A Saudi Prince is using video games to fuel an intellectual renaissance in the Middle East

posted on: May 2, 2015

Terrorist, cartoon stereotype, evil oppressive dictator.

It’s through those lenses — those unfair representations of a complex, massive grouping of a wide variety of people and what they believe in — that much of the non-Arab world sees the population of the Middle East.

And it was this realization, this moment of clarity about how the world might view his culture, that led Prince Fahad Al Saud to try and play a part in disrupting that singular, often incorrect trope.

“I asked myself a whole bunch of perplexing, potentially paranoid questions,” Fahad said in his keynote at the Games For Change Festival in New York last week. “Was this intentional? Why was I misrepresented like this so often? Is someone doing this on purpose, generally presenting me as some super-size, bearded, brown-skinned terrorist? I didn’t know. I still don’t know. All I knew at that point of realization was that I had to play my part in disrupting this narrative, in contributing with positivity, to this global story.”

And his tools for sparking what he calls an intellectual, artistic renaissance are video games about camel racing, wordplay and soon, the revolutionary uprising of Saudi girls against an oppressive male regime.

Source: www.polygon.com