The Representation of Inferior East and Superior West in Digital Games: Case Study of Call of Duty

After the September 11th incident, a widespread wave of media outlets in the world created to misrepresent the East and Muslims. Meanwhile, digital games were among the media that by entering in a new era of representation, introduced the East as other to the audiences around the world. The main issue of the current research is that how the East as a subject is represented in the games. Hence, we analyzed the most important representational games of the East which were based on a real narrative of the wars happened in the past two decades in the Middle East to portray the way of East representation. Considering the research issue, this study seeks to answer the question that what features of the East have been targeted in the most important American games which representing the East?For this purpose, the selected games were played continuously for 120 hours, while the video was captured during the playing. Using the Qualitative Content Analysis method (sequence, character, music, dialogue, etc. analysis), three units of Call of Duty series entitled "Modern Warfare", "Modern Warfare 2" and "Modern Warfare 3" were analyzed and the most important methods of representing the East with its features were extracted. We found that the game developers have used different ways to represent the East, particularly the Islamic countries as a negative subject. These are: 1.Political-military misrepresentations, 2.Cultural misrepresentations, 3.Religious misrepresentations (Islamophobia), 4.Race misrepresentations, 5.Cultural dominance over the East, and 6. Political-military dominance over the East.