 for years in Hollywood and games, the bad guys, they were always these World War II-era Nazis. They were the bad guys. And then something interesting happened. It's all I said with the clash of digitalizations. Let's give them a round of applause. I want to start out rather oddly by saying, I'm not really sure if I agree with my own thesis. Now, let me explain. The work I'm presenting today is stuff I left out of my doctoral dissertation on radical Islamic thought. The dissertation is based on a research project I started over 10 years ago. And from field work I did five to six years ago. This is not an overview of that work. This is a sliver of regret. So when I started, there was no Islamic state of the Iraq and the Levant. It literally arose around me as the people I was focusing on were becoming less and less relevant. People like the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and even Orthodox Salafis, the so-called Wahhabis, were becoming less and less significant in everyday political life. Also becoming less relevant was the leading Western modes of analyzing Islamic radicalism, the real politic, political economy people, the fancy deconstructionists, postmodern discourse analysis people. They were all becoming less significant in everyday political dialogue. The academics are doing well in their respective departments, but they're irrelevant for the public at large. I argue here today that the introduction of new technologies within particular political moment produces cultural orientations that will drive future conflicts. The Islamic state is, or almost was, a Twitter state. Supporters for it started in the internet, made alliances with unlikely bedfellows, former Baptist, disgruntled jihadists, moderate rebels, and eventually took the mantle from traditional radical Islamic groups like Al Qaeda. There was no similar coup in the intellectual analysis of the shift. The dominant intellectual paradigm that explained the conflict between Islam and the West was most properly phrased by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington as the clash of civilizations. All analyses of the conflict are basically either the clash or reactions against the clash. The clash is a geopolitical thesis that integrates long sweeping historical developments with cultural stereotypes to explain current political conflicts. This is actually an identical style of analysis that Osama bin Laden uses in his own view of the world. The basic idea is that the Islamic world and some understanding or definition of a modern, liberal, and to be explicit, Judeo-Christian, mostly European world, has been in conflict for a really long time. These two worlds share an inevitable collision course. For Huntington, the future of war is not a conflict between clearly defined nation states. It's a war between cultures. Huntington is one of the central figures of the neo-conservative movement, and his argument is today the standard classical theory of international relations taught in colleges and universities across the world. And let's face it, it's racist. And if it's not racist, it's at least bigoted. Actually, my internal conflict with my own thesis has to do with these two terms. People who work on political linguistics are now debating these terms after the last election. You see, the history of racism, particularly like here in Germany and the United States, were devastating for both countries. The American Civil War and World War II are the bloodiest conflicts in human history. And of course, these wars were not primarily about liberating black slaves or saving Jews from the Holocaust. But in the aftermath of those wars, the take-home lesson was that these people should be treated equally, and we need to think about the role of bias against certain kinds of people. It took over 100 years after the Civil War for a black man to be president. The United States got there after an intense internal discussion about discrimination and civil rights. And about, at the end of the day, appropriate cultural representation and public conduct. Of course, the last election really put in perspective how far the US really went in terms of social progress. But for today's talk, I want to talk about blackface, the painting black of a usually white person's face. You might not know the image on the left, but it's the most famous example of blackface. It's Al Jolson in the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer. It was the first feature-length film that had synchronized sound, meaning you can now hear what the actor says instead of having text-ompli-cards like you did in the silent film era. Actually, they decided to keep title cards for the narrative and use synchronized sound for the songs, making this also the first musical film. At the time, it was one of the most technically difficult movies to screen. When people want to talk about the relationship between technological evolution and its relationship to social progress, you can't do much better than The Jazz Singer, as an example. The main character himself goes through a social transformation of sorts, via a placard when we're told that the protagonist's name was Jackie Rabinovitz, the son of a Jewish canter, the person who leads the Jewish congregation in prayer. After a conflict with his father for performing jazz music in a beer garden, Jackie Rabinovitz changes his name to Jack Robin, and starts a successful career as a jazz singer. So it's a Jewish person who integrates into American society, but misrepresents himself as a black person on stage. This is the first major American talking film. Note, this is 1927. Over the course of the 20th century, the roles of Jews in Europe and American society becomes a huge source of anxiety, contention, and point of distinction. American racism dealt with the legacy of slavery and the forced immigration of people from Africa and the Caribbean. European racism, particularly after World War II, has to deal with the self-identifying and no-choice ethnic community, the Jews, who have been in Europe for hundreds of years. Just to put this in perspective, Jews were in Europe before the Hungarians were in Hungary. There were Jews in Croatia before there were Croatians. This, of course, has to do with Christianity's relationship to Judaism, the recognition that there is both a continuity and break with the teachings of Judaism, particularly when it came to the question of ethnic determinism, i.e., you're born Jewish, but you're baptized and then confirmed into Christianity. On a cultural level, it took the devastating experience of the Holocaust to make Jewish identity normal, even as the religious and ethnic components became divorced, or at least uneasy. And here, I put Witte Allen as an example of a highly conscious, self-preferential, and intelligent Jewish cultural expression that is non-religious but still very Jewish. Racism is, in a sense, an act of hostility against people of different races. But bigotry is closed-mindedness. It's prejudice towards someone. It's something that's kind of under the radar. It's really something like that Jewish comedians like Witte Allen, but also David Letterman, Mel Brooks, really paved the way for cultural understandings of Jewish difference. And I really like the Billy Crystal quote, I'm not a Jew, I'm Jewish-ish. The Muslim example is a little trickier to untangle because it's playing itself out now. On the one hand, if we follow Huntington's clash of civilizations, the Muslims have always been at war with Christians and Jews. Since it came after both religions, the purpose of Muhammad's message is the ultimate annihilation of Judaism and Christianity. Whatever Western majority we have after World War II, it's just a relatively peaceful bubble in a massive, boiling cauldron of conflict. The Cold War is just a blip, a little misunderstanding in the history of human political thought. And of course, Huntington's intellectual buddy Francis Fukuyama around the same time also declared the end of history where neoliberal capitalism has forever defeated communism and socialism. In this vision of the world, there are absolute winners and losers, that there is an end game. I disagree. And I think people need to look at racism against Arabs and bigotry against Muslims as a development of modern attitudes towards other people who are obviously different with the legacy of black Americans and European Jews playing itself out in the discussion of Muslims. There is a race and religion component, one you can't transcend, I can't stop being Arab, but on the other, you're declared religion in a modern constitutional democracy. You have the right to worship any way you see fit. Here, I want to point to the work of Aziz Ansari who recently is taking the lead on how appropriate representation of Muslim Americans should take place. And he does kind of a moderate approach. I'm gonna go a step further than Aziz and say that the way Arabs and Muslims have been represented in film, in TV shows, and in video games will one day in the future be seen in the same way that we see blackface today or when we see anti-Semitic cartoons. We're just going to have this kind of revulsion. Actually, if that is not the case, then the clash between Muslims in the West would still be ongoing and that there is no final showdown, no winners or losers, a state of perpetual war. As I told you, I'm internally conflicted about this. It's a world where post-modern parody like Team America, World Police actually played itself out in reality and did not work. Anyway, now let's get to the video games. With this kind of audience, I'm actually kind of glad that I don't have to do too much explaining about what a first-person shooter is. When I was a teen growing up in the 90s, these were called first-person shoot-em-ups, so it was even more explicit. The basic idea is that you experience a game from the point of view of the main character in an immersive, three-dimensional environment represented two-dimensionally. This is kind of like the technical holy grail of gaming for many years in the same way that sound was for silent film, to make the game as realistic or immersive as possible. And it's basically the framework that was adopted for virtual reality and probably future forms of media consumption. First-person shooters are surprisingly old. Probably the first was Maze War. This is the white strip to the right, and it's 1973. It was on a Xerox machine and the screen was barely legible, so this is actually a printout of a screenshot. And you can already see the main characteristics of how 3D planes are represented using 2D lines to show perspective. The object of the game was to go through the maze to find the eyeball, your enemy, as it were, and if you find him facing to the side, you can shoot and kill him, but if the eyeball is facing you, then you're dead, so that's like a kill shot. You're dead here. Top-center is a spasm, or a space flight simulator. It was in 1974 in the University of Illinois, and it was very much influenced by Star Trek. That's the one in this top-center. Unlike Maze War, you are not restricted by the rules of gravity or moving on a single plane because you are floating in space. And left of that, we have the flight simulator Air Fight, and the U.S. military starts using the technology developed in Spasm to simulate flying almost immediately after it was developed to create a fighter jet flight simulator. The bottom one, we have the Bradley trainer from the point of view of a tank which was made by Atari under a special contract with the U.S. Army in 1981. So the military application of what is conceivably a game came early in the life of first-person shooters. And I want to dwell a little bit about the following question. What is it about full immersion and heightened depictions of reality that lend itself to militarization? Or even more generally, to violence? Because the first real killer app of the first-person shooter world was incredibly violent. This was something I played back in the day, and I'm sure some of you did too. Wolfenstein 3D, which started off as shareware and got a little more cleaned up when it became public. The basic story of Wolfenstein 3D is that you played the role of William B.J. Blakowicz, an American spy of Polish descent who was trapped in a Nazi prison. Your first mission is to get out of the prison in Castle Wolfenstein, depicted 3D point of view like the standard format we now have. And basically, you get to shoot Nazis as much as you want. In the second episode, you thwart a secret Nazi project where they're making mutant soldiers. Nazi iconography is just, like, everywhere and over the top. And in the final episode, entitled Die, Führer, Die, you get to fight Adolf Hitler directly in a bunker under the rock stag. Okay, this is what it looks like when mutant Hitler dies. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert. There. I'm sure a lot of you already know this Godwin's Law. It's the rule in a flame war where one side compares the other side to Hitler, the debate is effectively over. Hitler in this worldview is the worst possible most evil representation of another human being that is theoretically possible. How bad the person you are talking to on the internet, they're never really as bad as Hitler. Wilfenstein is kind of operating on Godwin's Law to legitimize its violence. It's okay to kill Nazis. And the final big boss level, you get to kill Hitler. So it all builds up for a really good cause. But remember, the lab thing where they were making mutant soldiers? After the immense success of Wilfenstein, the creators ID Software make their second series Doom where you play an unnamed space marine who kills space demons. I feel like the creative team must have realized that the carnage of Wilfenstein was still against humans, right? Like even fictional or historical Nazis are people too, maybe? So there's a kind of limit to the kind of carnage you can have. And the Doom series introduced networking multiplayer action. So now you and your buddies can kill space demons together or you can kill each other or strangers on the internet which shouldn't have to be a lot of fun. What's important for the talk is that Wilfenstein and Doom represent a break in first person shooters where games grounded on reality and fantasy start using technology in different ways. Obviously this has to do with how creatives are managing the appropriate representation of violence in these games. If you want to maximize gore it seems that like fantasy is the way to go and a particular kind of fantasy that involves non-human like space demons, aliens, whatever. In public discourse, when they talk about violence in connection to video games they're usually talking about this overall genre of games and not say Mario Kart. The closer it comes to reality, the more controversy it causes the more it gives us this kind of uneasy feeling. Doom is also one of the first games to be modded. Modded means modified where code of the game is mess with to change gameplay, characters, patterns, whatever. Extensive modding is another feature of this genre that doesn't exist in say role-playing games or puzzle games and one of guests who an early modder of Doom was the United States Marine Corps. In 1996 the commandant of the U.S. Marines issued a directive and I'm quoting here from Wikipedia to develop the use of wargames for improving military thinking and decision-making exercises. So they modded a version of Doom to develop a simulation where you're part of a four-member Marine fire team. The game focused on mutual support, protection of the automatic rifleman, proper sequencing of an attack, ammunition discipline and succession of command. These are like sort of basic Marine things that they need to develop. And the default like mission was the destruction of an enemy bunker again reviving the Hitler bunker scene. Although they also use other scenarios such as hostage rescue in a foreign embassy. And this apparently started as an internal thing but they gave away the mod for free as a kind of recruitment tool and for troubleshooting. This is something we'll discuss later. After Doom we're going straight to Halo. We're skipping Unreal, Quake and Half-Life. If you know anything about gaming let me tell you I just insulted a whole bunch of people. Actually, more or less I'm going to bookmark Halo's cultural content for later, kind of my conclusion. And just say for a moment that Halo is a big surprise or an outlier for many trends in the genre. For instance, it made Microsoft a major player in the video game world. You know, the Microsoft that makes Microsoft Office. Yeah, that might be it. Another thing, there's almost zero gore. The emphasis in Halo was gameplay mechanics and multi-user networking. It was smooth and somehow that smoothness made killing your friends even more fun. The single-user game was actually pretty good as well. It had a space opera scale and feel to it and it has and still commands a massive fan base and is one of the most successful products ever for Microsoft. For many people this was the gateway drug for other video games. But if we go back to the split, let's go back to the reality games. Those that were based on historical events and here the call of duty line becomes the dominant line but it was actually a rip-off of a series called Medal of Honor that was developed by the director Steven Spielberg. And like Wolfenstein 3D, all these games use World War II as a backdrop. Call of Duty had both European and Asia-Pacific theaters of the war. These were very much adult games in terms of storylines, look and feel. If you know older men who play first-person shoot-em-ups then they usually play these sort of games and they're very much associated with your grandpa's first-person shooter. Details like the correct kind of pistol or rifle were meticulously represented, so were historical battles. The overall theme of these games is patriotism. The stories in these games are very much an homage to the greatest generation. And of course you only get to play as a soldier from one of the allies, usually for the US military, but you also in later games can be British, French, Polish, even Canadian. And you get to play Russian even though that felt a little bit transgressive, but you never got to play a German soldier or a Japanese soldier because obviously these are the enemies. And not so ironically, this series is popular in Japan and I'm really curious what gamers are thinking when you're effectively shooting against the digital representation of your grandparents. It's like uneasy. And these games were comparably only moderately successful to their next iteration called Duty Modern Warfare. These games follow the realism-patriotism formula, except instead of doing World War II, they did it for current conflicts. I'm going to be diplomatic right now and say that the Middle East is featured prominently in these games. But I also want to say that over 250 million copies of this series has been sold. You heard right, that's a quarter billion. In fact, they're in that most people in the developing world use pirated games, so these numbers aren't even included and you can play up to four people simultaneously using one copy. The genre itself lends itself to multi-user play. It might be a conservative estimate that in a world of seven billion, like half a billion to a billion people have probably played Call of Duty. There are other games that show current conflicts like Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six, Battlefield, but in terms of influence and social impact, very little in terms of media compares anymore to Call of Duty. Even Hollywood, because unlike a Hollywood movie, you can't be passive while playing a first-person shooter, not when you're immersed in the middle of a firefight in Iraq using virtual replications of actual weapons you could conceivably using in real life, or play Capture the Flag in the streets of Paris and call in aerial support. We're kind of a long way in the cultural conflict spectrum from mutant Nazis or even a Jewish-American musician wearing blackface. Now you can be in a situation forced by the game itself to shoot innocent civilians in a Russian airport. This actually got the game banned in Russia and caused a whole lot of controversy. But blowing the shit up in a small Iraqi town, that gets zero outrage. That's just par for the course. That is effectively the game. And you know what? As an Arab guy, I'm really divided because I really like playing these games. But the saving grace was that after Modern Warfare 2, you can play an Arab soldier fighting against the Americans. And I hope this doesn't get me on a no-flight list now. I spent three years in graduate school where all I wanted to do was kind of play the conflict I was studying. It simulated those things I knew very little about, like fire team formations, why certain gun equipment configurations work, and really why American soldiers use so much tech in the battlefield. It's because it's a really unfair advantage. I realize I'm not the only one who caught on with this line of thinking. In the field, a big criticism of al-Qaeda in Iraq was their inability to change the realities in the battlefield. They would rather blow up an American tank to send a message than take that tank and use the comms to realize where the Americans were headed next. You see, the technology itself doesn't care who's using it. And I also realize that the other side has its advantages as well. Some are defending their land and others took crazy risks to get to the fight. Sometimes a golden AK-47 and a suicide vest is all you need to win a game. You know, screw night vision or a fleet of AC-130s at your command. War in this context is a highly psychological game. All you really need is the right tool for the right objective. But what does winning mean when you're able to play again and again? The weapon you choose says so much about your personality. You're willing to deal with the inaccuracy of an AK for the satisfying thumping recoil when you actually make a hit. You feel the propulsion of the bullet in your hand and those vibrating controllers as it penetrates the target. You can be a virtual representation of the kind of warrior you want to be. This is also a war of stereotypes, no doubt, filled with mostly angry young men around the world, playing out the clash of civilization scenario and replicated in tabloids and cable news of an intolerant Middle East with power-mad dictators and zealot radicals. Yeah, that's bin Laden holding two saws. The first player, shoot him up with online multiplayer is not just about being violent, it's about picking sides. There are modes when it's a free-for-all or lone wolf, but they are nowhere as popular as the team-centric games. And on a meta level, the fighting sides know this. This is more than a mod. This is the US Army's main virtual training and propaganda environment, a game called America's Army. And as you'd expect from the Army branch, it's actually kind of on the dorky side, this is the screen for planning a battle, meticulous detail like Army usually does. And of the radical Islamic organizations, the one that had the most developed video game infrastructure as it were was Hezbollah. The theme of the Special Forces series is to protect Muslim lands from Israeli invasion. So along with Hamas, the only organization with an official video game. But note that Hezbollah also makes like slingshots, so you know, about the same kind of level. I need to apologize, I could not find a pick of little American kids playing America's Army. I'm sure it's because parental controls are really severe in the United States and kids never get to play with these sorts of games. Hezbollah is also changing who perceives the enemy, who perceives as the enemy, as the battlefield is changing in the video games. Here, for instance, is a mod under development that has Hezbollah fighting Daesh or ISIS in Iraq or Syria. And even the name here is trying to be insulting by saying Daesh invention, it's implying that ISIS is not a real thing. It's a bid'ah in Islamic kind of theology. The mod, however, that first got my attention was called the call to jihad, the Dawah of jihad, which is a play on call of duty. And instead of modern warfare, it's called torturing unbelievers. I saw Salafi, yeah. I saw Salafi kids in Saudi play this video game in the background when I was doing my field work. And what was really interesting, like just in the corner of my eye, because I really couldn't be paying attention to them, was how much attention was paid to changing the narrative, but all the pieces of the game were already there. And I really wanted to bring one of these games here, but hacking consoles is actually very technically difficult. And when I got to the point where I could buy a hacked Xbox that could run the game, I was told that the game server is in Syria, and it's been down for a month. So if I bought it, I have to wait until it's online. And it's actually, I also talked to contacts in the intelligence community about it, and they all advised me to stay away because there's currently an investigation about who set up the game servers because it was possibly used by the Tassana brothers before the Boston Marathon bombing. And from the reactions I got and the people I talked to, my personal read on the situation is that someone's making a lot of money investigating something that's probably irrelevant. I'm going to make a racial generality in the sense that I have no empirical data, but I'm going to say what will sound largely true. The relationship between violence and masculinity is very much racially defined within the context of U.S. and Western culture, and effectively the creators of these games. And let me abstract a little bit about representation of race and violence. For instance, like when a Black or Latino man commits violence, it's for what I term as hedonistic goals. They want to be the bigger drug dealer, bigger pimp, the bigger gangster. The point is that they commit a violent act in order to enjoy the spoils of that violence hedonistically within the political network or system of the United States. When Muslim men commit violence, it's political violence. Muslim men commit violent acts of terrorism for world domination, the rise of the caliphate, to smite kafar and unbelievers. On the other hand, they commit violence for all sorts of reasons. From being serial killers, to advancing the corporate ladder, to getting life insurance from their dead spouse. When violence seems over the top, they're always labeled as insane. So like the Columbine shootings or James Holmes in the Dark Knight Aurora shootings. But this is also a kind of violence which is allowed when white men are saving the world. For instance, soldiers in Iraq or Jack Bauer in the streets of Washington, D.C. Here we have a kind of a messiah complex. When white men are committing violence, they are putting their lives on the line. And furthermore, women and children are objects to be saved. It's righteous violence. In a sense, it extends all the way back to the American War of Independence or perhaps even Christianity when it was interpreted in Europe in the Middle Ages. Within this matrix, we need to think about how long-term persistent efforts affects perception. The interface between an operator and the drone is now a simulacrum of a video game and not vice versa. Drone operators were recruited from the gamer community and it was revealed by Michael Haas and other former drone pilots. Bow Duarte, the Navy's top UAV commander, publicly expressed that a big part of the problem with civilian casualties and drone attacks isn't necessarily pilot error. It's just that the pilots were used to shooting targets that look and walk a certain way due to video games. He compared it to canine units and military dogs like attacking someone by mistake. So every Arab or Muslim-looking male now looks like a threat. I think the concept of military-aged male as being a valid target is rife with sexism and bias towards a particular appearance. You can now shoot a drone missile through a moving car window. A target like literally that big. But that doesn't make me feel safe. Besides the knee-jerk accidental killings, I think it's interesting to note that the first American citizen to be killed in the official limelight without trial since the American Civil War was Enwar al-Awlaki, along with his teenage son in a separate attack in Yemen. Obama was president and directly authorized the order. Now this guy lives on in YouTube as the primary ideological Imam of the Islamic State. You may not be able to respawn in this game, but the internet never forgets. Even Halo, the space opera fantasy happens hundreds of years in the future. The enemy are depicted as theocratic religious zealous, known as the Covenant, who are willing to risk their lives for what they believe in. The humans are the hyper-rational beings and their defenders are cybernetic beings. It's literally tech versus religion. We today live in democracies where free speech is largely protected, except in Germany where anti-Semitic speech is prohibited for obvious reasons. Society self-regulates on a cultural dimension when it realizes in a large enough scale how devastating racism and bias can be. As someone who enjoyed these games, a solution I can think of is that there's no reason why these settings of these games can't be anywhere. Imagine in a multiplayer game, the map you play by default is a virtual representation of your current location. When you play someone else, you take turns attacking each other in their own neighborhoods. There's already stuff in this direction, but if you keep thinking of the Middle East as a war zone, it will remain a war zone. If you keep thinking of Arabs as terrorists, well, I think the outcome is obvious. One model for ethical gameplay I've encountered is the small indie game, This War of Mine, which was based on the 1994-96 siege of Sarajevo. Here you play a group of squatters who are basically fighting to survive in the midst of a war zone. Most of the time, you're figuring out logistics like firewood, gas, food. I think if you want to make realistic video games, you might as well go all the way to show the suffering. Why not show war from the point of view of victims? I think these games would be really exciting as someone who's been in the middle of an bombing campaign. Nothing gets your adrenaline going, but I hope you guys never have to experience this in real life, and thank you very much.