Call Of Duty: Vanguard Vs The Quran
Pages of the Quran were spotted in Vanguard's new Zombies mode and Activision has apologized. But let's stop calling this stuff "Islamophobia" okay?
Activision is reportedly removing images of the Quran from the Der Anfang map in Call Of Duty: Vanguard’s Zombies mode after players noticed pages from the Muslim holy book lying on the ground, bloodied and torn up. This is, obviously, a Very Big Deal even for non-Muslims. Or something.
The pages were almost certainly included by environmental artists to add flavor to the location and show what might happen should it be overrun by zombies—the undead don’t really give a shit about your religion, after all. They want your brains, not your soul. Souls are for gods, silly rabbit. And there are no gods here.
But this inclusion is “Islamophobic” according to the headlines. Kotaku says so. People on Twitter, our new Holy Land, say so.
Oh and here I was under the impression that diversity was only for gender balance god now I feel stupid.
Others say they want more than an Arabic-only language apology:
Wow, this image in a video game about shooting people insulted Muslims across the globe. Better name this a day of national—nay, global!—mourning. What will Muslims do after this terrible affront? Also, can we stop assuming that Muslims have such thin skins? I’m pretty sure a lot of them have to put up with much worse than video game imagery.
Activision did apologize, and the apology has been translated by Dexerto:
Call of Duty is made for everyone. There was insensitive content to the Muslim community mistakenly included last week, and has since been removed from the game. It should never have appeared as it did in-game. We deeply apologize. We are taking immediate steps internally to address the situation to prevent such occurrences in the future.
Naturally, in our current political and media climate everyone in the games space and mainstream media just takes it at face value that this is insulting, Islamophobic and dangerous. Billions of Muslims worldwide are being harmed by this thing that nobody noticed until a YouTuber spotted it. Harm is happening to a religious group that isn’t Christians and we must get Very Upset on Twitter now.
I’m sorry, this is much ado about nothing. There are around 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. They’ll be perfectly fine if some pages of the Quran are on the floor, even if some of them make it a big deal on social media and some true zealots decide it’s a grave insult to their faith.
I want to live in a world where ripping out pages from holy texts and throwing them on the floor isn’t shunned or encouraged—just accepted as an act of free speech, free expression, artistic freedom and not something to get our collective panties in a bunch over (oh I’m sorry, was that a gendered statement? Okay, get our boxers in a bunch over).
What Call Of Duty: Vanguard needs is more pages from more holy texts strewn about more areas of the game. Rip out some of the Gospels and riddle them with bullets; tear out pages from the Torah and go Old Testament on them. Buddhist texts and Hindu texts and the Book Of Mormon while we’re at it, pages everywhere. None of these religions is “off limits” and guess what? Disrespecting your organized religion is a goddamned right we are free to exercise.
Activision is a business. Call Of Duty is a product. They don’t want to piss people off too much and I get that, but this is childish and ridiculous. No doubt some actually Islamophobic people will latch onto this to make some terrible point who probably never would have noticed before. Nobody is “protected” by removing the images. Nothing meaningful is changed for the Muslim world.
We’re left with a bunch of Twitter social justice warriors thinking they’ve done something worthwhile, a game designer having to spend pointless hours patching a perfectly fine map, and all we get is one step backward for the broader humanist project we seem to have lost sight of.
Activision removed the entire map “Favela” back in the Modern Warfare 2 days for having a framed image of the Prophet Muhammad on a wall. Apparently secular video games in secular countries with secular values can’t risk offending religious folk. Once upon a time that was the Christian “moral majority” and now it’s “oppressed” groups like Muslims (who do plenty of their own oppressing elsewhere but okay, thou wokies). I find the entire business lame and chickenshit but such are the times.
Oh, and also: You can be decent to other human beings because they’re human beings, full stop. Be decent to them while still finding their Medieval-era religions ghastly and backwards and rejecting their demands to adhere to tenets that we don’t actually follow or believe in. Nobody should be forced to censor themselves because of someone else’s faith (or be allowed to censor others for their faith). Be excellent to each other, sure, but I don’t have to believe in your fairy tales or pretend to and you don’t have to believe in mine. Just because I tell you dragons are real and any image of a dragon is an affront to my religion doesn’t mean you shouldn’t draw a dragon or two and sell it as an NFT.
I rant about all of this in the below video. Thanks for reading and watching! I know it’s been a little slow around these parts. Just been hectic as hell these days, always on the precipice of some looming chaos. But like the Dude, we abide.
“ What Call Of Duty: Vanguard needs is more pages from more holy texts strewn about more areas of the game.” rofl
I just got chastised the other week about this when someone pointed out the image of the Virgin Mary was altered to look like something different in a Japanese video game. I pressed as to why this mattered, and I got a few replies that mentioned that it’s advisable on the internet to make not make any actual references to religion, money, or politics. “But the Virgin Mary would simply be depicted here, and not disparaged in any way(?)”. Even that would be too much, they said. I still say as a walking insensitive that this is overkill and ridiculous. 🤷♂️