Andrian Pauline, the founder and CEO of one of the most prominent Indonesian e-sport organizations Rex Regum Qeon (RRQ), said there was no relation between violent games and violent acts.

“There have been many violent games for decades, but games are only for entertainment. There are many soap operas, films, and sports that can be categorized as violent but the audience know that these forms of entertainment are not doctrine videos ordering them to be radical terrorists,” Andrian told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

“If they say PUBG is haram today, will they say action movies or boxing or karate are haram too because they can be interpreted as violent?”

The perpetrator of the shooting rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, cited the war game Fortnite — which is similar to PUBG — in his manifesto, prompting speculation that he was inspired by the game.

Asrorun Ni’am, the MUI’s fatwa commission secretary, told the Post on Saturday that it was planning to meet with several experts to discuss the matter on Tuesday.

“[We] plan [to meet] on Tuesday,” he said via text message. “We will listen to suggestions from experts from various fields such as the psychologists, the Communications and Information Ministry, Indonesian Commission for Child Protection (KPAI), legal experts, as well as game producers and gamers.”

According to Asrorun, the MUI had a discussion with the ministry’s directorate general of information application about the game’s violent content.

“The ministry has regulations in relation to the online game, which ban content showing gambling, porn and violence,” he said.

Asrorun, who is also former head of the KPAI, added that he had also had a discussion with the KPAI on how PUBG could influence children who played the mobile games.

“Besides the content, the study also has to consider the influence it has on the players: physical, psychological and financial,” he said.

“If the root of the problem had been well-studied, the solution to answer the problem can be determined. Maybe the solution can be a fatwa or something else,” he added.

Meanwhile, Andrian said the fatwa might hamper the national effort to support Indonesian e-sport athletes at international level.

According to him, several PUBG teams from Indonesia was in the top 10 in international competitions.

“E-sports gained traction in Indonesia last year, because the community had become stronger than the previous years and it is easier to access good devices and internet now,” he said.

“Even the government had noticed this potential and we started getting supports from it to compete at international level,” he added.

He also mentioned the presence of e-sport at the 2018 Asian Games and 2019 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Manila.

“I think PUBG is just a scapegoat for current problems, because it is now trending. I am not sure that the problem would be solved when the game is banned,” Andrian said.

Alisha Karabinus, an assistant director for introductory composition and a doctoral candidate at Purdue University, was quoted by GamesBeat as saying: “Both academic and mainstream circles already studying links between certain facets of gaming culture and political events from the past few years in particular. Those connections are already there.”

“What we may need to be talking more about is how game-related spaces and gamer discourse can feed into or influence the radicalization of participants in online spaces. It’s not that games are to blame. It’s an issue of how these various factors are coming together to feed into something much bigger,” she was quoted as saying.

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