Jesus vs. Mohammed? Video Game Upsets Islamic Group [Internet game 'FAITH FIGHTER']

CAIRO — An influential Islamic group branded an online video game depicting religious figures fighting each other as offensive to Muslims and Christians and successfully demanded Tuesday that it be taken offline.

In the game "Faith Fighter," caricatures of Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, God and the Hindu god Ganesh fight each other against a backdrop of burning buildings.

God attacks with bolts of lighting and pillars of fire while the turbaned Muhammad can summon a burning black meteorite.

The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents most Muslim nations, said it should be removed from the Internet.

"The computer game was incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians. ... The game would serve no other purpose than to incite intolerance," an OIC statement said.

Game designer Molleindustria told the Associated Press the game, which had been around for more than a year and played millions of times, was misunderstood, but had been removed.

"This was meant to be a game against intolerance and against the one-way Islamophobic satire of the Danish Muhammad cartoons," Molleindustria said in an e-mail message. "So if a respectable organization didn't understand the irony and the message, we failed."

When a Danish newspaper in 2005 printed 12 cartoons showing negative portrayals of Muhammad, Muslims around the world were enraged.

Deadly protests erupted from Morocco to Indonesia, with rioters torching Danish and other Western diplomatic missions. Some Muslim countries boycotted Danish products.

The style of the game, with characters jumping, kicking and knocking each other out, mimics the martial-arts arcade games popular in the 1980s and 1990s.

Though the game had been around for a while, the OIC was responding to an article in the online British publication Metro UK, which stated the

In the game "Faith Fighter," caricatures of Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, God and the Hindu god Ganesh fight each other against a backdrop of burning buildings. God attacks with bolts of lighting and pillars of fire while the turbaned Muhammad can summon a burning black meteorite....

....Game designer Molleindustria told the Associated Press the game, which had been around for more than a year and played millions of times, was misunderstood, but had been removed....Molleindustria's Web site describes the company as "an Italian team of artists, designers and programmers that aims at starting a serious discussion about social and political implications of video games." Other games designed by Molleindustria include Operation: Pedopriest, Queer Power and Oiligarchy, satirizing the Catholic Church, sexual orientation and the oil industry.

From Molleindustria's website:

Today after an official statement by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) we decided to remove the game Faith Fighter from our site.
Faith Fighter was meant to be a game against intolerance that used over the top irony and a cartoonish style to express the instrumental use of religions.
Faith Fighter depicted in a mildly politically incorrect way all the major religions as a response to the one-way islamophobic satire of the Danish Mohammad cartoons.
If a established organization didn't understand the irony and the message of the game and is claiming it is inciting intolerance, we simply failed.
The game has been released more than a year ago, it got international news coverage, it has been played by millions of players on the Internet and it has been exhibited in several artistic venues around the world. Reviews have been generally positive and we only received two letters of complaints by two catholic players.
We suspect that people at OIC never played the game and only referred to the article on Metro UK that successfully manufactured this controversy.
This has happened before with games as Super Columbine Massacre RPG, Virtual Jihadi and our Operation: Pedopriest, works that attracted heavy criticism based on false assumptions spread by mass media.
This phenomenon is related to the still marginal role of the medium: commentators feel authorized to judge a game without playing it and just conforming to the common narrative depicting video game as violence generators (a narrative we tried to make fun of promoting Faith Fighter as a cathartic tool for religious hate).
We knew that this was a risky operation and we acknowledge our failure as communicators.
Taking down the game from this website is a symbolic act: copies and documentation of Faith Fighter can be found all over the Internet.
Hopefully this will help people to make their judgments by examining the actual work and not the sensationalist accounts spread by mass media.

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