Chaos Communication Congress

The Clash of Digitalizations (33x52)

Data di messa in onda: Dic 28, 2016

Speaker: Saud Al-Zaid This talk discusses the representation of Arab males in video games and the adverse effect it has on the collective political imagination. Anonymous military-aged Arab men become increasingly the exception to the laws of human rights, and become default targets for conventional and unmanned drone attacks. This devolution is seen through the lens of the changing nature of conflict through digitalization, the collapse of the nation state in Iraq and Syria, and the future of war. In the popular video game series "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare", Arab men are consistently depicted as the mindless throngs of the indestinguishable enemy. The First Person Shooter (FPS) genre lends itself to killing enemies, usually many in the same round, but the evolution of the target went from Nazi's in Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, to targets that become increasingly comparable to Arabs and Muslims in the following years. So besides historically oriented games that focus on the combatants of World War II, most games since the 1990's begin to shift their focus to another kind of enemy--one that suspiciously looks Arab or Islamic. Even Sci-Fi epics like the Halo series, which take place may hundreds of years in the future, the enemies start taking on an exotified look and feel, and follow an obviously religious ideology that is inimical to universal peace. The smallest insignificant alien becomes a strategic risk as they become "suicide bombers" blowing themselves up before they die, expressing a sigh of cowardice before they die. In "Modern Warfare 2", something suprising happens. The Arab characters are given a little more depth and backstory, and the Arabic dialogue is the most realistic of any of the other games. It also becomes the version of the game that is most modified by users (in so-called "mods"). Hacked and converted to other versions, there is significantly a version used by Al-Qaeda for recruitment purposes. The production company responsible, Infinity