You can excuse applicants for Danish citizenship for feeling they suffer from a fair bit of whiplash these days.
At the start of the year, everything was normal, then the whole process was frozen, now it’s been unfrozen for a select group, but remains frozen for others.
People deal with the uncertainty around their application in all kinds of different ways. Majed Albardan decided to program a video game.
Født Her – Men Ikke Helt
Født Her – Men Ikke Helt (in English: Born Here – But Not Quite) is an online game which follows Ali, a young man seeking Danish citizenship.
You can play on three different difficulty levels: easy (where you’re born in Valby), medium (where you’re born in Gellerup), and impossible (where you’re born on the Rødby-Puttgarden ferry).
You then have to navigate mini-games at various stops on the way to citizenship while ensuring you don’t run out of patience or money while also avoiding running into politicians and thereby provoking them into tightening the rules.
If you succeed, you then need to try to help your child get a passport too, in the second level.
“Citizenship often becomes very abstract”
Speaking to The Danish Dispatch, Albardan explained his reason for developing the game.
He explained that “the idea came about because I think the debate about citizenship often becomes very abstract.
“So I thought something was missing that wasn’t text: something where you can experience it for yourself, first-hand.”
He went on to add that “I’ve sometimes found that people think you’re being overdramatic when you talk about the application process, that you’re exaggerating and are maybe a bit too sensitive. But it’s just difficult, and that’s what I want to show with the game.”
Applied in 2024
In contrast to the main character in the game, Albardan was not born in Denmark, but came here as a ten-year-old from Syria.
Today, he works as an auditor for Ernst & Young. He applied for citizenship in autumn 2024 and is still waiting on further details regarding wait time.
On his own situation he added, “You can have someone who was born here, is studying law and has never committed any crime, and they’re in the same situation as me, who came to Denmark aged 10, or as many others who came even later.
“They have the same status as someone who has just arrived.”
“Tragicomic”
The game is filled with dry humour, small digs at the naturalisation process and at the politicians and bureaucrats responsible for it.
Albardan confirms that this reflects his experience with the system: “I experience the system as tragicomic. It’s tragic that it has to be this way, but it’s so tragic that it makes you want to laugh at it.”
The game is available for free online and can be played with this link: https://herfra.netlify.app/
