From the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, episode 302—“Saudi Arabia is Using Games to Improve Its Image” (Overcast, Apple Podcasts):

Paris Marx is joined by Nathan Grayson to discuss how Saudi Arabia is buying its way into the sports, comedy, and video game industries in order to broaden its investment portfolio and launder its international reputation.

Grayson is a cofounder of Aftermath, “a worker-owned news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.”

I found this conversation valuable as an explainer for the “why” behind Saudi Arabia’s ongoing games- and sportswashing that was briefly mentioned in the aforelinked Karen Attiah “Saudification” post.

In addition to laundering its image (and its oil money), the other beneift Saudi Arabia’s may see to its gaming takeover is that control over video games means control over young, impressionable men. Think Madden Football, UFC, Battlefield, or Mass Effect. The ability to control (or at least influence) the content and imagery in these games can have a huge long-term effect—I imagine, for example, we’d see less of the “Middle East as the enemy” trope in first-person shooter games, and perhaps more examples of the “advantages” of an absolute, totalitarian, patriarchal monarchy.