Call of Duty's Vanguard game

In an opinion piece to the Financial Times, Tom Faber, a culture journalist, details his experience in Cairo and how it made him ponder over the derogatory depictions of Arabs and Muslims in video games.

Faber attributes the shift in ethnicity from Nazis, who were the main antagonists of video games in the past, to Arabs to the recent "war on terror" after the events of September 11.

According to the Dutch-Egyptian game developer and advocate, Rami Ismail, “[Developers] are not trying to represent our culture, they’re trying to use it as a backdrop for violence.”

In Ismail's contribution to the "Nope, Not Arabic" blog, customs and culture are frequently mixed up in the games. Traditional clothing is inaccurate, dialects are confused, and language is faulty and sometimes spelled left to right.

One particular game 'Six Days in Fallujah' has sparked extreme outrage like no other. The game details the experiences of the US military in the Second Gulf War.

After initially being canceled due to heavy criticism, a reboot was recently announced, although it was delayed by a year in order to add more people to the development team and refine the game.

Ismail doesn't consider that the depictions are malevolent per se, but that they reveal more about the creators, who are usually based in Japan, Europe, and the US. In television and cinema, stereotypical images of Arabs and Muslims are not an uncommon sight either.

“Pick your white hero and you can probably see them shoot Arabs in a movie somewhere,” Ismail says.

Anyone who plays video games knows stereotypes are not limited to Arabs only. South America is portrayed as a tropical haven of drug trafficking, and Russia is commonly depicted with images of vodka, the KGB, and Kalashnikovs.

Arab stereotypes in video games are nothing new, but due to a lack of representation in the industry, they are more difficult to dismantle. “We need people to understand the Arab world is a place that has beautiful stories of love, laughter, happiness, and sadness; stories that aren’t in service to a hero from the outside coming to rescue us," Ismail says.

Faber concludes by mentioning some games that have shown improvement in recent years. Although some characters in games carry a mildly positive depiction, they are clearly westernized and fit another stereotype Faber calls "The good Muslim."

On the brighter side, this year, creators and gamers raised $900,000 for Palestine in a charity game by Itch.io.

Activision faces backlash over desecration in its latest CoD, apologizes

Earlier, Activision was subjected to criticism over desecrating and disrespectfully using Quranic text.

Following the launch of CoD: Vanguard, many players noticed that the game had various pages of the Quran scattered across the floor of a map in the game's Zombies mode.

CoD Vanguard and Activision were called out recently for displaying pages of the Quran both on the floor and covered in blood for Zombies, an act which in Muslim culture is seen as incredibly disrespectful and insulting as the sacred book is never meant to touch the ground pic.twitter.com/XllGMDDlWI
— Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) November 11, 2021