This week, we announced the winners of the 4th Annual OU Creaties. These awards celebrate the best new websites built by OU Create users.

We had over a hundred nominees for the Creaties this year, spanning a fantastic variety of experiences and modalities. The best solo project featured one of these unusual modalities – an interactive, branching scenario.

Imran Hasnat constructed a “choose your own adventure” story called “Race to Refuge,” which he describes as “a simulation to the rigorous process for refugee entry into the U.S.” The simulation demonstrates both how thorough the vetting process for refugees is and how time consuming and frustrating it can be. The simulation seeks to promote the player’s feelings of empathy for people going through this process in real life.

You can see a little bit of the game in the Creaties award video below. But the game is meant to be frustratingly long-winded, so it was hard for us to capture that emotion in putting together the video. I really recommend that you play both Imran’s game and a similar “news game” produced by the BBC, which focuses on Syrian refugees: Syrian Journey.

Congratulations Imran and thank you for your fantastic work.

You can see more of the winners in this video and in our series of posts on the winners: