A Lebanese boy plays the computer game Special Force 2 in a southern suburb of Beirut in 2007. (Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images)

Video gaming isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of the Arab republic of Yemen. Living in this country of 23 million is something of a video game itself — dodging al-Qaeda operatives, outwitting kidnapping cartels and avoiding the barrel end of the reported 60 million guns liberally peppered throughout the country have sadly become part of the Yemeni experience.

In the Middle East, and there appears to be a large disconnect between the meaning of a video game and the experience of playing it.

Sana’a, the capital and northern stronghold since unification in 1990, isn’t as bad as the outlying areas, but the country’s lawlessness is fast transforming it into major theatre in the ongoing war against terror. That’s what makes the tens of thousands of kids gaming on battered PCs in subterranean rooms beneath mudbrick buildings all the more surprising.

First, a word on these kids. Yemen is the demographic inversion of Canada; almost half the population is 15 years old or younger. It has the highest fertility rate in the world, and thus gets younger by the day. Girls are all but hidden; boys wear the futa (wraparound skirts) of their ancestors and share the fierce tribal outlook that makes the country ungovernable. But those living the rural/urban mélange that is Old Sana’a have embraced technology, and there is no turning back.

Most of these kids appear to be playing soccer games — like EA’s PC classic FIFA 06 — in which there are no obvious improprieties, religious or otherwise. But the war in Old Sana’a, as in the rest of Yemen and many other places in the Arab world is, at heart, between modernity and traditionalism. A fundamentalist cannot tolerate a medium in which the human body is represented; in the Islamist interpretation, this is forbidden.

Yemen — the Arab world in extremis — poses an interesting question about the future of gaming in Muslim majority countries. What does this rampantly popular and growing form of Western popular culture mean out here among the jihadis and the old clan and tribal connections?

I spent almost a month in Yemen in 2009 researching my book The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World. My guide through this burgeoning universe was an 18-year-old named Abdul Hamid, who is a rabid gamer. His favourite is the Grand Theft Auto series, which he played before an audience of his younger siblings and cousins. GTA offends just about everybody; I asked Abdul Hamid how beating up a virtual hooker squared with his values. “It is a game,” he told me. “We do not do these things in real life.”

Old Sana'a, Yemen, at night. (Richard Poplak/CBC)

Indeed. Good luck finding prostitutes in Yemen; they are flown in from elsewhere for the benefit of the elite. The debate about GTA — that is, whether it represents a significant decline in our cultural morality, or is just good fun — is as much a Canadian conversation as it is a Yemeni one.

I’ve made it my business to game all over the Middle East, and there appears — to my eyes, at least — to be a large disconnect between the meaning of the game and the experience of playing it. What Abdul Hamid responded to in GTA was the veracity of the physics, the thrilling game play, the violence and — his protestations to the contrary — the game’s illicit reputation. As far as I saw, GTA wasn’t being played on communal computers in Old Sana’a.

I played Conflict: Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad, SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALS: Combined Assault and other war games with Abdul Hamid, all of which portrayed Americans in salutary roles kicking the pixelated asses of a faceless Arab enemy. “This is not real life,” Abdul Hamid reminded me again. “Who wins in Afghanistan? In Iraq? It is the Muslims, because of the Arab fighters.” In other words, the game’s outlook did not alter Abdul Hamid’s version of how the world works.

Dozens of studies suggest that gaming shapes the way we see the world; dozens of other studies dispute those studies. Even so, many would dispute Abdul Hamid’s take on gaming — and he’d also have a large disagreement with the Lebanese group Hezbollah, who have added a gaming wing to their extremely sophisticated media machine. (Al Minar, their satellite station, rivals Fox for both slickness and stridency.) Hezbollah’s spokesperson, Bilal az-Zein, described the group’s 2003 release, Special Force, as a means to “create an alternative similar to Western games where Arabs and Muslims are portrayed as terrorists.”

The game was a response to America’s Army: Special Forces, a title developed by the American military that did nothing to advance American/Arab relations. Along with the Kuma War series, and other games developed in close collaboration with the Bush-era military, America’s Army is horribly offensive to those Arabs who’ve played it, mostly because it hits every hoary stereotype bang on the head.

Hezbollah is not the only group attempting to create an indigenous Arab gaming industry. (Special Force sucked in a big way, and bombed, so to speak, even in south Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.) In 2005, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman cited a game called Ummah Defense I, which was available at a bookstore investigated in connection with the London 7/7 bombings. The game was primitive by any standard, but Friedman saw something sinister in how poorly rendered UFOs, under the banner of Islam, destroyed robots termed “The Disbelievers.”

A scene from the game Under Siege. (Afkar Media)

There was a free-to-download game developed by a Syrian doctor succinctly titled The Stone Throwers, in which gamers, well, throw stones at Israeli soldiers in a badly rendered West Bank village. There was also Legend of Zord, developed in the United Arab Emirates, and a Tomb Raider knock-off called Zoya.

But the most successful, and controversial, titles were a pair of first-person shooters made in Syria by a company called Afkar Media. Under Ash (2002) and Under Siege (2005) depict the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Palestinian point of view. In these games, the Israelis are Aryan aggressors and the Palestinians the heroes. Afkar was accused of promoting terrorism, something that company founder Ridwan Kismiya denies.

“Games mean something,” Kismaya told me. “It can’t always be from the American point of view. We need our own outlook, our own games. I was trying to educate that there are two sides to the conflict.”

Kismaya says that Under Siege was downloaded a million times. While moderately successful, Under Ash and Under Siege cannot compare in regional popularity to the blockbuster games. Kismaya himself admits that the games don’t stand up technically, and may ironically contribute to the entrenched notion of Arab technological inferiority. But how GTA, America’s Army or FIFA 06 changes the outlook in the crepuscular warrens beneath Old Sana’a is anyone’s guess.

Late one afternoon last April, I played GTA with Abdul Hamid while most of the city’s elders stupefied themselves by chewing the narcotic leaf qat. Abdul laid out his views on why games may have an intrinsic value that has nothing to do with their textual meaning.

“We are not drugged on qat — like this whole country. We are not doing jihad, we are not making trouble with foreigners. We are inside having fun and safe from harm. Is this not enough?”

It may well be. But he is locked in that age-old Arabic battle of al-qadim wa-al-jadid, the old against the new. And it has stakes far higher than anything the thugs in Grand Theft Auto can conjure up.

Richard Poplak is a writer based in Toronto and the author of The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World.