Hawzah News Agency - I’m not saying we’re going to solve racism and Islamophobia with a game – but we can help normalise what it really means to be a Muslim.

Many of us can remember feeling left out at school, seeing classmates having a conversation we’re not involved in. We listen from the side-lines, scared to say anything in case the bullies suddenly turn.

Many Muslims, like me, carry that feeling every single minute of every single day, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We self-censor and self-police what we say – and how we say it – because of our beliefs, because a seat at the table often feels like it’s enough. We don’t want to stir up a fuss by demanding a voice as well.

It was only after I converted to Islam fifteen years ago that I really started to notice how limited representations of Muslims were across all media. Nearly all the Muslims depicted in TV shows and movies in this time seem to have been cast by those who are either ignorant of or hostile towards the normative practices of almost two billion people. The archetypes have been angry and barbaric if male or submissive and oppressed if female.

This isn’t helped by the fact that there are so few Muslims involved in casting, and the few that are seem to be as influenced by the stereotypes as anyone else. And in today’s video games – an enormous industry with some two billion consumers – it seems like the only Muslims you see conform, perhaps in an even more reductionist manner to the archetypes found on TV or in movies.

It’s been unnerving, too, to read articles, listen to podcasts and watch talks by industry voices talk about such games, while being totally divorced from the experience of Muslims. Anyone who is overtly Muslim is, in effect, excluded from these cultural spaces; their religion is not considered, nor mentioned as a positive influence, if mentioned at all.