Marta and Pedro are two civil servants who are expecting their first child. Juan is 80 years old and needs a wheelchair to get around. Francisco, 34 years old, has cancer. Jordi, Marina and Paula have a small video game development company. In total, 60 people live in the building that occupies numbers 101 and 103 on Primat Reig Avenue in Benimaclet, Valencia. It won’t last long though.
A large company has purchased the entire building. Its objective is to evict the 60 people who live there and then renovate it and build a student residence. This is the premise of the latest video game developed by Jordi de Paco, from the Valencian studio Deconstructeam. Your role as a player is that of a vulture fund worker and your objective is to evacuate all the homes in the building.
Image from the video game about evicting the building on Primat Reig Avenue
The video game seems to me to be one of the best means to raise awareness about certain situations, you can create a context for a person to inhabit. There is unique potential there.
The process is very simple, and there is a whole body of legislation and security forces designed to satisfy your needs. First you have to wait for the tenants’ rental contract to run out, you send them a burofax so that they leave and, if they don’t, you take legal action so that the police do the dirty work and evict them. When the apartment is empty, you block the door so that squatters do not enter and you move on.
It’s a game where you can’t lose, there’s no margin for error. But do vulture funds lose in real life? More or less months will pass – my departure was extended by a couple of years – but the result is always the same: all the people who lived in the building end up on the street. Your role is that of a bureaucrat, you don’t see those people at any time, they are names, numbers and counters on a screen. It is an Excel and your goal is for the boxes to end up green.
Image from the video game about evicting the building on Primat Reig Avenue
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Despite being a very short game, it is not easy to finish it. It is you who executes the eviction orders, who sends the burofaxes and threatens the tenants. Marta, Pedro, Francisco, Jordi, Marina and Paula are not real people, they are invented names with stories inspired by real cases, but it hurts to throw them out on the street.
Each floor is associated with a short description of the people who live there. That is because “we are used to doing doomscrolling between tragedy and many times we ignore it, writing small biographies allows us to become desensitized,” Jordi de Paco tells The Vanguard. To develop the game, Jordi consulted forums for tenants threatened by evictions and forums for landlords. The rental prices and terms displayed in the game are real metrics.
A video game inspired by real events
What shocked me the most was that they bricked up the empty floors.
In Benimaclet, specifically between numbers 101 and 103 there is a building in which the tenants live together with doors bricked up. There are 32 floors in total, 16 per staircase, and more than 60 people lived there. The journalist Claudio Moreno tells in the newspaper Levant how, since the end of 2023, the company that owns the building is kicking out all residents.
“I started developing the game because the news I read in the Levant “It impacted me a lot,” explains Jordi de Paco. “Every day you read about evictions, but what struck me the most was that they bricked up the empty apartments: they are no longer a place to live, they are merchandise,” he adds.
The photographs seen in the video game are images of the real building of Benimaclet
Tenants with old rents have received offers to move to another building owned by the same company, but with an increase in the contract price. Moreno gives an example that if they paid 450 euros per month, now they are asking for 600 euros. The rest of the tenants are sent a burofax two months before the end of their rental contract informing them that it will not be renewed.
The names and stories I mentioned at the beginning of the article may not be real, but they exist. In Benimaclet, 60 people will be left without their homes, but this same thing happens every day in any city in the country.
A microgame about vacating a building
Image from the video game about evicting the building on Primat Reig Avenue
Sometimes, it is necessary to add a little fiction to tell the truth. There are books and documentaries with made-up names and with more truth than many news reports or newspaper articles. Non-fiction novels, literary journalism or new journalism, call it what you want. Now, and for years, this trend also opens up to new formats and has reached video games.
Jordi de Paco’s microgame is a work of denunciation and awareness. During the few minutes it lasts, it puts you in the shoes of the executioner, although you don’t see blood or how heads roll. You only read brief reports and execute orders. The banality of evil, right?
Image from the video game about evicting the building on Primat Reig Avenue
“I made the game to observe what seems to me to be an unpleasant and somewhat inhuman situation,” says Jordi de Paco. “I have published it so that other people can also observe it because I believe that reading the news is not the same as playing it or, in some way, interpreting it. It seems to me that much more empathy is generated if you execute the actions,” he adds.
As of today, June 2024, several families are still resisting in this building in Benimaclet. At the beginning of the month, the Socialist Party of the Valencian Country presented this example case in the plenary session of the Valencia city council. The socialists urged the mayor, María José Catalá, to ask the Generalitat to declare a stressed area in application of the Land Law to stop real estate speculation.
Much more empathy is generated if you execute the actions.
The video game as a complaint
Image from the video game about evicting the building on Primat Reig Avenue
“The video game seems to me to be one of the best means to raise awareness about certain situations, it is not necessary to make them difficult or go around them too much to report them. Unlike media such as film or literature, it is not necessary to develop a drama. In the video game you can create a context for a person to inhabit or embody. There is a unique potential there,” explains Jordi de Paco. A good example of this is another Deconstructeam game called Behind Every Grat Onein which the player plays a housewife.
If you want to try this eviction microgame, you can play it for free on your profile. itch.io by Jordi de Paco.
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