Blog: why irony and religion don't mix

An online game that allows players to stage fights involving Jesus, Muhammad and other religious figures was withdrawn yesterday after Muslim protests. But the creators have now posted a cheeky sequel, in which players must love all the figures equally in order to survive.

The first Faith Fighter game is "incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians," a spokesman for the Jeddah-based Islamophobia Observatory of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) said.

Faith Fighter allows players to choose between Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, God, Ganesha and then fight each other in an old-style cartoon fashion with kicks and thunder bolts. The game's publishers, Molleindustria of Italy, which specialises in making games with a serious message, intended it as an ironic commentary on religious intolerance.

The accompanying guide reads: "Choose your belief and kick the s*** out of your enemies. Give vent to your intolerance!"

Molleindustria said on its website: "After an official statement from the Organisation of Islamic Conference we decided to remove the game Faith Fighter from our site."

An OIC spokesman said the game would serve no other purpose than to incite intolerance. He called on the game's internet host to take "immediate action" by withdrawing it from the web.

Molleindustria said Faith Fighter was meant to be a game against intolerance that used over-the-top irony and a cartoonish style.

"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 Muhammad cartoons,” a spokesman said.

In modern Islam, images of the Prophet Muhammad are considered taboo, and a Danish newspaper angered the Muslim world in 2005 by publishing cartoons of the prophet that were deemed offensive.

Molleindustria said: "If an established organisation didn't understand the irony and the message of the game and is claiming it is inciting intolerance, we simply failed."

The game was released more than a year ago and has been played by millions of people on the internet, it said.

The influential OIC has 57 member countries and represents 1.3 billion Muslims.

Molleindustria added on its website: "We suspect that people at OIC never played the game. 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."

The publisher noted: "Taking down the game from this website is a symbolic act: copies and documentation of Faith Fighter can be found all over the internet."

Later the company added: "In few hours this statement generated a way more heated reaction than the release of the game. We are not "bowing to the fundamentalists", we have no sympathy for any religion but we are aware that Muslims are victim of widespread racism in the western world."

One day later, the company website was updated with news of Faith Fighter 2. The site text reads: "Faith Fighter 2 is the sequel of the infamous game that outraged over 1.3 billions muslims from 57 countries. The scandal resulted in a ban from all the internets!

"We regretted the use of irony and violence and this time we want to offer you a positive, nonviolent educational game that teaches the universal values of tolerance and respect. This is a very simple game that can be played by children of all ages, religious leaders and even journalists!"

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