By Hossam Fazulla BBC Arabic Image caption, Eslam Gamal plays Assassin’s Creed, where the primary leadcharacter is an Arab with a favorable image A group of young individuals complete on consoles in an air-conditioned video videogame coffeeshop on a hot summertime’s day. A familiar scene in lotsof Arab cities today, as hasactually been the case for the past 2 years. Like lotsof of his peers, this is how Eslam Gamal, a softwareapplication engineer and a video videogame lover, invested lotsof hours of his youth in Cairo, Egypt – a city where bars and bars are doingnothave. For Eslam, enjoyable was “reaching a greater rating in a videogame like Metal Slug or working on a objective in a First Person Shooter (FPS) videogame such as Counter-Strike”. Even so, it troubled Eslam that both videogames represented Arabs, consistingof Egyptians, as terrorists and savages, “but neverever enough to stop playing these videogames”. Like other homeentertainment markets, video videogames have frequently dedicated the all-too-familiar error of perpetuating stereotypes of Arabs. Some embrace an older Orientalist view, in which Arab females are stubbornbelly dancers and males play the flute to beauty a snake or are seen atop a camel. Games such as Arabian Fight, Aladdin and the Metal Slug series are examples of this. While they are traditional game titles, they are gainingback appeal with numerous retro consoles on the market. Other videogames, especially FPS videogames, embrace the post-9/11 lens that solely portrays Arab characters as terrorists. Surging market Times are altering, . As movies and TELEVISION reveals embrace a more international outlook, so are video videogames, with muchbetter representation of Arabs start to be seen in mainstream titles. Altair Ibn-La’Ahad,
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