When it comes to superheroes, for the majority of people the immediate characters that always come to mind are the classics such as Superman, Iron Man, Captain America and the like. Sadly it’s rare that a superhero who isn’t a straight white male will ever be mentioned. However, the team at Crystal Dynamics decided that they’re going to flip the script when it comes to Marvel’s Avengers. Despite this being an Avengers game, not a single one of them is truly the lead in the campaign. The hero of this story is Kamala Khan, a.k.a Ms Marvel, the first Muslim American-Pakistani hero in the Marvel universe – making this game pretty huge for Muslims around the world, including myself.
Representation is something that people of colour and folks from different faiths have been wanting in video games for as long as I can remember. It’s something that we’ve started to slowly see an increase of in recent years with the likes of Overwatch adding Ana Amari, an Egyptian character who wears a hijab, and even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare attempted to break away from its stereotypical representation of Arabs and Muslims by letting you play an Arab soldier called Farrah in the singleplayer campaign.
However, we’ve never really had a triple-A game where being Muslim was a core part of a lead character, so when I started playing the campaign of Marvel Avengers, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Kamala Khan wasn’t just a side character to the Avengers, in fact it was quite the opposite! The Avengers were the side characters to Kamala Khan’s story. This was very much a Ms. Marvel story.
Marvel’s Avengers – Opening 80 Minutes of Gameplay Watch on YouTube
When Marvel Comics announced in November 2013 that Kamala Khan would be taking over the Ms. Marvel comic book series, this marked the first time a Muslim character headlined a book at Marvel Comics. It was a huge deal for Muslims everywhere, the fact that Captain Marvel, one of the most iconic heroes in the Marvel universe, was passing down the mantel of Ms. Marvel to a Pakistani-American Muslim character. And Kamala Khan’s background was something quite important to the development of Ms. Marvel, as Marvel Editor Sana Amanat commented on the announcement, saying that the series came from a ‘desire to explore the Muslim-American diaspora from an authentic perspective.’