Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (18 page)

Khonsari’s game, simply titled
1979 Revolution
, follows a character named Reza, a young photojournalist living in Tehran during the tumultuous days of the Iranian revolution, when the U.S.-supported Pahlavi dynasty was overthrown and replaced with an Islamic republic. While Reza isn’t politically or religiously motivated, he is inspired by the idea of change, and incensed by the brutal death of his cousin. He joins the revolution and eventually becomes a key player in its success. The game’s plot extends through the hostage crisis and into the violent and uneasy early days of the new regime, when Reza is betrayed by both the revolution and his best friend.

Eschewing the first-person-shooter template for a more interactive adventure-game format,
1979 Revolution
lets players explore Tehran and complete mini-games, their choices shaping the story as it progresses. While sabotaging power grids and hurling rocks at police is a departure from the shooting and carjacking of
Grand Theft Auto
, Khonsari views his games as more alike than not. ‘In
1979 Revolution
, like
Grand Theft Auto
and
Max Payne
[a video-game representation of the noir films of the 1940s and ’50s], narrative is at the heart of the experience,’ he says. ‘The main difference is that my game is set in a real place and time—accountable to history.’

While Swenson’s game aspires to be a work of contemporary journalism, Khonsari’s is historical fiction. It’s also semi-biographical, in that it’s informed by Khonsari’s personal experiences living in Tehran in the days leading up to the revolution. His was a childhood filled with cultural juxtapositions: Khonsari’s bedroom was plastered with
Star Wars
posters, while his family’s apartment building was filled with the ducks, chicken, or sheep often presented to his father, a surgeon, as payment for treating patients from a nearby village.

‘I remember jumping over bonfires in the streets as we celebrated the Zoroastrian holiday of Chahārshanbe Suri before going back inside to watch the
Donny & Marie
show with my family,’ he says.

Khonsari hopes to infuse the game with the emotions he felt on the streets as a young boy, using graphic-novel-esque illustrations, historical photography, and stock footage. During the revolution’s early days, Khonsari’s grandfather took him into the streets to see the demonstrations, so he could witness a pivotal moment in the country’s history.

‘The streets were filled with people and soldiers; helicopters flew overhead as military vehicles roared down major boulevards,’ he recalls. ‘I felt like I was in a movie.’ To recreate those scenes, Khonsari has collaborated with Michel Setboun, a French photojournalist
who documented both sides of the revolution. As Reza, players can take photographs in the game and compare their images with the ones taken by Setboun.

Not all of Khonsari’s memories are of the vivid spectacle of military power. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in Iran, Khonsari and his classmates were instructed to tear pictures of the previous regime’s shah out of their textbooks and set them on fire. ‘All the girls in our class were separated from the boys, and the women in our family had to start covering their hair,’ he recalled. Fearing that their sons would be drafted into the army, Khonsari’s parents decided to flee the country.

Khonsari’s father spent three months formulating an escape plan. It was a secret even from the family’s closest friends.

‘If the new regime found out we planned to defect, we could be in danger, or we could incriminate those members of our family who stayed behind,’ Khonsari explains.

Guards began to visit the house to interrogate his father about recent business trips and ask questions about the family’s political allegiances. Khonsari’s mother prepared a story for her sons to recount in these situations, when the boys were taken into a separate room for questioning.

‘It was an awesome responsibility at any age, particularly at that one,’ Khonsari says.

Finally, on December 22, 1979, the family left for the airport, claiming to be visiting Canada for a holiday. Khonsari’s mother hung as much jewellery around her son’s neck and under his shirt as she could.

‘I wore an entire lifetime of her jewellery during our flight to Canada,’ he recalls.

The memories remain vivid and, for Khonsari, a video game is an ideal way to recreate them in a way that can be shared with others.

As a young teenager in the suburbs of Ontario, Khonsari quickly adapted to his adopted country, immersing himself in the culture—movies, music, and video games such as
Donkey Kong
and
Pitfall
—even as his family continued to celebrate Persian rituals.

Khonsari’s multicultural identity is reflected in the game, with its Iranian subject matter and Western execution. Asked whether he’s making the game for a Western or an Iranian audience, Khonsari says, ‘We want to engage everyone, regardless of race, gender, or age.’

Like Swenson, Khonsari believes that an international audience will respond to the difficult subject matter precisely because it is a video game.

‘Players can engage in a more truthful, raw, political, and mature content,’ he says. ‘We want to go beyond the cinematic storytelling that the film
Argo
started and bring a new level of understanding to this influential time period.’ (The game stars Farshad Farahat, who appeared in the Oscar-winning film as a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.)

While the controversy has no doubt increased awareness of the game, the exposure has come at a cost. According to Khonsari, the game’s concept artist was forced to flee Iran owing to his association with the project, while many other members of the development team will be left off the game’s credits to protect their safety. Are these risks worthwhile?

‘In the end, if we can entertain while passively educate,’ Khonsari says, ‘then yes, we will have accomplished our goals.’

Empathy is usually the reward for vulnerability. When a person invites others into the landscape of their experience with honesty and generosity, most humans respond with kindness and understanding.
But not everyone who has attempted to use a video game to tell their own story has been met with this reaction.

In the autumn of 2014, an anonymous message was posted to the discussion-board website 4chan. In it, the author threatened to hurt the video-game developer Zoe Quinn.

‘Next time she shows up at a conference we … give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees,’ it read. ‘I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us.’

For eighteen months prior to this message, the twenty-seven-year-old Quinn received a cavalcade of similar threats, which have created an ambient hum of menace in her life, albeit one that she has mostly been able to ignore. But at the end of August she was doxed, a slang term for document tracing, which is when a person’s personal details—home address, phone numbers, bank details and, in some cases, social security number—are made public on the Internet. Doxing carries with it an implicit invitation to harangue and harass the subject. After the developer was doxed, the prank calls, threatening e-mails and abusive tweets intensified to such a degree that Quinn, fearing for her safety, chose to leave her home and sleep on friends’ sofas.

The reason Quinn was targeted varies, depending on whom you ask, but most explanations lead to
Depression Quest
, a free interactive fiction game released in 2013. To date, it has been played more than a million times. The game, created by Quinn, the writer Patrick Lindsey and the musician Isaac Schankler, casts its player as a young adult suffering from depression. The story is told through snippets of text (which, combined, total forty thousand words), bookended with ostensibly straightforward decisions for the player (it is structurally similar to Swenson’s
1,000 Days of Syria
). Will you work at your desk or retreat to bed? Will you attend the party or remain at
home? The choices appear mundane, but the protagonist, slowed by depression’s fug, finds each one to be tremendously burdensome. For example, some options, such as choosing to ‘enthusiastically socialize’ at a party, are greyed out, forcing the player’s hand.

The hate mail began to arrive on ‘pretty much the same day’ as the game’s release, Quinn tells me. The harassment increased when, earlier this summer, the game launched on Steam. Many Steam users argued that a game with such a gloomy subject had no place being distributed in the marketplace. Incredulous and angry user reviews filled up
Depression Quest
’s listing page. ‘I can’t really call it a game since I don’t think the point is to entertain you,’ reads one. ‘I’m not even sure what to say about this thing. It’s just boring and is entirely all reading,’ says another.

The game debuted on Steam on the day that the news of the actor and comedian Robin Williams’s suicide broke, and some critics claimed that the timing of the release was an attempt to capitalise on Williams’s death—despite the fact that the game’s only source of revenue is donations. Ultimately, Quinn decided to go ahead with the release, because, as she wrote in a blog post, ‘I can’t in good conscience hold back offering someone something that could help them start making real changes in their life for the sake of reducing the risk of offending people or hurting my own reputation.’

Depression Quest
is, like
Revolution 1979
, an autobiographical work. Quinn, who grew up in a small town in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York, has suffered from depression since she was a teenager. At the age of twelve, she attempted to commit suicide.

‘We couldn’t afford therapy, so I was sent to meet school-district officials who were less than understanding about teens with depression and suicide issues,’ she says. ‘I was diagnosed with depression at fourteen, but I couldn’t find any medication that did anything for me other than making things worse.’

Video games became Quinn’s refuge when her father, a motorbike mechanic, was given a computer by one of his customers as payment. A particular favourite was
Commander Keen
, a game that features an eight-year-old boy who builds a spaceship from household objects and tours the galaxy as earth’s defender.

After a breakup, at the age of twenty-four, Quinn moved to Canada.

‘My social anxiety was as bad as it had ever been, and now I was in a new country on my own,’ she says. ‘I was trying to force myself to leave the house and actually interact with people in spite of it.’

Then Quinn saw an advertisement for a six-week course on how to make a video game. ‘I figured that maybe it would be a good way to meet people with similar interests,’ she says. Six weeks later, she completed her first game. ‘I felt like I’d found my calling,’ she says.

Game-making provided Quinn with a community and introduced her to Lindsey, who also suffers from depression. Recognising the capacity the medium has for communicating human experience, as Swenson and Khonsari had, Lindsey suggested that the pair attempt to communicate their experiences through a computer game.

‘Previous games that attempted to deal with depression or mental illness were too oblique and steeped in metaphor and symbolism to really get at the nasty heart of what living with these conditions can be like,’ Lindsey says. ‘It is more than “feeling sad.” We wanted to communicate what it’s like to be in that headspace.’

For Quinn, who also suffers from ADHD, a video game was an ideal way to create an experience that built an understanding between sufferers and non-sufferers. ‘Externalising that into a game and asking people to take some time out to see what “rules” other people have to live with, I think, is a powerful use of the medium,’ she says.

Depression Quest
eschews the usual characteristics of most
video games: there is no victorious ending and, as the developers warn in the preamble text, the game ‘is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience.’ It is, instead, one of a growing number of video games that hopes to broaden the medium’s subject matter with depictions of life’s darker aspects, including titles such as
That Dragon, Cancer
, which documents a family’s traumatic experience living with a child suffering from terminal illness, and
Hush
, in which you play a displaced Darfuri child trying to retrieve water while avoiding Janjaweed militia patrols.

This group of games shares few similarities with Mario’s spatial-reasoning puzzles and
Call of Duty
’s shooting-gallery tests of reaction speed, typical attributes of the video games that dominate the medium. Some of the hatred directed at Quinn has come from video-game enthusiasts who think that the darker themes are not suitable for video games, which they believe should be playful and primarily focused on entertainment. Others, especially those who have led the recent attacks, claim that the game has received an amount of coverage that is disproportionate to its quality. One criticism is that the game offers too simplistic a solution to depression—it leads the player to partly solve the issue through medication or therapy. But the game explicitly states that it is not trying to speak for all depression sufferers.

‘The topic is too big, there’s too many people who live with it, and too many moving pieces for anyone to do a definitive statement on what depression is like for everyone,’ Quinn says. ‘
Depression Quest
’s goal was to be a basic introduction to the concept and to get the conversation started.’

Still, some critics argue that the game tells too individual a story, that its protagonist is overprivileged and, therefore, better equipped to deal with the illness than real-world sufferers. Quinn disagrees.

‘I deliberately created a protagonist who has a lot of support networks and resources that I don’t have,’ she says. ‘We wanted to
preempt the argument that someone is only depressed because they have a difficult life. Anyone can have depression. The illness doesn’t care how much you do or don’t have.’