Juan Llamas-Rodriguez (Annenberg)

This work investigates the use of games by non-profits, migrant advocates, and think tanks to illustrate the complexity and opacity of immigration bureaucracy. I analyze how different browser-based games simulate the avenues available to achieve visas and permanent residence status in the United States. What is at stake in gaming government bureaucracy? By focusing on how game mechanics and procedural rhetoric contend with the mundaneness of paperwork and the logistics of achieving status, I consider (1) the affordances and limitations to this approach towards gaming immigration and (2) the ways these games implicitly communicate the goals of various institutional stakeholders. Finally, I ask us to consider what it means to model bureaucracy as a game when this bureaucracy is already designed as a set of challenges impossible to solve.

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Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and associate director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching encompasses the fields of global media cultures, digital technologies, border and migration studies, and Latin American media. He is the author of Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the US-Mexico Underground (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Y Tu Mamá También: A Queer Film Classic (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025), and editor of Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media(Amherst College Press, 2025).