With real anti-Muslim sentiment, outside of websites like this one, being relatively rare these days, it’s no wonder it had to be manufactured by one of America’s leading, and now, apparently, “ultra-woke’ universities.
Washington Examiner (h/t Marvin W) The game, On the Plane, is a virtual reality role-playing game that “encourages players to take on new roles that may be outside of their personal experiences in the first person, allowing them to confront in-group/out-group bias,” according to the university.
Participants will see three characters in the game: “Sarah, a first-generation Muslim American of Malaysian ancestry who wears a hijab; Marianne, a white woman from the Midwest with little exposure to other cultures and customs; or a flight attendant. Sarah represents the out-group.”
The game, On the Plane, is a virtual reality role-playing game that “encourages players to take on new roles that may be outside of their personal experiences in the first person, allowing them to confront in-group/out-group bias,” according to the university.
Participants will see three characters in the game: “Sarah, a first-generation Muslim American of Malaysian ancestry who wears a hijab; Marianne, a white woman from the Midwest with little exposure to other cultures and customs; or a flight attendant. Sarah represents the out-group.”
According to a lead researcher on the project, the video game will “harness the power of virtual reality and artificial intelligence to address social ills, such as discrimination and xenophobia/Islamophobia.”
“The simulation engages players in critical reflection and seeks to foster empathy for the passenger who was ‘othered’ due to her outfit being not so ‘prototypical’ of what an American should look like,” Caglar Yildirim, the game’s co-designer, said in the university’s news release.
But the game relies on stereotypes; Marianne, the “white woman,” has “Islamophobic expressions and racist attitudes toward Sarah,” according to MIT. Putting aside that Islam is a religion, not a race or ethnic identity, how does it fight racism to make the white Midwestern woman the bad character?
According to Robert Spencer at PJ Media: Now, this could be interesting if both Sarah and Marianne are given the opportunity to confront their prejudices and false assumptions, but no such luck. In the Left’s world, only a “white woman from the Midwest with little exposure to other cultures and customs,” not a “first-generation Muslim American of Malaysian ancestry who wears a hijab,” could possibly have any prejudices or false assumptions in the first place. And so we are told before we even start playing how the interaction is supposed to work out: “Sarah represents the out group, Marianne is a member of the in group, and the flight staffer is a bystander witnessing an exchange between the two passengers.”
The game won’t allow you to imagine a scenario in which the hijab-wearing Muslim woman has xenophobic attitudes toward the Midwestern white woman. In the Left’s world, that would be inconceivable! The game, however, is not entirely one-sided: it “grants players a chance to alter their standing in the simulation through their reply choices to each prompt, affecting their affinity toward the other two characters. For example, if you play as the flight attendant, you can react to Marianne’s Islamophobic expressions and attitudes toward Sarah, changing your affinities.” What fun.
Not surprisingly, this ridiculous and offensive game is part of MIT’s Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism. MIT Professor Fotini Christia explains: “In a post-9/11 world, Muslims often experience ethnic profiling in American airports. ‘On the Plane’ builds off of that type of in-group favoritism, a well-established finding in psychology. This game also takes a novel approach to analyzing hardwired bias by utilizing VR [virtual reality] instead of field experiments to simulate prejudice.” That’s wise as it’s much easier to find virtual prejudice of this kind than the real thing. These people aren’t at MIT for nothing.
Giorgos says
Because cold fusion is generally considered achievable rather than a hypothetical phenomenon? MIT has also utterly failed at producing a perpetual motion machine or breeding unicorns so far.
Pray Hard says
When I was young, it would have been an extreme blessing to have been able to attend MIT.
Aaaa says
They do it on purpose