Playing Computer Games that May Involve Prohibitions
Fatwa No: 394975

Question

I have some questions concerning two games we sometimes play without missing a duty or doing a sin thereby. This questions might seem unnecessary but a very high rate of the young people from 12-25 play these games. At least 90% of them so a clear answer would be helpful. First of all there is a football game. In this game there are packs and if you open this pack you get item like players contracts managers and so on. In every pack youget something you can use but of course every one wants to get a good player to sell him for a high prices. There are 3 ways to achieve such packs and my question is if a point is gambling.1. By matches, the more matches you win, the better packs you will get.2. By doing the so called "Squad Building Challenges". To sum up: You get a quest to build up a squad with different conditions like 3 players from spain and so on. If you build this team you send it and those players you builded your squad with are removed from your account. Then you get a Pack for finishing this quest as reward.3. You buy either with real moneyor with gameplay money those packs.My second question is in another game you are with your team of your friends and if someone get damaged by enemys stars crawling and if he gets shots in thise state he dies. But in this state of crawling , where the player lives and can crawl to somewhere the other teammates can help him by going close to him , look at him and pressing a button for 10 seconds. What ponders me is that if you look at this crawling guy there pops up the button you need to click and the word "revive" or "resuscitation".In this game there are no signs of whichcraft or reviving the deads, so is playing this game allowed if we see this act of "revive" only as an act of helping the damaged person ?

Answer

All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger.

We will start our answer from your last question, which is about the term ‘revive’. Revive means helping an injured and rescuing him from death; there is nothing wrong with this expression as the Quran expressed saving a life by the word Ahya, which means revive, or keep alive. Allah Says (what means): {And whoever saves [Ahya] one - it is as if he had saved [Ahya] mankind entirely.} [Quran 5:32]

As for buying packs with real money or imaginary money that has a real value, then this is forbidden gambling and it is not permissible because it is not known what is in the pack: it could be something worth a high value and it may be worthless. What fluctuates between two possibilities, either winning or losing is considered gambling and it is not permissible.

Also, getting more packs by increasing the number of matches is not free of Islamic violations. Even if it is free and does not involve spending extra money, simply increasing the number of matches would mean spending more time on the game, and this is a waste of time and it can lead to distraction from fulfilling an obligation, or to committing what is forbidden; so it should be avoided.

This is one of the tricks they use in order to attach people to the game and make them spend more time playing it. Indeed, a person will be asked two questions about time: about his entire life span, and about his youth time in particular. The Prophet said: “The feet of a slave will not move on the Day of Judgment until he is asked about four things: his life span, how he spent it; his youth, how he consumed it; his wealth from where he earned it and where he spent it; and about his knowledge how he acted upon it (or taught it).” [Al-Bayhaqi and Al-Albaani classified it as Sound]

As regards getting packs through the so-called “Squad Building Challenges”, then this is not clear enough for us in order to issue a ruling about it. In any case, regardless of the prize that one gets, it is safer to avoid all this and not to waste time on it, especially for the adults. Time is the capital investment of the person, and if one spends it in what does not benefit him, then there will be no time left for what benefits him, and his entire life will be wasted on what one will regret later.

Allah knows best.

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