Recent content by Saladin Ahmed

Don't be preposterous. A video game w/a frog protagonist would never sell. Nor would anyone thirty years later remember it...

Thanks for the (mostly) supportive comments, folks. Replying as I gear up for Thanksgiving madness with the wife's family, so please forgive this brief/consolidated response. A few folks complained that this is basically a list of 'wouldn't this be sweet' games. Well...yeah, guilty as...

Fresh Frontiers Designers tired of churning out the same old space marines and fantasy adventurers can draw fresh inspiration from the pages of history - and literature. Read Full Article

Well, folks, this really is the last post I'll be able to make for a while -- need to work on the novel and take the kiddies out this weekend. So I'll try to address some broad arguments that people are making. A lot of this thread is not really about games. People are asking me to weigh in...

Thanks again for all the responses, folks -- hell, even the negative ones. I'll be immersed in novel revisions and taking care of my kids the next few days, so I may not be able to read/respond as swiftly as I've done thus far, and it's seeming like a lot of arguments are happening over and...

Why do you assume that these hings are true of ALL Muslims, or even of a significant portion? I could post a link to the crappy Left Behind games and go 'Hey, these were made in America! Clearly, these reflect the way Americans in general feel!' -- but that would be dumb.

A) Sooo because there are dictators (half of them American-supported) in the Middle East, random cabbies and regular people -- some of whom came here to flee said dictators, some of whom were born here -- should expect to get knifed and have their houses of worship bombed? Nice logic! B)...

1) I was working from memory, mostly recalling the Indonesia stuff and the 'nukes for sale' Pakistani guy in the Splinter Cell games. So in that case, yeah, the case may be a bit overstated. Good point and my bad. 2) The fact that Desert Strike is a take on the Gulf War proves my point...

Actually, the original game is set in a highly mythologized "Persia" that's not really historical one way or another -- but there's an evil vizier named Jaffar, a sultan, turbans, scimitars, and the cover had a sheikh-looking guy on it. These are all Islamic influences, not ancient Persian.

Sigh... Just out of curiosity do all the folks saying things like this have ANY notions of the actual history of interfaith interactions in Islamic societies, or are you just kind of regurgitating stuff you've heard? And, also out of curiosity where are folks getting the 'Well, most...

Yeah it's awesome to make this stuff up! In fact *I* actually stabbed a Muslim cabbie in New York (http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/muslim-question-leads-cabbie-stabbing-hate-crime-charge/story?id=11480081), and set off a pipe bomb at a Florida mosque...

As I said in the OP, in the very first PoP game, the hero's actually supposed to be from a foreign (to Persia) land. If one had a color monitor he had blond hair. Later PoP games are different. And again in Aladdin, yes everyone's muslim/arab, but it's interesting that Jafar is brown with a...

So if all Muslims in video games aren't bad, if they're not all the same, surely you must have lots of positive counter-examples to weigh against the dozen or so games w/ evil terrorists?

Um...where exactly did I claim that Islamic history is free of these things? Muslims are human beings. Of course they've done all of the same villainous things -- and all the same heroic things - that human beings have done throughout history. What does this have to do with the article...

A) I realize this may be a shock to you, but lots of people want to see a greater variety of settings/heroes in games. It's not just about wanting to see one's self -- variety is a good thing in games, period. And -- though again this may shock you -- not every person -- not even every white...