“APENAS ATIRE NO ÁRABE”: ORIENTALISMO, ISLAMOFOBIA E IMPERIALISMO NAS NARRATIVAS DE FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS

Abstract

Within the scope of this work, we will seek to investigate the relationship between History and discursive resources used in the plot of certain video games, conceptually understood as “war” video games: digital games whose central elements, both in the narrative and in the gameplay, center in the unfolding of warlike conflicts. For the restrainment of such objects, they are required to belong to the genre of first person shooters (identified by the popular acronym FPS), which concerns the graphic perspective adopted – the “camera view”, when we think in a movie. Furthermore, its themes are located through a common spatial and temporal cut. They are geographically situated in close proximity to the Greater Middle East. Temporally, its plots unfold in fictional worlds, which present a historical background common to reality, thought in the context between the end of the Cold War, going through the “war on terror” and reaching the current situation of military campaigns. This selection has to do with the intended problematization through a conceptual triad – orientalism, islamophobia and imperialism – with which the objective is to analyze how the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) represents the oriental “Other”. It is concluded that the great merit of digital war games, regarding the orientalist repertoire, was to include it relatively unchanged in this new form of entertainment that are video games. With this, they can be nourished by its intellectual authority, while reaffirming a worldview ordered by the categories of the war on terror, elevating US interventionism as a mechanism to curb social anxieties and the feeling of threat by the “Other”, who must be fought, restricted, assimilated or annihilated.