The video games Turista Fronterizo by Ricardo Dominguez and Coco Fusco, and Corridos by Anne-Marie Schleiner and Luis Hernandez, were released in 2005, commissioned by "Tijuana Calling," the electronic leg of the binational festival inSite, curated by Mark Tribe. These pieces use interactive gaming to actively engage participants in borderlands politics. They are part of a corpus of pieces created to comment on issues of legality and illegality at play in the southern border of the U.S., especially after the events of 9/11.

Built around the model of traditional board games such as Monopoly, Turista Fronterizo [Border Tourist] is a "point and click" online game designed using HTML, a simple web programming language.

In Turista Fronterizo participants can get a glimpse of the border as a lived space informed by different politics of border crossing (business, research, labor, entertainment). Turista Fronterizo provides a view of a liminal space that is not exceptional, as in the case of "illegal" immigrant bordercrossings, but quotidian.


A similar procedure of highlighting the border as a quotidian space is at play in the case of Corridos, a 3-D open source game that can be downloaded from the Internet. The name of the game draws from the traditional lyric genre of corridos or ballads that can be traced back to the Mexican Revolution of 1910.  Corridos are songs that narrate heroic border stories which may include illegal activities such as smuggling and drug trafficking. Evoking this tradition, Schleiner's and Hernandez's game allows participants to have a first-person perspective on illegal activities performed at the border. Described simply as "a computer game about driving and listening to music," in the game participants drive through a narco tunnel connecting downtown Tijuana and a mall in San Ysidro, on the U.S. side of the border. Additionally, participants are able to buy weapons and sell drugs. While capturing the exaltation of the "illegal" at play in traditional corridos, Schleiner and Hernandez call attention to the many practices that are played out on both sides of the border involving different degrees of legality/ illegality.

On the game's website, the artists map out the border as a grey zone of transnational exchange involving differing degrees of accountability:

In corridos we only focused on illegal exchanges, but illegal and legal exchange has been the most important vector affecting the zone, historically speaking, traversing many directions and levels, from elderly gringos crossing to tijuana to buy cheap legal medication, sometimes controlled substances in the U.S, and retire to trailer homes further south in baja mexico, or US women who travel to tijuana and rosarito for plastic surgery, to computers and electronics that are smuggled to Mexico to avoid heavy Mexican government taxes, or mexicans going to San Diego to buy consumer products, US marines partying in the clubs of Tj and Rosarito and visiting prostitutes.

Although the game centers on one set of border characters and behaviors, that of drug smugglers, Schleiner's and Hernandez's framing of the game in the broader context of daily border exchanges invites us to imagine a multi-perspective version of the game similar to the one at play in Turista Fronterizo. In this new version, participants would be able to incarnate elderly people, soldiers, and other consumer types who benefit from the border as liminal zone.

The digital gaming logics enable the artists to focus on the social dynamics that take place at border towns. Chance, sudden change of luck, scenarios, impersonation, choice-making, and character attributes are the main elements through which the artists who created Turista Fronterizo and Corridos critically engage border politics at different scales, inviting others to "play along" while "playing against" normative perceptions of the border that cast some behaviors as criminal while leaving others unaccountable.

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