Why Muslim-centric video games are a mine of gold
With millions of Muslim gamers across the globe and a wealth of Islamic stories that can unleash a plethora of game genres, it's a prime time to capitalize on the opportunity
Despite the well-known truism that gaming is a global business, Muslims accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population, continue to be underrepresented in video games.
Notwithstanding the occasional representation in mainstream games, the sizeable demographic is systematically presented in an orientalist way, and Muslims are only a scattershot target audience.
“I can count on one hand the games that came out of the industry in the last five years and featured a Muslim character,” Younès Rabii, a France-based game designer and AI researcher, tells Salaam Gateway.
When the number of Muslim game players are compared to the attention accorded to them by the industry, the ratio is incredibly small.
“Games with a substantial international player base often hold special events for celebrations that are religious in nature, such as Christmas or Easter, but the vast majority completely ignore the Muslim community when it's time for Ramadan or Eid, for example.”
There is much to gain from the world of gaming. Global video games revenue – including esports - reached $227.6 billion in 2023, and is projected to top $300 billion in 2028, according to PwC.
Stereotypical representations dominate
Rabii, a decade-old game developer, is currently studying for a PhD in Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence at Queen Mary University of London, the world's largest doctoral research programme in games. During Ramadan of 2021, he set out to find a game per day that featured the Muslim world in a manner that wasn’t superficial or exploitative. His search yielded limited results.
“If you want to find games where Muslims have a genuinely central role, you need to look for teams where Muslims also have a genuinely central role. These tends to be smaller indie projects or artists with little to no funding.”
That doesn't mean the Muslim world has zero representation in the world of games.
“The industry loves using the Middle East as a shooting ground after all, and the Gerudos - a recurring race in the Legend of Zelda game series - are an example that ‘oriental’ aesthetics are still fashionable in the industry. But do these games speak to Muslim audiences? The answer is: No.”
Alireza Doostdar, an associate professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School, says that while there are video games being produced in Muslim-majority societies that feature Muslim protagonists, such games mostly cater to local audiences and rarely venture beyond borders.
“When it comes to games produced in the US and Europe, there has certainly been some positive change in terms of Muslim representation, but there’s still a long way to go,” says Doostdar, who is also the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, and co-creator of the YouTube video series Gaming Islam.
He gives the example of Assassin's Creed games, including the recent Mirage set in Baghdad - although the series largely reproduces a Western narrative about Muslims being relevant only in the past.
He also points to Kamala Khan in Marvel's Avengers, the American media franchise’s first Muslim superheroine, but whose character is far less developed, and whose Muslimness far less explored in the video game than in the comics or TV series about the same character.
Other games that could have been Muslim-centric completely dodge the opportunity, according to Doostdar.
“The Prince of Persia series, for example, shed a lot of its orientalist baggage in its most recent iteration, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, with excellent results. But none of the characters in the game, including the protagonist Sargon, are explicitly identified as Muslim, and the game largely draws on pre-Islamic Iranian myths and legends anyway,” he says.
“The indie game Heaven's Vault is another example: the game is set on a distant nebula with landscapes that look like stereotypical Middle Eastern cities, and the protagonist is a hijabi woman by the name of Aliya Elasra. And yet, again, she’s not identified as a Muslim.”
Are Sargon and Aliya advances for Muslim representation? Doostdar believes so, simply insofar as they bring complex and appealing Middle Eastern characters to the center of well-made, entertaining video games.
That said, these games also remind us about the challenges of including positive and explicitly Muslim characters in mainstream games, especially when these do not somehow serve dominant Western narratives, as in the Call of Duty shooter series where the "good" Muslims serve US imperialism, according to Doostdar.
Enormous potential
Considering there are over 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, representing a rich tapestry of cultures, traditions, and ethnicities, there is a vast potential market for Muslim-centric video games.
“There are tens of millions of Muslim gamers. And if done well, Muslim-focused games can also appeal to non-Muslim audiences,” says Doostdar. This growing and increasingly diverse customer base craves compelling stories and characters that are not a retread of the same old stereotypes.
“When it comes to content, there are hundreds of stories in the Islamic tradition that can provide inspiration for all kinds of game genres. Beyond this, game developers can look to ordinary Muslim life in all its diversity and richness as a source for game-making,” he explains.
Rabii, too, believes that Muslim gamers react very positively when they feel genuinely included. “I cannot speak for the Muslim world at large, but I can confidently say that the Muslim diaspora in the West is hungry for games that take the time to include them.”
“There's an entire library of stories to tell in the Muslim world, but it's like the game industry is obsessed with reprinting the same outdated book, over and over,” says Rabii.
“Games like Tandis by Mahdi Bahrami, Mira and the Legend of the Dijnns or Abdullah Karam's Path Out are proof that the Muslim diaspora at large can house games in a plethora of genres. The only way to tap into them, however, is to trust Muslim developers to make them.”
Filmmaking and novels can also offer good parallels, according to Doostdar. “There are innumerable works of fiction that have proven universally appealing, both those made by Muslims and those that are Muslim focused. Why not the same with videogames?”
On the other hand, the growing number of Muslim game developers is bound to bring positive change in the long run, notes Doostdar.
"For example, the highly rated games Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Assassin's Creed: Mirage both drew heavily on Muslim talent and
expertise,” he says.
Missing elements
What is certain is that it's not talent or incentive that is lacking; it's trust and funding, says Rabii.
“If you look into the workers of the game industry, you'll find plenty of people with the relevant knowledge, skills and even desire to develop more games for whom Muslim audiences would not be an afterthought.”
But without access to funds or investor support, studios keen on developing Muslim-centric games are left to do so on their own.
“Even the new game industry investors such as Saudi Arabia do not seem interested in changing the types of games that are funded. They fashion their strategy after the American and European model, which notably refuse to fund games made for Muslim audiences,” he says.
As a writer for Neurocracy 2.049, a murder mystery game set in a realistic future of our world and released in 2023, Rabii wrote a short story that explores a dream manipulation technology invented by a Muslim woman, the child of French-Moroccan immigrants.
“The setting being grounded in reality; I had the room to explore how the Western world at large would treat a brilliant scientist that happens to have that specific background. From the erasure of her name in academia, to her using duas [prayers] as a ward against nightmares, her story is full of details that only someone with her background could write.”
However, the gamer’s interface with the world of Neurocracy being similar to real-life Wikipedia, they have to cross-reference sources and read articles beyond surface level to understand who that character is. Just like in the real world, they must go beyond the official narrative if they want to understand the complex lives of people from the Muslim diaspora.
“It would be a mistake to think that giving more funding and creative space to Muslim developers is only relevant when you want to make Muslim-centric games. Muslim developers have the skill set to create a depth and nuance that can enrich about any fictional world that has at least a semblance with our reality,” says Rabii.
“With almost 25% of the world population being Muslim, it's safe to say that if your creative team cannot truly engage with it, you're closing your door to a huge chunk of the human experience.”
Note: Article updated on October 21, 2024
