1 00:00:03,203 --> 00:00:03,870 Hello! 2 00:00:04,237 --> 00:00:04,437 Hello. 3 00:00:05,105 --> 00:00:07,073 Welcome to Gaming Islam, a series of films 4 00:00:07,140 --> 00:00:09,376 about video games and their complicated relationship 5 00:00:09,509 --> 00:00:11,578 to Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East. 6 00:00:12,012 --> 00:00:12,512 I'm Ghenwa. 7 00:00:12,912 --> 00:00:13,580 And I'm Alireza. 8 00:00:13,947 --> 00:00:16,383 We're two gamers who also happen to be professors 9 00:00:16,449 --> 00:00:18,685 of the Middle East at the University of Chicago. 10 00:00:19,052 --> 00:00:21,588 In our series, we bring these two interests together. 11 00:00:21,988 --> 00:00:23,990 We play video games to understand how they 12 00:00:24,057 --> 00:00:26,693 represent, reimagine and remix a whole host 13 00:00:26,760 --> 00:00:28,728 of things from Middle Eastern and Muslim life. 14 00:00:29,529 --> 00:00:31,664 Books and rituals, historical events and 15 00:00:31,731 --> 00:00:34,934 personas, art, architecture, poetry, fiction 16 00:00:35,368 --> 00:00:36,002 and so on. 17 00:00:36,369 --> 00:00:37,871 We want to think about video game 18 00:00:37,937 --> 00:00:40,407 depictions of Muslims and the Middle East in relation 19 00:00:40,740 --> 00:00:43,276 to a much longer history of cultural 20 00:00:43,343 --> 00:00:48,548 representation, from art books to comics to film to academic scholarship. 21 00:00:49,182 --> 00:00:52,051 We think that the images and stories we all 22 00:00:52,118 --> 00:00:54,888 consume are just as powerful in shaping our 23 00:00:54,954 --> 00:00:56,990 worlds as political and economic events. 24 00:00:57,490 --> 00:00:59,392 The electronic game industry is the biggest 25 00:00:59,459 --> 00:01:01,761 and fastest-growing entertainment industry 26 00:01:01,828 --> 00:01:02,328 in the world. 27 00:01:03,163 --> 00:01:04,998 Islam and Muslims are represented and 28 00:01:05,064 --> 00:01:09,202 appropriated in all sorts of ways across a vast selection 29 00:01:09,269 --> 00:01:09,769 of titles. 30 00:01:10,370 --> 00:01:12,072 There's fantasy adventure games like Prince 31 00:01:12,138 --> 00:01:14,974 of Persia and Heaven's Vault, even The Legend 32 00:01:15,041 --> 00:01:17,877 of Zelda, speculative histories like 33 00:01:17,944 --> 00:01:21,147 Assassin's Creed and the upcoming Nasser Son of Man, 34 00:01:22,048 --> 00:01:24,517 and adventures like Uncharted 3, and 35 00:01:24,584 --> 00:01:27,220 first-person shooters like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. 36 00:01:27,720 --> 00:01:29,255 This is to say nothing of the many 37 00:01:29,322 --> 00:01:32,258 independent games produced by Muslims for Muslims. 38 00:01:32,992 --> 00:01:34,894 We both grew up playing video games and we 39 00:01:34,961 --> 00:01:36,930 learned to be sensitive to how Muslims and 40 00:01:36,996 --> 00:01:38,398 Middle Easterners are represented. 41 00:01:38,798 --> 00:01:40,500 Whether in the original Prince of Persia 42 00:01:40,567 --> 00:01:43,069 game, the strategy games based on Frank Herbert's 43 00:01:43,136 --> 00:01:45,438 Dune, or any of the numerous first-person 44 00:01:45,505 --> 00:01:48,108 shooters based in the Middle East, we were consuming 45 00:01:48,241 --> 00:01:52,679 media that depicted people like us and our cultures, not always in positive ways. 46 00:01:53,146 --> 00:01:56,182 And of course, we came of age also watching films 47 00:01:56,249 --> 00:01:58,651 with problematic and stereotypical representation 48 00:01:58,852 --> 00:01:59,853 of people like us. 49 00:02:00,286 --> 00:02:02,922 Aladdin, True Lies, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 50 00:02:02,989 --> 00:02:06,593 and Alireza's favorite film, Not Without My Daughter 51 00:02:07,227 --> 00:02:08,528 One of the worst films of all time. 52 00:02:08,928 --> 00:02:11,064 Just to name a few from the 1990s. 53 00:02:11,598 --> 00:02:13,366 We've called our video series Gaming Islam, 54 00:02:13,633 --> 00:02:15,535 but it's important to emphasize that there 55 00:02:15,602 --> 00:02:17,737 are many more Muslims than there are Middle Easterners 56 00:02:17,804 --> 00:02:20,240 and a lot of Middle Easterners 57 00:02:20,306 --> 00:02:21,007 who are not Muslim. 58 00:02:21,708 --> 00:02:25,345 In the popular imagination, these complexities are often flattened. 59 00:02:26,045 --> 00:02:28,515 In video games, as in other media, Muslims 60 00:02:28,581 --> 00:02:30,850 are de facto Middle Easterners, and people 61 00:02:30,917 --> 00:02:33,286 from the Middle East are typically imagined to be Muslims. 62 00:02:34,053 --> 00:02:36,923 That's one of the critical perspectives we bring to our videos. 63 00:02:37,423 --> 00:02:42,095 We try to unravel some of these assumptions as we focus on specific games. 64 00:02:42,328 --> 00:02:43,963 We'd love your feedback and suggestions. 65 00:02:44,464 --> 00:02:45,865 Tell us what you think about our videos. 66 00:02:46,165 --> 00:02:48,234 And let us know what games you think we should be playing next. 67 00:02:48,501 --> 00:02:50,937 We're on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and Instagram.