Michael Medina's final

Videogames have grown in popularity since the crash of 1983 and have become a global form of entertainment for the masses. As the use of the internet grows worldwide the amount of gamers in the world will grow with it. Has the world of gaming had a major impact on the Arab spring? Given that the population of the middle-east is very young do they fall into the demographic? The rapid transfer of ideas and universal appeal of movies and music suggests that games should be right at home in the Arab world. It is important that games play a role in this revolution. The three countries that would benefit the most are Egypt, Syria, and Libya. They can help show the citizens of these countries how the rest of the world is, what we think of their countries, and connect the young people involved in the Arab spring with other hopeful young people around the world.

The Arab Spring is a revolution that began in 2011 in the Arab world. The citizens of various countries there are subjected to rule by various dictatorships or religious leaders who try to control everything. They employ artificial inflation and suppress the citizen’s ability to speak out against them. The people are fed up with their leaders and have started to protest openly. The Arab Spring began in Egypt and Tunisia and quickly spread to other nations. The advent of the internet and modern smartphones has given the populace the chance to show each other what is happening in their back yards. In Libya the uprising against Muammar Gaddafis regime grew from a protest to a violent civil war.( Barker, Anne (24 February 2011). "Time Running Out for Cornered Gaddafi". ABC News. Retrieved 12 September 2011.) The leaders of the Libyan government kept announcing ceasefires that they never upheld. They tried to blame the attacks on the rebels and accuse them of violating the peace they are trying to achieve. ("Gadhafi Blasts 'Crusader' Aggression After Strikes". MSNBC. 19 March 2011. Retrieved 14 August 2011.)

The witnesses to these crimes used videos taken from cellphones and word of mouth to help spread the message aobut the evils of their respective regimes. Everyone wanted to overthrow Gaddafi and it didn’t take long for him and others like him to willingly step down. The United Nations put a hold on all of Gadaffi’s accounts and prevented him from leaving the country. He was later found and executed by his citizens. ( ABC NEWS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGm492qVEzA ) The videos that were broadcast on the news were brutal but confusing. There were a lot of confusing stories coming out of Libya. The details surrounding his death aren’t completely concrete but the people of Libya were happy that he and his sons were killed. The word spread like wildfire thanks to youtube videos of his death appearing as it happened as AK-47s go off in the background in celebration.

Similar events happened in Egypt where the protests that began in 2011 caused Ahmed Shafik to resign. When he stepped down the military took over as a temporary government. The country went through multiple false elections and is currently holding elections to decide who their leader should be. The conflict that occurs in the Arab world is caused by the majority religion followed there.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim-majority_countries) Islam does not conform to any laws other than itself. A western style democracy with Islam at the helm is impossible in the middle-east due to the conflict with Islam. Islam doesn’t just represent ideas about faith, it is also meant to govern the people with. It would be like having two conflicting constitutions that both claim to have absolute power. This is the issue that allows for religious dictatorships to appear at every opportunity. When the people get a chance to vote democratically for a new leader they always select based on the majority religion in the region, this usually leads to oppression of the other half of society and the unrest causes the leader to have to be replaced. Egypt has gone through this before. Their newly elected president gave himself unlimited power to protect the nation without the need for judicial review of his acts.     

Syria has been in an extremely terrible situation since the Arab spring began. It’s a conflict that has many acting sides and not enough people really get what’s happening there. There has been a war going on in Syria since March 2011. The Syrian conflict intensified when Syrian soldiers were dispatched to take down all of the protesters in the country. The death toll has been rising at an alarming rate. Over 100,000 people were killed as of June 2013. (The death toll surpassed 100,000 in June 2013 Wikipedia: Syrian conflict) The circumstances surrounding those deaths are not concrete. The issue with these reports is that the military’s reports don’t always match up with the rebel’s reports. Rebels will blame the military for deaths that may not have been caused by the soldiers. There are reports of other outside influences like Al-Qaeda getting involved with their cause. It’s hard to get reliable news from Syria during the conflict.

Those kinds of events don’t get the fair coverage they deserve in the western world. The mainstream news sites give us condensed views on the events of the Arab spring. Sometimes they leave out the struggles that the local populace goes through or went through prior to the violence. Activists in the Arab Spring need to show that they are not a danger to the western world as some media outlets would have us think. Just as there are political movies and songs, there should be political games as well. The current average age in the Arab world is about 25 years old. That fits very neatly into the gamer demographic. Many gamers don’t pay attention to the news and get false ideas about what the middle-east is like. Many famous games involve the mass killing of faceless “terrorist” enemies. This has desensitized many gamers to the lives of the real people that live there.

Activists need to make their message more clear to us while helping their own cause as well. They could profit by creating games that highlight major points in their countries revolutions. A game that has you see the injustice through the eyes of an average citizen would really help connect the users with the people we so blindly ignore and disregard. A game that takes place in Libya during the opening months in February 2011 leading to Gadaffis death in October 2011 would really highlight the true nature of his regime. Showing his chemical attacks in a first person perspective from the point of view of an average person with no powers and no chance of survival would be a brutal way of showing us what truly happened. A game where you need to fight to survive and yet will have no chance of making it out would be a challenge some people would really appreciate.

There is room for a more politically charged genre of gaming out there, interactive experiences need to evolve past just ones for pure enjoyment. We need more games that focus on current events that don’t involve America or another major power liberating or destroying an enemy nation. With the advent of indie games and the cheap barrier of entry(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine) there is no excuse for the lack of popular content focusing on these historic events. One day soon we will have online games that unite our lesser understood brothers and sisters and we will be able to see them as the people they really are. On the outside they may be different, and their ideologies might be different as well, but on the inside they want to live their lives as freely as we do. They have the chance to change their futures and if they see that we support them on a citizen to citizen level. When we remove the governments from the equation and connect to people on a more personal level we will be able to understand them more. That is something that we should strive to achieve.