Alright so call me a bleeding heart liberal but a friend and I were talking on Xbox live while playing Call of Duty 4 and the question came up. "Are there any positive Arab video game characters? Or heck any that have names worth remembering?" So off I dashed to the internets to try and dig up some information on Arab/Islamic video game characters. So far I only found a handful and most of them were terrorist/evil characters. Then I stumbled on a RTS designed by Afkar Media, located in Damascus's newly-built free-zone. The game is called "Al-Quraysh" and the basic premise is like "Age of Empires" where you take command of the infant religion of Islam and try to carve out a nitch for your peoples in a hostile world populated by crusading Christians, pagan raiders, and other followers of Islam that have a less correct view of Islam than you. Well I had to admit as far as a game looks it seems decent enough. But the whole premise of the game kind of pissed me off. Here I was looking for information on positive Arab video game characters and games. And I definately wasn't off to a good start.

So finally I found one that seemed pretty damn decent. A game called Silk Road. An online game that is based in a semi-fantasy world where you take the role of an Arab fighting against an evil Chinese Warlord and you try to keep the silk road open. Meanwhile you battle giant wyrms IE "Dune". You end up trying to rescue civilians and they seem to be of both Arab decent and Chinese so evidently I found one game where Arabs are more than evil killing machines.

In fact I just might download the game on my next day off and dive a little deeper into this world. I uninstalled it right away because I was a bit worried when my computer started acting funny, turns out my Virus Scan started running without me realizing it.