A How-To Guide for Muslim Representation in Video Games

[Music] so first of all thank you all for coming i'm very happy to see so many people interested in this topic that i care so much about i really appreciate your time especially gdc time which is really precious time thank you gdc for giving me this platform on which to speak it's very important to me and to every muslim in the world all 1.6 billion of us there are two things that i have to tell you i want to tell you as well don't worry so please turn down the volumes on your phones or turn them off and when you came in if you weren't scanned please go and get scanned because we're going to send you a questionnaire i would really appreciate the feedback if there's anything i could do better the other last thing is that this talk is subjective there are a lot of muslims in the world with a lot of different opinions i've shown it to a lot of muslims and i've gotten their feedback and i think it's it covers a lot of basis but if a muslim tells you otherwise they're also right that goes to that question thank you so this is me my name well in sim form at

least my name is osama dorias i'm a senior game designer at wb games in montreal i'm also the coordinator of the video game programs at dawson college and i'm the co-founder and organizer of the montreal independent games festival and i do a lot of other things see there these are some of the games that i've shipped and what i'm going to be addressing today because this talk was really long and i had to scale it back a lot because there's a lot of content and it's impossible to talk about everything so i had to make some hard choices so i'm going to go very briefly about why positive muslim representation is important then i'm going to debunk a few myths and this there are volumes that could be said about myths about islam so i just chose a few select things that i think a lot of people don't know that are relevant to the talk and then i get into the nitty-gritty the meat of the talk which is the how-to guide at some point i might lose my voice it's happened before so

bear with me what this talk is not about is trying to convince you that not all muslims are bad if you believe this not a problem come meet me later we'll be friends and hopefully i'll i'll prove you wrong but i'm not going to address i'm going to assume that everybody is here on good faith and the other is my intention is not to shame any companies or people who've misrepresented muslims before the truth is i've worked on games that misrepresented muslims and i had no choice in the matter and i tried to make it better and sometimes it did get better after a little bit of time and other times not everyone's situation is different i'm not even trying to shame the companies that make the decisions a lot of times they just don't know better the intention behind this talk is that you will know better for the future that is all so if i mention your game or a movie or something that you worked on it's not personal at all no pointing at people in the audience please so let's start with why this is important islamophobia is on the rise after september 11 it was at its highest point and then it started to die down then a

few things happened in the states with you know political things and now it's spiked in the last two years the rate of islamophobia related crimes has doubled and it's unprecedented and it continues to grow most of the time it happens just on the street insults or what have you attacks sometimes it happens in the workplace and other times it takes the form of bullying in schools most of the victims are women and most of the perpetrators are men and most and ten percent of the cases are of extreme violence including death where i come from in canada very the our neighboring city quebec just had a shooting last year where six muslims were killed while they were praying so it is serious 15 of north american children's and there's a very conservative number i've heard it go up as much as 50 on occasion hide their faith and i know this is true because i used to do the same when i was

young and it wasn't even that bad back then so i could only imagine how bad it is now for muslim children muslims have a public image problem and it's sometimes dangerous to be muslim so we need help addressing the public image problem during the american elections in 2016 a few well-intentioned politicians said some things that misrepresented muslims of course i'm not talking about this gentleman because everything he says is poop i am talking about people who should know better now bear with me as i quote them so i'm gonna go in a little okay oh i see it clear there if we're to succeed in defeating terrorism we must enlist muslim communities as some of our strongest allies rather than push them away through suspicion and hate so enlist and allies we need to be cooperating with the

muslim nations and with the muslim american community they're on the front lines they can provide information to us that we might not get anywhere else so i was born in iraq i moved to canada 30 years ago i've been muslim ever since i've been active in the muslim community as well as the video game community since i started working in the industry i have never met a terrorist i'm not privy to any information i don't know how to be your ally in this fight this is a tweet that went viral by a person who goes by the name of kash ali i don't understand why non-muslims think we british muslims can stop isis mate i can't even get a text back from the girl i like can you expect me to stop a terrorist organization for better or worse these are the things we're dealing with they're strangely very similar to things that normal people deal with so you don't need us to be your allies we need you to be ours

in the movie three kings there was a very troubling scene where a muslim woman was shot point blank by an insurgent and the reason that this scene exists is to drum up support for the noble american soldiers who are there to stop the insurgency this is not necessarily entirely false because 97 percent of the world's victims of terrorism are muslim look it up nobody hates terrorists more than us on both fronts we are the victims in number of deaths and we are the victims and the number of bigoted acts that happen because we are blamed for our own deaths and the deaths of others of course as a result so what this does is it brings the it makes people think that we have to go and kill muslims that kill muslims and if muslims die as a result well isn't that why we're there to begin

with and it devalues our lives to begin with it devalues uh the value of our life solely portraying us as victims justifies the wars that make us victims so this is not good there's another movie called the siege in the 90s that happened actually it took place before september 11. and in this there was the terrorist act and muslims were the perpetrators the muslims were portrayed the terrorists were portrayed as being very religious they even linked a lot of our religious acts to the terrorist acts and there was a cia agent who was muslim but he was one of the good muslims and he drank alcohol and he went to parties and there's nothing wrong with that the problem is the association that they created in this because when you create a direct link between the religion and terrorism what you're telling us is that we could be muslim but not too muslim and you're creating that association between our religion

and terrorism not you personally just so some muslims practice more than others we can practice islam on a spectrum and that's okay now to the debunking some of the misconceptions like i said we could write volumes about what people think islam is and isn't but i just picked out a few things to start most muslims come from these countries of course there are muslims everywhere i'm from montreal there are muslims here from in san francisco but it's mostly from here fewer than 15 percent of muslims are arab and by what i mean by this is that they speak arabic as our primary language there are a few more that speak it as a secondary language or it's equal so let's we could go up to about 20 depending on how you define what an arab is but as primary language it's about 15 the biggest muslim country is indonesia a country nobody ever hears anything about and that might have something to do with them not having oil to say indonesia is a peaceful country

it doesn't get involved in anything and it is the biggest muslim country in the world the second biggest muslim population is in india where they're actually a minority and there are almost as many muslims in india as there are muslims who are primarily arab and yet they get very little representation when was the last time you saw an indonesian character in anything i can't name one why i could name one but that's because i did research it's different so what do muslims look like give you a little bit of time to think about it okay before i answer that question what does a christian look like what does an atheist look like most of you i bet when i asked you what a muslim looks like you conjured up an image in your mind but it was much harder or maybe even impossible to do the same for christians and atheists and why is this is because you have a bigger pool to draw on where you live right now for christians and atheists and so the stereotypes don't make sense if you ask this question in a muslim

country it would be the inverse they wouldn't know what a muslim likes what are you talking about like anyone's muslim everyone's also but they would have the hollywood hero as either the christian or the atheist and that's how because that's what they see the hero most people here have a very skewed image of what a muslim look like depending on a few variations you it might be these two with varying degrees of dress and if you were a little more well traveled it might be a little bit more diverse but the truth is the spectrum is very very wide and a muslim can look like anyone right and the more muslims you meet the more this is a no-brainer so i don't know who you are but you might have imagined something along these lines and that's okay so let's play a game i'm a game designer i like games i call it 50 shades of brown i'm going to show you an image and if you think this person is not

muslim raise your hand don't overthink it i want your first impulse deal about half of you seek about half of you hindu okay some hesitation but not many people at all christian syrian christian you see the cross a lot of you ethiopian jew buddhist it's interesting like you're about halfway for most of them the buddhists stumped almost everyone because nobody knows that can dress this way the truth is you're not far from being right regardless of what you said because all of these people come from countries that have large populations of muslim and culture

generally dictates dress way more than religion christian arabs in certain places are indistinguishable from muslim arabs you cannot tell them apart in certain places again because culture is works that way so muslims wear turbans muslims who are series muslims cover their heads it just in the details that sometimes you could tell what's different and what's not so keep that in mind we are diverse just like everyone else now i'm going to get to the how to guide so if you want to represent muslims in your games and i hope that's why you're here these are a few pointers the first is if you have a platform given to us this is kamala khan she's mrs marvel she is a character from comics not from because there's very little positive representation of muslim video games i apologize that's why i'm drawing from so many media kamala khan is pakistani she's a teenager and she's a muslim and her comics speak to my experience growing up in the west more than any

other character in fiction i've ever seen even though i'm not pakistani and i'm not a woman i'm no longer a teenager why is that it's because it's authentic because it was written by two muslim women ji willow wilson and sana amanat in fact when they first started writing the book they only had the story for about three comics they didn't expect this to be the great success that it was and then it is it's still printed now and it's a big deal and people love it why is that it's because there's no competition we want this and nobody's giving it to us so whatever form we get it it's good at this point later on we'll see so if you want to be in the front you want to represent us now so if you have a platform give it to us and you need to amplify sorry we need you to amplify our voices the next step is to talk to us so let's say for example you don't have a platform but you do have a game and there are muslims among you either as your friends or as your co-workers then come and ask us ask us questions

what i find is a lot of people are afraid to offend us so they don't ask and they misrepresent us which is far more offen offensive and what happens is if you ask us even an offensive question and we answer it once you'll never offend us that way again but if you offend us in a video game it's kind of permanent right so we'll take it just come and talk to us and everyone might have different questions and that's totally okay as i proved before islam is very diverse and it doesn't matter as long as you have a consultant that's muslim it'll go don't stack tokens and there's a lot i could say about this so what i mean to say is that right now there's a need and a desire to represent people to have diversity in our games which is great and we're seeing how that's be that's a very good thing however if you have a character let's say who's a black muslim amputee woman sounds like a great character but if everyone else in your game is a white guy you're not doing anyone any favors and that character even though it sounds like an interesting character that would

love to know what they have to go through if you don't have a consultant that could speak to their actual experience that's dangerous as well it's not going to come off as being authentic and sometimes you cannot find a consultant that has that experience so then no problem get consultants who are from all these different marginalized groups and in addition to this spread out the diversity among your cast you'll see it's going to be a lot better there are a lot of games right now that are more successful because of it so what i'm saying is i'm not saying don't make characters that are from different marginalized groups i'm saying don't stack tokens it's not checklist that you can do all with one character insist on authentic vios so for better or worse when i was young i loved aladdin because there were not a lot of different ways that arabs were represented in video games at all i am arab and you know aladdin could have been about muslims they say allah a lot etc i didn't know any better and i loved it as a result today i have a different opinion about latin but i won't go into that so the one thing that even as a child

that i did notice is aladdin did not sound like me and that is something that could have been easily addressed this is anna amari her voice actress is in egypt and i was told by some egyptian friends that if you are egyptian you know exactly what part of egypt she's from it's that authentic and on top of that what's amazing is she's actually about the right age for the character that she's playing which is really unique sadly in our industry so when anna speaks you will never mistake her for another character it's impossible isn't that awesome that's amazing even for gameplay reasons that's amazing so insist on authentic vios if you have a roster include us now these characters might not even be muslim and it doesn't matter they come from muslim majority countries and that's what's important if you don't address if you don't point out the religion of any other characters

then do the same for the muslims you don't have to have a banner on their front that says muslim muslim muslim we don't need that that's not important what's important is that you represent people from where we come from might not be muslim but he's from turkey and we don't have a lot of characters that come from turkey and the same is true for all of these characters so if you have a roster please include people from our countries so you need to include us if you have npcs please have muslim npcs and don't make islam their focal point so this is farida malik from the deus ex series she's a badass who happens to be muslim which is amazing sarah hasmadi is a brilliant scientist who happens to be muslim and islam is mentioned which is amazing because what this does is it normalizes us we can be something other than the muslim character we're a character that's also muslim there are very few characters that are like that we are normal as i've shown you with

different slides before so we need your help into pushing that to other people so they can see us as normal as well we have other interests other than other aspects of our personality other than just being muslim this is a movie called robin hood prince of thieves from the 90s um actually azeem is a pretty good character especially from the 90s when it comes to muslim representation because he's nuanced he's not a pillar of virtue who's perfect in every way that doesn't that's not the only kind of muslim representation i'm asking for it would be great if at least one of the characters was like that but it doesn't have to be that he's nuanced he was an exile and it's ambiguous as to why but he has a moral code and he calls everyone christian so it's like there's this level of okay he seems like he could be real and this takes place in the crusades everything felt good and i love that they had this character who was not portrayed in just a negative light where he was balanced and then he bowed down to pray and i didn't recognize what he was doing our rituals are precise my friends from

first nations have the exact same comments if you're not going to do the research and hire a consultant then just don't include the ritual it's easy shortcut alternate skins are great and they mean a lot so this is farah and very recently she had a hijab skin that actually had a lot of research that went to do it because it looks like a bedouin hijab from egypt specifically it's an option so if people don't want to wear it no problem and if people do they will and it will mean a lot to them exhibit a this is jasmine loves you although this was during halloween so her name was jasmine kills you pharah is wearing a hijab i'm muslim you don't know how much this means to me i've been waiting all my life i've been waiting all my life too we've all been waiting all our lives to be included what's interesting is if you look at her twitter avatar her icon it's a beaten but victorious kamala khan because muslims will absorb all media that represent us because

there's so little of it so it is meaningful and you will find success now if you are representing people from specific countries do your research just what you if even if you think you're well traveled and well versed we're not all the same and even something as simple as a head covering has extremely different um manifestations based on where the people come from so just hire a consultant do some research and no problem include us but if we're talking about character customization oh sorry then go because crazy long as you don't say this is an indonesian headdress or this is from somalia then go crazy any kind of headdress it's an option anyone can wear it of any gender and there's not a problem we appreciate these options a lot of games are going disrupt and it's great so just have fun with it so can anyone tell me what country this takes place in again i'm not shaming the people who worked on this game this screenshot could have been taken from a lot of different games

i had to choose one maybe i call it arabistan it's a generic war-torn middle eastern southeast asian broken down rubble place where many of our fps matches take place the problem here is that we see this and we think no i'm not pointing out we think iraq when most of iraq does not look like this even war-torn iraq most of it does not look like this and for sure if you go back 10 years or 20 years or 30 years most of the middle east did not look like this but this is all we recognize it desensitizes us to we don't even know what the reality of these countries look like again i'm sorry i'm not pointing anyone out this is syria before and after the war and sadly the before is the one we don't recognize and when we see it in the news oh i fought a match in that location and if a stray bullet hit someone well whatever i'm aiming for people there all

the time anyway it completely dehumanizes us this is a tweet from my friend nicola he was talking about it oasis which was a map from uh from blizzard from overwatch that was set in a future iraq and it glorifies the middle east instead of the usual depictions he showed it to his iraqi canadian friend and it brought his friend to tears at work and if it's not clear who that friend is it was me and the reason this was meaningful is because i spent a lot of time thinking about this and talking about this and writing about this and never once i'm from iraq never once did i project a bright future for my own country and to see someone else to it it was that sorry

i'm sorry oh i hope you realize how meaningful this is i needed it thank you [Applause] i hope this proves a point that this is actually very meaningful and it touches people in a positive way things have been getting better i've been in the video game industry about 10 years now

and things have been getting a lot better but we're not there we're not where we want to be and muslims all we want is just to be included in this conversation that's really all i had to say thank you okay so we have six moves for questions if anybody wants to ask anything do you have any suggestions for movies to watch varieties movies to watch for ideas is a very good question i would say okay so he's asking if there are any good movies i guess that represent muslims positively um the one the first one that comes to mind is pitch black in it there are muslims who just happen to be there in the future who have nothing to do with the violence that's happening there oh this is not working did everyone hear

me anywhere or do i have to repeat it so pitch black is one but to be honest i haven't i can't really think of anything right now but if you want poke me and i'll make you a list thank you hi i've worked on a bunch of uh big japanese aaa games and um the problem that i've always found when we were doing um localization to english uh is that our actual actor pool uh is all dudes from california who like have that accent and we're like well how about this character like he's he's like muslim they're like well how about we use the guy who played whoever in dragon ball and we're like oh no because i could connect you to a person who could find you diverse people yeah basically what i'd like to ask is um how do i find um you know muslim actors and who are both oh hi are both union and non-union uh and and how can i and i just would like to know so i can pass that on to people who

are still doing that absolutely well my friend lily she works in montreal and she has she actually it's not just muslims or people from muslim countries that she has a pool of names but if anyone wants to have actors from there come see me poke me i'll connect you to her she does have a pool of both act of unionized and non-unionized actor voice actors so oops so yeah awesome thank you anyone else hi hi oh sorry go ahead okay this is also an actor question um it's two-part when you are searching for actors i know that you're not allowed to say they must be from we have laws against that so do you find that there are certain ways around that or is it best done by i know this person who has people yes that's what i would do because i don't want to do anything illegal i'm not a lawyer and i'm sorry even lawyers don't give this kind of advice so i would just

connect you to the people who have this pool and a few to tell them what you need they can find someone for you i'm sorry if that didn't answer your question no no you're fine you're fine uh yes so and my next question is how specific do you suggest say you have a muslim character that you haven't given a huge background nobody has a huge background in this do you suggest finding someone with very specific like in neighborhoods in a certain town like do you have anything necessary it was a game i was playing on on the plane right here i think it's called good pizza something along those lines and it just i was making a pizza and a muslim seemingly muslim woman with hijab walked in i know nothing about her or where she's from or anything along those lines and that's totally okay if you're ta if you're gonna put other labels on top of it then you have to do the research to make sure that whatever you're saying about this person is accurate but if it's just a person who happens to wear a veil go for it there's really no

no problem whatsoever people can fill in the blanks themselves there are people who are not muslims who wear veils so no problem that's just an example of the vera veil we could talk about like a dark skinned person with a big beard and he happens to be in a i don't know a guitar hero type game that's totally okay we don't need to say he's from this country or that but try to treat them at the same level as everyone else on the roster so if everyone else on the roster has a backstory then you probably need a backstory if you're mentioning the country of origin and if you're mentioning the other things that they're interested in then you would need someone like to to speak to that great is that sure yeah thank you hi how are you amazing how you doing good um so a lot of the customization these days especially on live game goes through uh microtransaction yes do you think it would be still okay to have for example women headwear in microtransaction customization like all the other headwear a game has but

because there is uh yes there is a cultural part but there's also a religious part to it so i don't know how can we monetize something that has a religious connotation to you uh that's a very difficult question to answer because for example if you're in a game and you want to offer more customization but most of your customization goes through micro transaction it's more of a pr question than everything else it depends how you formulate it if you say we need the budget to make this and so far we're transferring the cost to you if you want your representation and might fly but otherwise if you're representing everyone else for free then options are also charged oh yeah then no problems yeah everything is charged does that make sense that's true i'm sorry no no but i'm just no all your customization is on the same level to include something that has more we want you to normalize us if everyone

else is the same we want to be the same as everyone else all right thank you it's a good uh question don't know who was here first go ahead uh so it's clearly given that players like to see themselves represented in games especially in their player characters um it's super important um what advice do you have for people doing like far modern sci-fi games or fantasy games or alternate universe games to let the players still feel like they see themselves in the game but maybe our you know current earth religions don't exist yeah well star trek does a great job of that so follow them as a good example uh one thing to stay away from is don't create a race that's a caricature of a culture that exists in real life that's not the right way to go but if you're having people who if in your fiction islam doesn't exist anymore and no other religion exists or even if another religion survived and it didn't that's not a problem at all so you could represent people who if evolved from those countries and just

tell the story of what happened to them it's fiction right if you wanted to include like a character that looks like they're in hijab even though you don't have islam in your in your game or in your universe that's okay as long as you have a good reason for why the hijab persisted afterwards and you've given it some thought because that doesn't become muslim representation it's just it's muslim symbolism at that point so if you need muslim symbolism and you have a good reason for it go for it there are a lot of sci-fi authors that are muslim who write about similar situations so maybe asking them and consulting with them about what they learned and what they did would be great there i could there's a few the names don't come to mind but i could maybe uh give you a few i think saladin was the name of one of them who writes a sci-fi yeah so he'd be a great person to ask specifically for that but this is my opinion okay thank you yes sir great presentation great talk thank you thank you um my my perspective different because i don't directly make content but i think if we're going to make more representative games we have to have

more representation in the industry in general so from a work environment perspective what do you think would be the most impactful change that you would see like at a studio in terms of a work environment well hire more muslims wow yeah and a good way to do that organically and naturally is maybe don't show the names on the cvs when you're going through the hiring process until the interview yeah it's gonna be a happy surprise uh more people more muslims will make it to video games and then you'll have consultants out of the pool of people that you work with right and that everything else is going to come organically from that beyond recruiting though like at work as an environment what would what would be the most impactful changes like if you're thinking about a place that's going to make it more comfortable and more inclusive like specifically accommodating those ones okay so people in general i mean i think that's good that's a great question i could actually give a completely different talk on just how it's kind of happening but like a place to pray would be amazing it doesn't have to be big but a clean price to pray would be amazing if you have a lot of activities networking activities that revolve around alcohol having a few that don't would be

great uh t socials ice cream socials muslims love ice cream and generally accommodating like right now it's gotten much better when i started in the industry there were rarely any vegetarian or vegan options so muslims who keep to halal can have vegetarian and vegan food and they love it so but now that already seems to be taken care of so i'll mention it anyway just in case you don't have any i don't know how you would not have vegetarians in your workforce but just in case but that's taken care of these little things go a long way because at the end muslims will tell you when they need something right i mean there's also the friday prayer that some muslims go to if you give them a slot where they could work later on fridays and have a longer lunch anything like that goes out it goes a long way right sorry i'm new to this forgive me thank you yeah thank you my pleasure last question i think is that the last one or do you have time for more who am i looking at okay nobody seems to know i'll keep going until they kick us out go for it

uh i want to say thank you first as an egyptian muslim myself a lot of this they're very close to home um i've often found myself talking to folks who think that as far as protagonists go that um it has to sort of always be a cis white man and that we need an excuse for it to be anyone else um and and that they throw out you know this garbage idea of gender for era diversity for diversity's sake um what do you think needs to be done or what do you what do you tell those people what do you think conversations need to be happened for people to be trained out of that idea maybe what would be great if there are any journalists here if someone does choose a white system hell as a marine protagonist start asking them why that could be a good first step but otherwise i to be honest i don't have an answer to that this is something that's uh you could write volumes on it right i mean it's this is seen as the norm and that's why bigotry exists how do we tackle bigotry it's it's so above what i can answer in this talk

but i would love to have that answer so if anyone else gives it to you please like reach out and let me know i appreciate that thank you thank you we're still not kicked out so we're over like what 10 minutes five minutes okay that's fine uh so uh when you're looking for consultants uh being a consultant can often be a big form of emotional labor particularly when uh you are already a minority in your particular group do you have good strategies for asking people like hey do you want to consult without like forcing that on them if they don't want to like what's what's a good in line for like hey you want to consult on this i'm actually um working to start up a sig with igda for muslims and games right now we're still in the beginning steps but we want to be able to answer these kind of questions by having a pool of people that you could ask both paid consultants for the companies that could afford it and volunteers for the ones that don't we haven't established what the rule set is uh we don't like this is still the

infancy and the beginning of being able to answer that question but it is something that we some of our members did bring up and that we do want to address because it is it's it's taxing right and but eventually from what i heard from consultants who consult for other things especially for first nations and and the like is that the the people who do this as a job they they do develop some kind of uh what's the word to use like they're able to cope with it better because they've done it so much for so many different studios that they have answers to that and they're able to separate their emotion from from the consulting work so i'm hoping that's going to happen for us as far as i know there are no muslim consultants for video games or for media in general i could be wrong i looked for them and i could not find them so we're trying to establish that ourselves and then we'll see when the problems arise we'll try to tackle it but thank you that's a good question so oh hi squeezed in right at the end what's the difference between representation and cultural appropriation i mean where is the line that separates representation from cultural appropriation cultural

education okay appropriation i heard completely wrong um okay well in this case we're talking about video games specifically right so if you're if you're talking about a character who you're saying this person is a muslim then that is representation or someone who comes from a muslim country if you're talking about a character who is who appears to be muslim but you explicitly go out of your way to say that they're not then that would be cultural appropriation however i've never seen that before not in video games or any other media not for muslims specifically because to be quite honest there's a lot of bigotry go that's going against muslims right now the only thing that's close is i see like there's a huge trend for hummus right now so maybe that has something to do with it where like people are making all their different brands of of hummus but i know that's not what you're asking but still that was what i would say if you have a character who appears to be a muslim but you explicitly go out of your way to say they're not you better have a pretty good reason why that is

that's good yes a little announcement um we are sadly out of time but if anyone still has any further questions we can take uh this conversation over to the overlooks over there in room 2022 and 2024. uh anyone is fine they have tables chairs we can have a nice conversation and you have been incredibly amazing thank you very much you