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?

Unbeknownst to me then, many US-made war video games collaborate with and/or are funded in some way by the US military (Andersen & Kurti, 2011; Payne, 2016; Mirrlees, 2014; Mirrlees & Ibaid, 2021), with some games having both public release versions and military training-specific versions. The idea of turning war into a video game is disturbing. The purported benefits of having near-zero material costs (in supplies and lives) and turning killing into a rewarding, pleasurable experience can desensitise players to violence and make war seem like a game (Leonard, 2004; Stahl, 2006, 2010), when in reality, war can cost many lives. Furthermore, the narratives in these games are often troubling, aligning players with “mostly white male Anglo-American soldiers and empower[ing] them to invade, occupy, and intervene in Muslim countries to kill Muslim enemies, sometimes to save Muslim women and children, but most of the time, to secure America and the West” (Mirrlees & Ibaid, 2021, p. 45). Analysing ten US-made war video games released between 2001 and 2012, Mirrlees and Ibaid (2021) identify recurrent patriarchal fantasies where US soldiers are summoned to invade Muslim-majority countries to defeat terrorist groups often led by “brown and bad Muslim men” (p. 38), echoing the harmful Islamophobic narratives and stereotypes circulating within the context of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror.

Not only are these narratives harmful and insulting, but they can also bias players’ perceptions of Muslim and Arabic people, Islam and the Arabic language (Altsultany, 2012). Addressing my questions which started this post, perhaps having Arabic on the walls of a war-torn location leads players to conflate the language with stereotypes that have real-world consequences. Mirrlees and Ibaid (2021) note that in the ten games they analysed, no US protagonist, except one, was Muslim – reinforcing the stereotype that “Muslims are cast as ‘foreign’ others, not part of the American national self” (p. 43). Within war video games, not only have Muslims been implicitly portrayed as “foreign others” (Bakali, 2016), Islam itself has also been explicitly disrespected. In Call of Duty: Vanguard (Sledgehammer Games, 2021), one of the playable locations featured pages of the Quran torn out and thrown on the floor, calling to mind the 2012 protests in Afghanistan over foreign soldiers burning Qurans (Graham-Harrison, 2012a, 2012b). Although the 2012 desecration involved physical Qurans, the 2021 digital destruction of a sacred book similarly reveals, at best, the ignorance about, and, more likely, hatred towards Muslim people and Islam (Bakali & Hafez, 2022). The Vanguard video game creators responded by removing the Quranic pages and issuing an apology in Arabic, wrongly assuming that only Arabic Muslims would be offended and reinforcing the stereotype that all Muslims are Arabic (Kozlovic, 2009; Kundani, 2015; Mirrlees & Ibaird, 2021). Furthermore, in these games, enemies will often speak poorly translated Arabic and are voice-acted by “non-native speakers”, leading some “native” Arabic speakers to rely on subtitles (Kennedy, 2022), revealing how little the game creators care about Arabic-speaking audiences. The presence of the Arabic language and Islamic culture in these video games serve only as a signifier of the Other, justifying and downplaying the severity of violence of the Global War on Terror.

Furthermore, such stereotypical depictions reinforce suspicion towards “brown” and Muslim people, and even the Arabic language. Sara Ahmed (2004) notes how the UK Conservative party created a dichotomy between “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seekers, suggesting that the former (“genuine”) deserved protection and shelter, while the latter (“bogus”) should be scorned. However, as there is no way to distinguish between “genuine” from “bogus” asylum seekers, Ahmed argues that this creates an atmosphere of suspicion, “command[ing] the nation’s Right and will to keep looking for signs of difference and justif[ying] violent forms of intrusion into the bodies of others” (p. 122). This suspicion and intrusion are still present, for example, in “randomised” US and Canadian airport security checks and in immigrant detention camps in the US and Canada (Human Rights Watch, 2021; Markham, 2021). Of course, there’s not enough space to discuss this here. However, war video games, whether directly connected with the US military or not, retell narratives which justify suspicion, violence and real war. While I do not know Arabic, I have felt how people who know Arabic deeply love their language (Canagarajah, 2011). It’s sad when a beloved language becomes a Western prop.

References

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