Valorant: Arabic in a World That Doesn’t Exist

Encountering pervasive stereotypes in popular games

If you’re like me, you might be diligently working at home. One screen shows your productivity, but secretly minimized in the background is a [Drop Enabled] Twitch stream of your favorite streamer playing Valorant. You check every couple hours to see if on the small chance, among the thousands viewing the stream, you’re the lucky person who got a Valorant beta key. 

There is no doubt Valorant is the first person shooter (FPS) from kingdom come. In large part, it’s based off of CS:GO (Counter Strike Global Offensive, a game produced by the publisher, Valve), which, released eight years ago, boasted a recent record high of 1 million concurrent players. CS:GO has staying power, brand loyalty and talent. Yet, some say that Valorant can unseat the FPS king: it rivals in mechanics and enjoyment, map design, and even introduces a new skill/spell function, producing an environment that welcomes players from all skill levels. For me, one of the best parts of Valorant is its fantastical nature, set in a lore that Riot Games has spent over a decade crafting.

As I devoted half my attention to work and half to Dr. Lupo’s stream, there is one aspect of the game that gave me pause: the Arabic writing on the walls in the map called ‘Bind’. Given all the thorough and detailed work done on Valorant, a game that prides itself on level design, this may be seen by most as an insignificant detail. But it’s a dangerous and irksome design choice because it contributes to an already large amount of American media that overtly links the Arabic language, and by extension, the Middle East (or ‘Arabs themselves’), with terrorism. 

Arabic writing in the bottom right of the screenshot — Gamer Journalist

For context, the objective of the game is to eliminate players /set a bomb or, if on the opposing side, eliminate players/ diffuse the planted bomb. Maybe most players won’t stop to smell the flowers and look at the walls, but hundreds of playthroughs later, won’t players be conditioned by the association of Arabic + bomb + terrorism?

It’s well known that Hollywood is one of most egregious offenders of race-based stereotypes, often labelling Russians/Chinese as hackers and Arabs as bombers. CS:GO, for instance, is a game built on top of the western military industrial complex that stigmatizes Arabs as terrorists. In CS:GO, Counter terrorism is literally in the DNA and objective of the game. Hence the choice of a desert setting — an ostensibly Middle Eastern location. The unfortunate popularity of western counterterrorism games being set in the Middle East is no new phenomenon. However, the use of Arabic language in Valorant is a poor design decision, reinforcing an already problematic trend.

Especially considering that the game is supposedly set in an alternate reality, the design choice is racially insensitive and frankly doesn’t make much sense. It bothers me to know that every design choice is intentional, every detail edited and chosen to be included, that someone consciously spent time designing, placing and supervising this detail.

“The big thing for us with maps is we want to make sure that every time we add a new map there’s something new and unique about it — there’s a reason for it to be in the game.” — Trevor Romleski, lead game designer, in an interview with PC Gamer

In fact, this was troubling enough to make me turn off the stream. Valorant is supposed to be a game that has nothing to do with modern day politics and stereotypes. The racially and culturally insensitive use of Arabic language says otherwise. Albeit perhaps unintentionally, it politicizes the game, effectively excluding any person of Middle Eastern origin from ‘belonging’. Why build a game centered in the fictional LoL universe and then associate it with Arabs and Bombs, something Americans (and the world) have wrongly associated with terrorism? Are we in the LoL universe or are we in the Middle East?

CS:GO map, Mirage, snapshot courtesy of games per second

Valorant’s Bind center stage. Compare this with the CS:GO map above. The mantels above the doors reveal Middle Eastern images. Prima Games

I think the larger reasoning for this trend can be couched in Valorant’s dependence on Orientalism for both initial beta maps. Haven and Bind play to a distorted Western imagination of the East. The use of Japanese pagodas of Haven make the setting appear mystic and divine. The presence of a Bazaar in Bind is equally exoticizing, accentuated by the writing on the walls and images of magical lanterns. Indeed, the aesthetic appeal of the East to Western audiences has been documented; and yet, we need to think harder about how to incorporate familiar tropes and themes without succumbing to stereotypic assumptions and cultural reductionism. In reality, we don’t need to incorporate these bad tropes/themes at all.

Japanese-inspired architecture in Haven — Millenium

Games companies leverage the appeal of familiar themes of terrorism, war, Eastern exoticism — which tug at our collective nostalgia and imagination — to cleverly market their products. As a result, we fall victim to the same stereotypes in games that we may fight hard against in our personal or political lives. As consumers of this content, we shouldn’t be complicit in even the smallest details.

Ultimately, game development is an intrinsic conduit for imagination and human creativity. Let’s channel that energy to create exciting, immersive, and innovative games that don’t sacrifice our ideals for enjoyment. @Riot Games has spent years developing a rich and vibrant virtual world. I hope this article can make it even better.