Khan says Ubisoft did a good job with Assassin's Creed's Altair character. Still, video game portrayals of Muslims aren't all bad.

'If you show people an image of Beirut, they'll be surprised that it's modern!' Farah Khalaf, a Palestinian-Iraqi game developer from New Zealand, said that she often wishes games would depict Middle Eastern cities as they really are, instead of sandy deserts. In fact, Pakistanis speak mostly in English and Urdu. But Arabic isn't spoken in Pakistan, which is where Karachi is located. The above screenshot of Karachi in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, for example, has Arabic written over it. In several video games, images of the Arab and Muslim world are often inaccurate. It's not just the portrayal of Muslims that is problematic. Not all Muslims speak Arabic.' For example, Ismail said, the world's largest Muslim nation is Indonesia, which is not anywhere near the Middle East. 'It's 1.6 billion people across the world with various nationalities, backgrounds, languages. No one's really sitting around thinking what does a Christian character look like.' She gave an example of when she visited Morocco, and she saw women who were fully clothed from head to toe, and she also saw women who wore backless dresses and miniskirts. 'Why can't we be represented by our nationalities? Why can't it be what might a female from Pakistan look like, or from Lebanon, or Tunisia? We are all so diverse. 'Why do we need to be represented by our faith?' she asks. Muslims are not necessarily Arab, and Arabs are not necessarily Muslim. When asked about the appearance of seemingly Muslim characters in fighting games like Zafina from Tekken 6, Ramzan said that her real issue is that a Muslim doesn't look like any one particular person. Usually it's a slightly dark-skinned character shouting Allahu Akbar, carrying an AK-47. 'In games, we will be represented as the 'other' people who are the ones you have to kill. So if you're a woman, you wear a hijab If you're a man, you have a beard or wear your national dress.' She added that Muslims are also often portrayed as aggressive and violent.

'It's usually summed up by the clothes we wear. Romana Ramzan, a game design lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK.

'We are often just reduced to four or five stereotypes,' said Dr. 'There have been some latent animosity that has erupted in the past year leading to untoward criticism and actual violence.' 'The current election has been fueled by certain prejudices,' said Imad Khan, a freelance journalist for the Daily Dot who moderated the panel. The presentation's tone was a sombre one. Ismail spoke last week on a panel at the annual Game Developers Conference about Muslim representation in video games. 'Muslim blood is the cheapest in the world.' The Call of Duty franchise, for example, is rife with Muslim villains - like Khaled Al-Asad in Modern Warfare. The same broad brush, he says, applies to video games too. 'The current political and cultural climate is the reason in media we are the bad guys right now,' said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer, an independent game studio based in the Netherlands. You need only watch a few episodes of 24 or Homeland to see that Muslims, particularly those of Arab descent, are almost always painted as the enemy. The media has been pigeonholing Muslims for years. And it's not just recent world events that have led to an undue level of scrutiny and prejudice.

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