1979 and the potential of games as historical-political narratives

Games haven’t been given much of a chance to articulate historical narratives in a meaningful way, let alone serve as political commentary. The most successful title to achieve the latter would have to be Bioshock, and while its forthcoming sequel Bioshock: Infinite draws on populist uprising not unlike the Tea Party, those connections are still only allegorical. The general perception that games shouldn’t be allowed to function as historical tools in the same way documentary or literature can saw Six Days in Fallujah, a title based on a battle in the early stages of the second Iraq war, dropped by Konami in 2009 amid concern that the game would trivialize the conflict. The message was clear: games have no place depicting contentious parts of history, leaving us with Call of Duty and Battlefield as the pinnacle, at least in terms of populartity, of the medium’s ability to represent modern warfare.

In an interview with CNN, Navid Khonsari explains how he hopes to buck that trend. Khonsari was the cinematic director at Rockstar from 2001 to 2005, working on GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas and the two Max Payne.  More recently,  he worked on Alan Wake and Homefront for iNKStories, a company he runs with his wife. Most important to this story though is his history: Khonsari, 41, grew up in Iran, and was in that nation’s capital of Tehran at the height of the Islamic revolution, the year of which is the name of his new game: 1979.

“I think that being able to base a game in contemporary historical truths is significant, besides being educational,” he told CNN. “It opens people’s eyes to look beyond what they’re reading in the paper and realize that there’s a definite relationship between history and the headlines.”

The story will be presented as a series of disjointed episodes during the revolution. Khonsari calls it a “baton-pass” system, in which the player will take the role of a student demonstrator and a translator, among others, with perspective jumping between characters on different sides of the conflict, forming an under-current of moral ambiguity affecting each micro-narrative.

1979 is sure to receive negative publicity. If Six Days in Fallujah can depict an American perspective as told by the veteran who were there and still get axed, imagine how the media is going to jump on a game set in a soon-to-be-fundamentalist state that represents Muslims and revolutionaries as, God forbid, real people. Khonsari is prepared for the abuse, though.

“”Iranians are going to criticize me because I’m making a game that ‘promotes American imperialists going in and shooting Iranians. Americans are going to criticize me because I’m making a game that ‘glorifies Islamic fundamentalism,’ or something. I’m not going to please everyone, and the point of the game isn’t to do that.”

And rightly so – until the next cultural boogeyman takes attention away from the medium, Maude Flanders types are going to keep blaming games for all the ills of our society – and that’s all the more reason for developers to take creative risks and make something that challenges the player on an intellectual and emotional level.