.future · Microsoft / Gimlet Creative

Gaming the System

July 19, 2017·24 min·2 clips

Naveed Khansari recalls the hopeful streets of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution, a moment he later turned into a video game.

The episode opens with Naveed Khansari, an Iranian-American game developer, describing how most Westerners picture Iran only through images of the 1979 hostage crisis. Naveed was 10 years old in Tehran during the revolution, initially experiencing it as a moment of hope and popular uprising before watching it turn violent. His family eventually emigrated to Canada, but he spent years feeling unable to convey the complexity of that history to outsiders. His solution was a video game: 1979 Revolution Black Friday, an indie title that places players inside Tehran during the revolution. The host, Christina Quinn, contextualizes this by laying out the scale of the gaming industry — $90 billion in annual sales, more than double global box office revenue, with four out of five American households owning a gaming device. She explains the dominance of AAA games, an industry term for big-budget titles like Call of Duty and Halo that follow Hollywood-style release calendars and tend toward repetitive storylines and homogeneous protagonists. Gaming writer Leigh Alexander's essay 'Gamers Are Over' is cited as a landmark critique of AAA culture's lack of diversity. The episode then pivots to the indie gaming scene as an alternative. Naveed's studio, Ink Stories, was co-founded with his documentary filmmaker wife and is inspired by cinema verite. 1979 Revolution incorporates real Super 8 footage shot by his grandfather and interviews with over 40 people who lived through the revolution, as well as input from academics and religious advisors. Naveed argues that video games are the most powerful medium for creating empathy, placing players directly inside historical and emotional experiences. MIT Game Lab researcher Rick Eberhardt supports this, noting that indie games carry an authenticity that AAA studios struggle to replicate because they reflect the genuine cultural backgrounds of their creators. The episode then profiles Sherita Halitu, who created Beyond Eyes after taking a game development course in college. The game follows a blind girl named Ray searching for her lost cat, and its visual design — a white screen that slowly fills with watercolor as Ray explores — was inspired by Sherita's grief over losing her father at age 10. Sherita measures the game's emotional impact by adding water to a glass bottle for every email she receives from a player who cried; within six months it was half full. Beyond Eyes was featured at the E3 conference in 2015. Carla Zemmonia spent seven years as an animator at AAA studios, including work on the Bioshock series and Zoo Tycoon, before the repetitive nature of the work drove her to leave. She and a collaborator founded Fulbright and made Gone Home, a first-person exploration game set in a 1995 Victorian house with no combat. The game's central love story between two young women was named the greatest video game love story ever told by the New York Times and won the British Academy Games Award for Best Debut. Carla notes that AAA publishers would never have greenlit the concept. Microsoft's ID at Xbox program, described by Katie Stone-Perez, is highlighted as a platform that democratizes access for indie developers, giving them tools and promotion at major industry events. The episode closes by returning to Naveed, who says 1979 Revolution has helped Iranians see themselves portrayed as protagonists for the first time, and helped non-Iranians understand the country beyond stereotypes.

As heard by us

A thoughtful look at games as memory, culture, and connection, with a brief but affecting thread from revolutionary Iran to Xbox Live.

Gaming the System treats video games as a way to carry memory, culture, and connection, beginning with Naveed Khansari's childhood in Tehran during the Iranian revolution.

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Why you'd press play

A game history episode that starts in Tehran and ends with a connected world.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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