likely forged many of the connections that make up the group’s network today. The developers say they chose to have the player wrestle with cell assignments to underscore the role of American prison camps in radicalizing the next generation of fighters and terrorists.

The developers relied on allegations of prisoner abuse in archived news articles and a leaked Red Cross report to guide their game design. While there were many reports of prisoner abuse at Camp Bucca, they were never so widespread as to prompt an official public investigation.

Worried for their safety if their names were associated with what’s likely to be a controversial video game, the designers, a group of five graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University, asked to remain anonymous in this story. I was put in touch with two of the game’s lead designers by a colleague who works with one of them in a Carnegie Mellon computer lab. (The game is not affiliated with either university.) I did not, however, get a chance to play the game, or see any gameplay footage, beyond six screenshots the designers sent me.

Without playing through the video game, it’s hard to know how well the team’s ideas will translate to the screen. But just the concept—a game rooted in recent history that allows players to engage in interactive torture—is enough to get started.

I asked Brenda Romero, a prominent video-game designer who’s currently a course director in the computer science department at Ireland’s University of Limerick, about her experience using games to address thorny issues. Starting in 2008, Romero created a series of board games called The Mechanic is the Message, which draws players into difficult moments in history: the slave trade, the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust. In the game Train, players must cram yellow figurines into model boxcars and try to move each to the end of the tracks on the board. Only once they arrive is it revealed that the destination they were trying to reach is Auschwitz.

(Courtesy of game designers)

Romero was intrigued by the idea of addressing torture in American detention camps with a video game. “The interactivity of games gives them the unique ability to make this an incredibly powerful experience,” she said. “Games convey complicity like no other medium can.”