It’s a proud part of American mythology that people from all over the world get to come here and pursue their dreams. Navid Khonsari has one of those stories. The Iranian-American used to work at Rockstar Games as cinematic director, where he helped steer the vision on games like The Warriors, Midnight Club II and Bully.
However, for all the best-selling, critically acclaimed games Khonsari worked on, it wasn’t until he went back to the Middle East that he really saw the surprising cultural impact of video games.
Khonsari spoke at this week’s Games for Change conference about 1979, the real-world political action game that he’s making through his iNKstories development studio. That game’s set in Iran during the infamous hostage crisis that followed a violent regime change in that country. Part of that game’s inspration comes directly from his resume.
During a visit to his homeland six months after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, Khonsari found himself mobbed by teenagers in the small villager of Gombad after word spread that he’d worked on the PS2 hit.
There’s not much retail infrastructure in Iran but that wasn’t really an obstacle with regard to getting games. “Iran has no copyright laws,” Khonsari explains. “It’s all black market. So you can buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto for $1. You can buy anything for $1. And Iranians are hardcore gamers. It’s a huge gaming community. What’s amazing is that it’s not gender-specific. I was talking to girls like 16 years olds who were throwing lines back at me from San Andreas.“
It’s a given that gamers in Gombad—a small community in Iran’s northeast region near the Turkmenistan border—would seize on the opportunity to peer at American culture through the PC version of GTA: SA. But it was the things they enjoyed most that surprised Khonsari.
“What was amazing was they weren’t necessarily drawn to what the media and the critics always attacked about GTA games. The sex, nudity or the violence… none of that stuff was a big deal to them,” he relates. Instead, it was the more mundane parts of San Andreas that resonated.
“They said it was a great venue for them to just listen to music, which is harder for them to do. And they can’t just hop into a car and go places, either,” he continues. “So they were like, “I just drive around in my car and listen to music. And it’s wonderful.” They really got into the everyday kind of things you could do in the game, like being able to go and get your hair cut. We put these things in the game because we believe that these are part of our activities in our daily lives. We take for granted that these are part of our activities in our daily lives.”
When I mentioned that such a level of personal freedom must seem like a fantasy to players like the ones he met in Gombad, Khonsari agreed. “For them, it’s a hyper version of kids who live in the suburbs and what they think the city’s like. In this particular situation these guys are going, ‘I get to make choices.’ And, on top of that, look at the power and strength I have as a woman playing as this character. It’s not gender-specific. It’s not limited by who I am. It’s my journey because I get to control that journey. I might be the shell of this person that I’m playing, which is CJ. But my desire is what’s shaping this experience.”
“The fact that CJ was black had a huge implication over there, too,” offers Khonsari. “Because it wasn’t the white character that’s being pushed forward. And they’re like, “Wow, there’s a sense of openness. They’ve taken their main character and they’ve made him black. That’s amazing.”
Khonsari says that his experience in Gombad drove home something he always knew in his gut, which is that games can make foreign countries and cultures feel alive in a way that other mediums can’t achieve. I’ll have more about how he hopes to do just that for Iran with 1979 tomorrow.
Former New York Mets star and self-styled financial guru Lenny Dykstra has agreed to plead guilty to three of 15 federal bankruptcy fraud charges he was facing, according to a plea deal unsealed Thursday.
As part of the agreement, Dykstra has acknowledged he took more $200,000 of assets out of a home and other locations as he struggled to battle numerous creditors.
Dykstra has agreed to plead guilty to bankruptcy fraud, concealment of assets, and money
laundering. He could face up to 20 years in prison, but is likely to be sentence to far less because of his plea.
According to agreements, Dykstra sold sports memorabilia from the attic of his Ventura County mansion. Dykstra acknowledged depriving creditors of at least $200,000 but less than $400,000, prosecutors alleged. Typically, a person in bankruptcy can't touch assets that are part of the case so that they are available to repay creditors.
Dykstra helped the New York Mets win the 1986 World Series and later became a celebrity stock picker before his finances dissolved in chaos in 2009. He has racked up numerous criminal charges in recent years.
Nicknamed "Nails" by baseball fans for his raucous style on the diamond, the Garden Grove native turned to bankruptcy court in July 2009 to try to save his lavishly furnished Sherwood Country Club estate, which he bought from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky for $18.5 million at the height of the last housing boom.
Grand Theft Auto IV Publisher: Rockstar Games & Capcom
Developer: Rockstar North & Rockstar Toronto
Genre: Action
ESRB: Mature (17 +)
Platform: PC GamesOverall Rating:2/1001/25
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Grand Theft Auto is arguably one of the most profitable franchises in the video game market. While I’m not sure what this says about society as a whole, in the end all the bad press that the game receives seems to follow the “No Press is Bad Press” rule as each title rockets to a record breaking sales high. But, it’s been a while since a true upgrade to the Grand Theft Auto Series. Ever since GTA3 we’ve seen similar graphics with only a few added game play mechanics. San Andreas did go one step further and offer character customization as well as wide open areas in between the cities, which was really a hit or miss feature. But now, we have it: Grand Theft Auto IV – the next-gen GTA title that’s got euphoria physics and a major graphics overhaul. This game has been hyped endlessly, so let’s just get right in and see what’s going on with it!
The first thing you’ll notice with this game is that the writing has stayed in about the same, comfortable place it’s been all along. You play the story’s “protagonist” (read Murderous Psycho) , Niko and you’ve just immigrated to Liberty City. You find out very early on that your cousin’s romantic stories about how well he was doing are not so accurate and you find yourself quite low on the pecking order. Anyone who’s played a previous GTA game above the third one knows that this is how the story slates progression, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
The game play in this game is much like you’d expect, but now it’s got some really yummy next-gen graphics. First off, the addition of rag doll physics to this game was a must. You can’t have a massively open sandbox game and have no rag doll physics. The physics are powered by the Euphoria motion engine, so they look quite believable and smooth. As you tear across the city you’ll notice a few difficulties however, to this otherwise almost perfect game. For one, the handling on the vehicles is too prone to break traction. You’ll find yourself correcting constantly as your vehicle breaks traction on the simplest of turns. This does get old, but you also learn to compensate for it. The second thing that’s noticeable is that the blur from speeding around in the game makes it very hard to see what is ahead of you. This is intensely frustrating and can give you a headache over time as you fail to be able to make out what’s in the distance like Niko is far sighted.
The audio in GTA IV is no less compelling than any of the other GTA series. The sounds of the city fill the air and make everything seem crisp and alive. All of the voice actors in the game are on par with the last few games. Some of the Russian accented English does get kind of weird, and feels rather weak over time. Other than that though, you’ll definitely be hearing a lot of high quality audio as you run through the city.
Overall, this title is most definitely worthy of the GTA IV franchise and it will be interesting to see where they go from here. It’s also important to note that the PC version will be coming out soon, and it will be interesting if they fix any of the outstanding visual or game play issues in that, or perhaps upgrade them.
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