Views of Digital Game Lovers on Games with Islamophobic Content

With the advances in communication technologies, people from all over the world have been able to communicate with each other at almost zero cost without time and place restrictions. While many positive results such as the establishment of friendships, the removal of borders in education or the facilitation of trade have been obtained on the basis of this opportunity, there have been observed many negative consequences such as spread of severe conflict of ideas, marginalization or racism. The spread of Islamophobia is one of the main negative consequences. The subject of the study is also the effects of the Islamophobic content of digital games, seen as a new media space, on the game lovers who play these games. The aim of the study is to find whether those, who played the games that the T.R. Ministry of Youth and Sports has put forth as “Islamophobic Games”, were influenced by the contents of these games and what their opinions were about Islamophobic content. A total of 847 comments from 5 different international platforms related to these games were subjected to the thematic content analysis. The aim here was to understand the ideas of international game lovers related to Islamophobic games in 8 different themes. As a result, it was found that non-Muslim game lovers especially in the US and European countries have a discriminating and hateful view towards Muslims, that they have seen Muslims as violence prone and delighted to kill people at 90%, and that there was no change in their ideas despite the comments of Muslim game lovers on that Islam is a religion of peace