I wasn't there when it all started. A friend of mine, who plays too, told me the whole story. Then I read. A lot. The messages on the Discord, what was going on in the game chat, the articles that kept coming out one after another.
I didn't post anything and I didn't react anywhere. Mostly, I tried to understand how a story about a flag could blow up like that.
This article is what I got out of it. It's not an attack on anyone: not on Muslims, not on Western players, not on the LGBT community, not on the mods. It's my personal take on what I saw, and I'm not claiming to have the absolute truth.
And this article means a lot to me. I'll get to why at the end.
It all started on the Discord. A player put an LGBT flag next to the Libyan flag. Some Libyan players took it really badly, and things went downhill way faster than anyone could have expected. It spilled over into the game chat, then into the articles.
Then some players deliberately started bringing religion into it: depictions of or references to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Jesus, the Kaaba and other religious symbols. I can't read everyone's mind. But for some of them, the goal looked pretty clear: provoke Muslims and see how hard they would react.
And it worked. Part of the Muslim community reacted very strongly, and some people clearly crossed the line: insults, attacks, heat-of-the-moment replies that only made things worse. Then sanctions came, and some Muslim players saw them as a double standard.
My position fits in one sentence, and the rest of this article is me explaining it: I condemn the deliberate provocations and the excessive reactions that followed, but I understand why some Muslims reacted so strongly.
To understand why some Muslims reacted like that, you need to know one thing. For many of them, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ isn't just a historical figure or one religious figure among others. In Islam, a believer is supposed to love him more than their own parents.
The Kaaba is the direction Muslims all over the world face when they pray. And many people don't know this, but Jesus (Isa) is also a prophet in Islam. So mocking him hurts Muslims too, not only Christians.
When people see these symbols used deliberately, just to get a reaction, for many of them it goes way past bad taste. It feels like an attack on what they care about most.
If you're not Muslim, try this: think about the person or the thing that matters most to you. Now imagine a stranger using it on purpose, just to see if you'll snap. The picture itself barely matters. What hurts is the intent.
I'm not saying all Muslims have to react the same way, and I'm definitely not saying it's okay to insult anyone. I'm just saying religious sensitivity isn't the same for everyone.
A non-Muslim can genuinely think "it's just a symbol". A Muslim can see a deep provocation in it. Both are looking at the exact same thing and seeing something completely different. And neither of them is faking it.
Since it all started with an LGBT flag, I can't skip this part. So I'll start with where I stand, to be clear: I'm against discriminating against any community, or mistreating anyone, because of their sexual orientation.
Islam forbids sexual relations between people of the same sex, but it separates the person from their actions. You don't necessarily choose who you're attracted to, and I don't think anyone can be blamed for what they feel. In the religious view, it's the actions that fall under moral rules. And none of this gives a Muslim the right to insult, humiliate or mistreat anyone.
I also know that in some Muslim-majority countries, LGBT people face discrimination. I think that's wrong, and I won't defend it in the name of my religion.
Some people might ask why Islam forbids the act in the first place, and why everyone can't just do what they want. The answer comes down to what it means to believe in a revealed religion. For a believer, moral rules aren't preferences you keep because they suit you. A Muslim believes some limits were set by God, which makes them the truth for him, even when they look incomprehensible or unfair to someone who doesn't share that faith.
The point here is to explain how a Muslim thinks, not to convince anyone that Islam is right. You can disagree with a religious belief without pretending it makes no sense to the person who follows it. And the other way around matters just as much: understanding Muslims' religious sensitivity doesn't mean they get to impose their beliefs on others.
This is where it gets interesting. In France, blasphemy isn't a crime. You're allowed to criticize a religion, mock it, even shock people with it. But insulting or defaming people because of their religion, threatening them or calling for hatred against them is illegal. In other words, the line is between going after a religion and going after the people who believe in it.
And that's where War Era comes from. The game's creator is French. From what I see, most of the community and most of the mods are Western, and most players from Arab countries, Africa and elsewhere showed up more recently. The rules themselves even use France as one of their references, for example to define which groups count as terrorist groups.
These rules ban insults, targeted harassment, any kind of discrimination and hate speech, whether direct or implicit. They also say that just because something isn't explicitly written doesn't mean you can abuse it. But offending a religion isn't listed as its own category. So the text leaves real room for interpretation, and that's exactly where everything played out.
You can read the same text in two honest ways. For many Muslim players, deliberately using the Prophet ﷺ to get a reaction out of Muslims is an implicit insult, or even harassment, because it's aimed at people and not at an idea. So when they saw some of the people who reacted get sanctioned while the provocateurs seemed to get off much lighter, they saw a double standard.
Read the French way, mocking a religious figure is going after a belief, not after people. So it isn't necessarily hate speech. Insulting a player directly, on the other hand, is a clear violation. From that angle, the mods were just applying the categories in their rules.
I don't claim to know what was going on in the mods' heads, and I'm not going to decide for them. What interests me is that both readings start from the same text. So the real disagreement is about a question nobody answers the same way: were those images targeting a religion, or people?
Written rules are one thing, unwritten norms are another. One detail really stood out to me here. The rules ban talking about real-world wars that are still going on, like Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Palestine, probably because those topics can blow a community apart. Religion isn't on that list. I don't think it's a malicious oversight. I think that, seen from a certain place, the topic just didn't look that explosive.
The game was never presented as being only for Western players, and that's not what I'm saying. But some of its unwritten norms seem to come from a community culture shaped by the French idea of free speech. As long as the community looked like that culture, those norms went without saying. Once it became truly international, not so much. During the debates, plenty of players actually said the game "leans Western".
For me, that's the real culture clash.
If the game got something wrong, it's mostly that it didn't see this coming. With a community getting more and more international, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I really do think Vatou, the game's creator, wanted to include everyone. But if this view of free speech is a deliberate choice, then the game isn't made for every community, and it would've been better to just say so. At least everyone would know what to expect when they join.
I get the ragebait thing. Provoking someone on purpose just to watch them get mad, I can see why some people find that funny.
But in War Era, it's a really bad idea. This isn't Twitter or TikTok, where you bait some stranger you'll never see again. Here, the people you bait are the same people you'll have to negotiate with, ally with, trade with, fight, or just keep playing next to for months.
Ragebaiting a guy at midnight and asking him for a NAP the next day at noon is a bold diplomatic strategy. I don't recommend it.
Up to here, I tried to talk like an observer. But I won't pretend to be neutral: I'm Muslim, this whole thing obviously affected me, and War Era isn't a game I watch from a distance.
When I found it, I knew right away I was going to like it. There weren't many Senegalese or African players around me yet, and I stayed anyway. I even tried to bring people in.
What hooked me was the mix: diplomacy, war, economy, politics, management, international relations, strategy. A small simulation of the real world, except this time I wasn't just a spectator. I was making decisions, negotiating, forming alliances, trying to guess what others would do next, and seeing the consequences of my choices. For once, I wasn't watching a geopolitics simulation from the outside. I was inside it.
And inside, it wasn't always easy. When I arrived, Senegal's government was already held by Portuguese and Venezuelan proxies. I first got a seat in Congress, which is easier in a country with few players. The government was another story: it took me three months of negotiating and debating.
I tried pretty much every approach possible, and I saw every trick you can imagine to stay in power longer. The worst part was when proxies straight up sold the country to other proxies, and you couldn't do anything because you didn't have enough players on your side to kick them out.
Today, all that is behind me. So much so that I'm actually starting to get a bit tired of being president. Three months fighting for that seat, and look at me now. Nobody ever said I was consistent.
Then there's everything else: diplomatic talks with the neighbors, hard choices, wars, running the Discord, writing laws. For almost a month, I'd been building a really detailed guide website, with animations, so I could launch a big campaign and bring in a lot of Senegalese players. It really had potential.
And the game gave me more than I expected. I got better at programming: building websites, working with an API, coding a bot. Most of all, my English got so much better. Today I can read English without translating in my head. When I started, I couldn't have read an article like this one without a translator. Now I just need to work on my speaking, haha.
And then there are the people. I met players from everywhere, from very different countries and backgrounds, people I negotiated with, talked with, built things with, and sometimes just had fun with.
At the start, I said this article meant a lot to me. That's because it's my last one. I'm leaving War Era.
I'm not leaving because War Era is a bad game. It's almost the opposite: I loved it. The problem is the community, or more precisely some unwritten norms that make me feel like I don't belong here anymore.
As a Muslim, I can't just act like nothing happened when I regularly see my religion or the Prophet ﷺ being used to provoke people. I know my religious sensitivity isn't universal. I'm not asking anyone to adopt my beliefs, and I don't want Islam imposed on anyone. I just would've liked a bit of mutual respect.
Something simple, like in real life. We don't necessarily know each other. You don't know me, I don't know you. But we play the same game. We can talk about the game, joke around, argue about in-game politics, say random stuff in the chat. But I'm not going to go out of my way to make you mad over something I know matters to you.
And I wish that worked both ways.
I'm also not leaving because I think every player here is bad. I've met a ton of interesting, respectful people.
If there's one thing I take away from all this, it's that an international community isn't automatically a universal one. We can play the same game, speak the same language, follow the same rules, and still have completely different ideas about respect, religion, provocation or free speech.
I can admit several sides were in the wrong, understand some positions, and still not want to be part of this environment anymore. There's no contradiction there.
Thanks to my allies, to the Senegalese players who were there even when there weren't many of us, to the people I negotiated with, including the ones on the other side of the table, and to everyone I got to talk with or build something with. You're the reason this game meant so much to me.
We were supposed to be playing a war game, not starting a worldwide culture war. Then again, for a geopolitics sim, we can admit it stayed realistic right to the end.
GG everyone