Iran – MMO Fallout

Here’s something chilling to mull over for your new years.

Dead Mage team lead Amir Fassihi posted a message on Twitter this week revealing that the team behind Children of Morta had been summoned to court over concerns about their game. What was the concern? The game not upholding Islamic tradition. The tweet which has been (poorly) translated for your pleasure, notes that Iranian officials took umbrage with the game including things like dancing and a burial not complying with Islamic law.

“Children of Morta developer is summoned to the court over the complaint that the game includes dancing, lack of hijab, lack of praising for God, use of magic for fighting demons and also a burial not complying with Islamic laws.”

Children of Morta is an RPG rogue-lite where you take control of the Bergsons family who must fight against encroaching corruption in a procedurally generated dungeon. The game takes place in a fantasy world and the female characters do not wear hijabs.

The original tweet by Fassihi has since been deleted. It’s hard to tell where this proceeding will go, but gamers who were considering buying Children of Morta might want to do so now if just to support the developers financially or to get their hands on the title in case it suddenly gets pulled from the Steam store. Dead Mage is an Iran-based indie developer.

Source: Twitter (archive)

Iranian gamers may be waking up to find that access to a number of games will be going away in the coming weeks. According to the BBC, while the Iran government would like you to believe that the games are being banned as “western propaganda” used to “poison the minds of the youth population in Iran,” the real culprit appears to be international sanctions against the country. While many publishers already have no intention of releasing their games in Iran, this does mean that gamers in Iran will find their IP addresses blocked from accessing previously available services.

Blizzard responded to recent comments of Battle.net being blocked in Iran with the following:

We can’t speak to reports surrounding the Iranian government restricting games from its citizens. What we do know is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. We’ve recently tightened up our procedures to ensure compliance with those laws, which means we must restrict access to our games by players in those nations.

Iranian youth may want to consider a proxy if they intend on continuing to poison their minds with western propaganda.

(Source: BBC)