We start the 2024-25 academic year with a post by regular blogger Janan Chan, an incoming PhD student at the Department of Integrated Studies at McGill University. Janan was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Quebec, Canada, then lived and taught in Shanghai, China from 2021-2024. Janan’s BILD posts can be found here.

This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

What began as an uncomfortable question led me down a research rabbit hole that has changed how I view one of my teenage obsessions. Around the age of thirteen, my father bought me Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, 2009), a first-person-shooter war video game rated for players at least seventeen years old. First-person-shooter (FPS) is a genre of video game where players look through the eyes of a shooter, often with the barrel of a gun occupying the lower screen, ready to shoot and kill virtual enemies. FPS games often feature online multiplayer matches, where players are placed into opposing teams and run around a circumscribed location to complete objectives such as reaching a target number of kills. Despite the hours I lost in running around these locations, it was only recently, while watching gameplay from the 2022 Call of Duty entry in the series, that I noticed the aesthetic choices of these locations. On the walls of narrow corridors and on the facades of bombed buildings was graffitied text which looked like Arabic. I wondered then, how would it feel for someone who knows Arabic to see this text? Why did the game designers choose Arabic?