Religion, Games, and Othering: An Intersectional Approach

Kathrin Trattner's study examines how religion, particularly Islam, functions as a marker of "othering" in video games, arguing that religious difference rarely operates in isolation and becomes fully visible only when analyzed alongside race, nationality, culture, and gender. Drawing on intersectional analysis, multimodal discourse theory, and Said's concept of imaginative geographies, the work positions games as ideologically non-neutral cultural texts whose representations of Muslims and the Middle East often rely on generalized, stereotypical enemy figures.

The central case study is the post-9/11 military shooter Medal of Honor: Warfighter (2012), whose narrative, Orientalist imagery, and largely civilian-free virtual geographies equate Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism. The analysis contrasts these recent portrayals with earlier 1980s and 1990s depictions, which relied more on exoticism than on explicit religious narrative, and with the racialized trolls of World of Warcraft, showing a shift toward religiously inflected enemy construction in the post-2001 period.

Supporting this textual analysis, the study examines YouTube comments on walkthroughs of Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Responses to discussions of Islam were emotionally charged, with many commenters affirming the game's association of Muslims with terrorism, while others, including Muslim and non-Muslim critics, challenged the stereotyping. Many Muslim commenters felt obliged to explicitly distance themselves from terrorism, indicating how deeply the Islam-terrorism association has become embedded in public discourse.

The author concludes that religious othering in games is frequently implicit and works intersectionally with other forms of social difference. The study also documents real-world consequences, including a commenter's report of being called a terrorist at school because of the game, underscoring the potential social impact of such representations.