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Screenshot from Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Photo: Activision
The latest installment of Activision’s very popular “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” video game series is set to be released in October. Much of the game takes place in the fictional Middle Eastern state of “Urzikstan.” One of the main characters that players incarnate during the game is “Farah Karim,” described as “the female leader of a rebel group in Urzikstan.”
The video game industry generated around $135 billion of revenue in 2018. As with Hollywood films, games like Call of Duty require millions of dollars of investment, years of development, teams of thousands of developers, and celebrity voice actors. In fact, the video game industry has earned more money than the movie and music industries combined for the past eight years.
While some in Kurdistan might therefore be thrilled that a character clearly based on the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria is now entering mainstream popular culture, the whole approach to the issue smacks of colonial disinterest in the actual realities and lives of the Middle East and other “periphery” regions.
A Guardian newspaper article on the new Call of Duty game describes it as treading “a moral minefield” and appearing keen to emphasize a sense of “authenticity.”
“We are inspired heavily by some of the events in Iraq and in Syria, by the Arab Spring and even by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,” one of the developers said. “There are a lot of similar themes on colonialism, on superpowers exerting their influence in regions through proxy allies and about militias that rise up and fight terrorist groups.”
If the game developers wanted to achieve authenticity, however, why set the game in a fictional “Middle Eastern” state called Urzikstan, while Britain remains Britain in the game, Russia remains Russia and so forth? Why is one of the main characters, who is clearly based on a Kurdish YPG fighter, not a Kurdish YPG fighter – while the British special ops team in the game remains a British special ops team? Instead, the “Kurdish” character has the name Farah Karim, which sounds rather Arabic.
God forbid the people playing games like this actually learn a single thing about the Middle East in the process. With so much money spent on game development, one would think they could hire a political consultant or two (this columnist would happily lend his services) to situate the game in an actual conflict and allow the player to truly grapple with the complicated political issues of today’s world.
A truly interesting game would have players make interesting choices. For example, if players click "These YPG are terrorists," they end up playing a Syrian Arab rebel leader fighting alongside a Turkish special forces team. If they click "These YPG are freedom fighters," then they play the Kurdish female character with some US soldiers assisting. Each character would naturally have their own agenda that differs from that of the Turks or Americans.
Instead, we are left with Western media that treats the actual details of the politics and history of the “natives” as so uninteresting they can be stereotyped and fictionalized. This has a long history in Hollywood, with films such as Escape from Zahrain, War Inc. (set in the country of “Ugigistan”), Caravans (set in the country of “Zadestan”), Lost in Karastan, Mile 22 (set in the country of “Indocarr”), and The Interpreter (where Nicole Kidman translates the language of the country of “Matobo”).
Meanwhile, films set in a fictional European or North American country, such as A Handmaid’s Tale or The Hunger Games, are extremely rare and always seem to occur in the future rather than the present. Few producers would dare create a fictional present-day America, rightly preferring to rely on actual American realities and political complexities. Peripheral states and regions, on the other hand, remain little more than objects to advance Westerners’ story lines.
None of this may matter too much in Iraq, however, since the Iraqi parliament – having dealt with all the other problems besetting the country – is discussing banning such video games.
Her biji Urzikstan.
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David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East. |
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