Modern Warfare 2isn’t exactly the most culturally sensitive of games. However, one Pakistani gamer has noticed some real racial ignorance from Infinity Ward — exposing the apparent fact that IW believes anybody who is brown must be some sort of Arab.
“I, being a Pakistani, was so excited at seeing a Karachi map and then immediately so disappointed when I played the map,” one Karachi resident tellsKotaku.
The problem is this: All the writing featured in the Karachi map is in Arabic, despite the fact this is supposed to be Karachi. Nobody in Pakistan would write Arabic on a storefront or street sign, considering the country’s two major languages are English and Urdu. Arabic simply would not be relevant to a Pakistan resident.
“Infinity Ward probably thought, ‘Oh hey its a Muslim country so Arabic is the language,'” explains the man known only as Saad. “Someone who doesn’t know Urdu won’t be able to tell the difference. It’s like Spanish and English, I guess. Some letters are same, some are different but the words are completely different.”
There is no Urdu at all on the Karachi map. While it won’t make a difference to Western gamers, that’s the kind of basic research that Infinity Ward should have done.
