The COVID-19 pandemic has hit people and economies worldwide, sparking a global recession and financially destabilising millions of people. In the Middle East, dipping oil prices have only worsened the threat to the economy. Businesses are shutting down, and many are trying to survive by cutting the salaries or laying off of workers. Large segments of the workers in these countries are expatriates, and many have struggled to make ends meet as unemployment soared.
The development of the Gulf countries has always been intertwined with their large expat populations. These workers are often vital to the economy, not just as part of the workforce but also as consumers by enabling successful malls, restaurants and other forms of recreation and tourism. Countries like Saudi Arabia gain valuable non-oil revenue in the form of increased Value Added Taxes (VAT) and by imposing a monthly fee on migrants who want to sponsor family members.
Many of these workers are from developing Southeast Asian countries such as India and Pakistan, and contribute greatly to their home country’s economy in the form of remittances, i.e sending money back home. Those who are facing unemployment or salary cuts are eager to be repatriated, especially since in many Gulf countries visas, rent, and even phone lines are linked to jobs, and expats have little to no social safety nets to fall back on.
“Panicked” Indians applying to go back home crashed the Dubai aviation ministry’s website for applications in the process. The consulate says it has received around 200,000 applications for repatriation of expats from as many as 12 countries.
For some, closing businesses are forcing them to go home. For others, the cost of education is the major concern. The Emirates group, Uber’s Middle Eastern counterpart Careem, and hotels are some of the few major employers considering laying off large portions of their staff or reducing salaries.
Dubai has been one of the hardest hit, as expats form an estimated 92% of the population. Dubai based movers estimate that they’re getting up to seven calls a day to ship belongings abroad. It is extremely hard to gain permanent resident status in countries such as the UAE, and the costs of living and education are quite high and often provided by employers, which has made leaving the only option left for many laid-off workers across all fields.
The UAE has tried to offset the damage by granting automatic extensions to expiring work permits, waiving of work permit fees and fines, and providing interest-free loans and repayment breaks.
Meanwhile, governments in Kuwait and Oman are trying to mould the exodus into an opportunity to boost local employment. On the other hand, the Saudi Arabian government has been criticised for not taking enough measures to protect the local workforce.
While the Gulf countries have been trying to decrease their dependence on oil wealth and foreign workforce, it is not something that can be accomplished soon, especially given the great dependence of the Gulf economies on both those factors.
There is still too unavoidable a gap between the current skill of local workers and the training needed to compete with foreign professionals, making it hard to simply employ domestic workers in place of foreign ones. The pandemic, however, might not leave much of a choice.
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Cyberpunk 2077, the most awaited video game was released on consoles and PC on 10th of December, 2020. The game went under 10 years of build-up and had kept gamers waiting for over 8 years. Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by a cult-favourite tabletop roleplaying game. The video game was designed by well-known Polish studio, CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk was the studio’s first big console game since The Witcher 3: Wild hunt which was an extraordinarily triumphant game that won numerous awards after its launch in 2015.
The popular video game, when released, faced backlash from the gaming community and non-gamers for several reasons. To many observers and gamers, Cyberpunk 2077 even proved to be an absolute failure. Several gamers called out the game developers for the promotion of sexiest ideologies and transphobia. However, the reviews weren’t well received by the fans. Cyberpunk 2077 fans responded with unacceptable abuses, harrasing and hateful messages and even rape and death threats.
Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 released ample previews, trailers, motion pictures and marketing material. Aside from this, the appearence of popular Canadian actor, Keanu Reeves as a character in the game carved the expectations of gamers and promised a sexy and kinky world of futuristic and revolutionary action. CD Projekt Red, one of Europe’s most successful video game company announced Cyberpunk 2077 project in 2012 and released the first trailer in 2013
The game is set in an alternate timeline in the city of California. The streets in the game are owned by tyrannical corporations. Everyone in the game modifies their body with illegal technology. Much of the state in the video game setting is said to be suffering from the impacts of a major nuclear attack which happened years ago. Every player gets to be a cyber-enhanced human who has to fight against physical and psychological threats to their survival. The game character of Keanu Reeves comes in as your sidekick.
In 2018, the developers insisted and had assured the gamers that Cyberpunk 2077 would not include in game purchases. CD Projekt Red did not want to lock any content behind a paywall. The studio was also insistent that the game would come out only when it was completely “ready”. They announced that the release would take place in April 2020 but it was delayed multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as other quality problems that the game was facing. When it was finally released in December 2020, gamers expected their experience of the game to be “worth the wait”. However, the video game wasn’t well revived by all. In spite of several months of work that went into making and developing the game, the game was launched with several technical issues. Players on both PC and consoles were having terrible experiences. As a result of multiple glitches and technical problems, the characters’ faces were obscured and the game would reset randomly. Some of the environments or areas of the game map was unappealing. The game even caused consoles to crash repeatedly and sometimes sacrificed players’ progress. One glitch led to characters’ breasts and penises being exposed. The characters’ genitals would poke out of their clothes. CD Projeckt Red offered refunds to players who were disappointed with the product. In fact, they updated a self-review discouraging gamers from playing the game on console until the game was fixed and improved.
Cyberpunk 2077 was roundly criticized by reviewers, game designers, industry insiders and other gamers across the gaming community. The wait and hype for the game had already created a fanbase which turned toxic by harassing reviewers who criticised the game.
There is another reason why the game wasn’t well received. Cyberpunk 2077 transphobia was apparent in the game contradicting the fact that the developers had claimed that the game was ahead of its time. The game has an incredibly detailed character creation menu. The players can control several aspects of their character’s appearance including the shapes and size of the genitals. The game even allows players to decline the option of including genitals to their characters. However, this isn’t the problem and is in fact appreciable. The idea of not determining gender by the character’s genitals in fact made many trans players happy. But this soon turned into disbelief and disappointment. The gamers realised that the game actually assigned the gender to the characters not based on their genitals but rather by the voice. Characters with higher-pitched voices were identified as females and characters with deep-voiced characters were assigned male pronouns. This purports the toxic idea that people’s gender can be determined by certain traits. A non-sexist video game would determine the gender of a player’s character based on an independent choice made by players themselves. This is uninfluenced by other physical traits or qualities.
Several reviewers called out Cyberpunk 2077 for promoting sexist ideologies. Unfortunately, toxic fans harassed the reviewers. “You just KNOW when you're going to get harassed. If the game with all the hype has anything wrong with it, and you're honest about that, or even just want to provide any context outside of ‘it's fun’, you're going to get harassed. It's a given.” These were precisely what Susan Arendt, a podcast host quoted. She even second guessed herself whether sharing her true opinions was worth the hateful, threatening and harassing messages that she received.
Controversial Tweet by Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter Handle
In the early days of arcade, gaming was a family activity. The popular male dominance and stereotype that only boys or men are good at video games were perpetuated in the past three decades. We observe this change due to sexualisation of video games. Today, most video games aren’t family friendly as they include explicit and sexual content. This, in fact, is a marketing tactic used by developers to target the male population. In 2018, a Cyberpunk 2077 fan who was awaiting the game at that point of time tweeted that the user wanted to see more from the “guys” at CDPR. In response to this tweet, CD Projekt Red tweeted, “Did you just assume their gender?!”. On the look of it, the tweet seems innocent but it is a joke at the expense of the trans community. After receiving backlash to the tweet, CDPR took it down and issued an apology staying sorry to “all those offended”. The apology seems like another targeted mockery and CDPR did no right by not taking responsibility for its actions.
Not only is Cyberpunk2077 transphobic and sexist, it is non user friendly as well. The game has several epilepsy triggers without any warnings about it. There are several instances and situations in the game where the effects and the graphics are brighter, louder and flashing. This is a general trigger for seizures. Liana Rupert, a player of Cyberpunk 2077 suffered a major seizure and at several moments felt that she was close to another one. After bringing this to the notice of CD Projekt Red, the company agreed to add trigger warnings wherever necessary.
The gaming industry has definitely taken a few steps forward in terms of inclusivity of all genders but has also taken a few steps backward. While all genders are welcome, they still face harassment and judgement for simply existing in the community and need a lot more improvement.
