When considering light entertainment, there is a danger in bringing too much context and weight to the analysis. Not every moment of our leisure media consumption need reflect the complications and difficulties of what is somewhat quaintly called the real world, as if it were so necessary to distinguish it from the myriad fake worlds that both modern technology and eternal imagination make so accessible. But sometimes the real world can’t be ignored.

Prince of Persia, the new game from Ubisoft that is meant to revamp the franchise that is now two decades old, is certainly light entertainment. It is gorgeous to behold, with a hand-painted visual style demonstrating that as high-definition graphics grow more advanced, they come to look less electronic, more organic rather than more digital.

On a purely biomechanical level — the delicate composition of finger movements with which a player interacts with a game — Prince of Persia is also a triumph. It is perhaps 2008’s archetypal platforming game, built around jumping, climbing, leaping, running along walls and even attaining the illusion of flight in moments of balletic grace. Rather than force the player to master a dense menu of complicated commands, Prince of Persia makes a formidable palette of acrobatics available with the press of only a button or two.

Simply as a game, as a visually engaging and manually satisfying 15-hour collection of environmental puzzles (How do I get to that ledge up there?) and battles with foes — the prince and his companion, a princess, must restore life to a world that’s been desiccated by evil — this is the best installment in the series since 2003’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

And yet I have never been fully comfortable approaching the Prince of Persia games simply as a diversion, and it has been difficult over the years for me to let the series off the hook for invoking a specific real-world culture so cavalierly. What are we to make of a “Prince of Persia” who talks and behaves like a 17-year-old American mall rat? A “Prince of Persia” with blue eyes, fully Anglicized facial features and what looks like a tan he picked up on spring break? Is it taking a video game too seriously to shrink in distaste from such characterizations? In fairness, the new Prince of Persia does not claim any historical or cultural authenticity; the game is set in a fantastic magical realm rather than in a rendition of any real place. But does that absolve the game of any responsibility?

I think not. I played the original Prince of Persia in 1990, and at the time I did not really know how to express my unease. One year later I read the seminal work of the scholar Edward Said, “Orientalism.” A controversial and influential academic figure, Mr. Said contended that the West had spent centuries romanticizing and fetishizing the cultures and peoples of Islam as a tool of the West’s own political and military hegemony.

At the time I did not think my professors would appreciate a look at Mr. Said’s work through the prism of a video game. But perhaps I underestimated them. Perhaps they would have understood that even in the latest, most modern new media, the cultural vocabulary accumulated over the course of history makes its presence felt at almost every turn.

Many Americans have little understanding of the difference between Persia and the Arab world. To most Americans the entire Islamic world is still the “other,” as Mr. Said might have put it, something mysterious and unknowable and at least a bit menacing.

Prince of Persia does not try to grapple with these issues. But by mere fact of its name and Middle Eastern trappings, the game invokes and raises them. Yes, there is danger and potential futility in taking works of mass fare too seriously. Yet there is also danger in employing cultural symbols of such power so blithely, with such a willful disregard for reality.

Prince of Persia is a great game, but simply being a video game is no longer sufficient to earn a pass from being held to account for shaping the perceptions and attitudes of its players. Not anymore.