For years, Muslim people have been suffering from various grievances due to Islamophobia around the world. There are some criticisms of the spread of Islamophobia in many different sectors. Computer games can sometimes be the target of similar criticism. Speeches, images, tasks in the games received criticism from time to time.
The Call of Duty series, which was first released in 2003 and is among the computer games that adorned the childhood of many people, has also been criticized for the problem in question since the day it was released. Activision-Blizzard apologized to Muslim users for a Quran scene in Call of Duty: Vanguard, which was published last week and is about World War II.
“Including by mistake”
Activision, one of the well-established names in the video game industry, announced Vanguard, the new game of Call of Duty, in the past months. The highly anticipated game was officially released last week. With the release of the game, a controversy also occurred. It was determined that pages from the Qur’an appeared on the Stalingrad map in the Zombie mode of the game, which excited many users, scattered on the floor and some of them covered with blood.
Activision-Blizzard apologized to Muslims for the scenes that attracted the attention and reaction of Muslim users. In a statement published on Call of Duty Middle East social media accounts, he stated that the images were included in the game by mistake and said, “Call of Duty is made for everyone. There was content insensitive to the Muslim community that was mistakenly included last week and was removed from the game as soon as it was discovered. It shouldn’t look like in the game. We deeply apologize. We are taking urgent steps internally to address the situation so that such incidents do not occur in the future.” Then, blank pages were included instead of the Koran pages in the game.