This scene on a Karachi, Pakistan street in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 makes the mistake of having signs in both Urdu and Arabic.
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How the West gets Muslims wrong in video games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 26 min

Muslim blood is cheap.

It’s easy to depict Muslims as the villains in video games these days. How we show Muslims in video games is slanted in a way that reflects the storytelling biases of Westerners who don’t follow Islam. And the voices and perspectives of a minority group that consists of more than a billion people around the world is rarely represented in mainstream video games. These were some of the conclusions of a panel dubbed “Muslim representation in video games” at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.