By their very nature, video games excel at fostering empathy.
While I had less to gain from its educational elements — this was a historical event that my dad experienced first-hand, and one that I had been acutely aware of from an early age — the idea of other people learning something about Iran’s misunderstood history and culture excited me. Americans are familiar with the Iran Hostage Crisis, but few are as well-versed in the events that lead up to it — a result of Western-centric history curriculums and the ease with which we tend to always position ourselves as the Good Guy. By their very nature, though, video games excel at fostering empathy. They put us in the shoes of people other than ourselves, and ask us to explore, make decisions, and face consequences as those people. The ability to engage directly with a game’s world, story, and characters helps us identify with these things in a way unique to games, and that’s exactly what 1979 Revolution sought to do.“
As 1979 Revolution’s protagonist Reza (incidentally, the name of my late grandfather), I traversed the virtual streets of Tehran, interacting with student dissidents from all different backgrounds and taking pictures of significant events with Reza’s camera. Every snapshot brought up a real photograph that corresponded with the in-game scene: marchers filling the streets for miles, striking oil workers, a fallen statue of the Shah.
1979 Revolution is bold in its exploration of truths, even hard ones, sewn into the fabric of the place where my father grew up.
As someone who was born in the United States and has never traveled to Iran, I’ve only been able to connect to my dad’s childhood and teen years through stories and photographs. But technology has played a small part too. With Google Earth and Google Maps, my dad can zoom down to the streets of his old neighborhood in Tehran, a place he hasn’t been in over three decades, giving me a nostalgic city tour of his old house, his old school, his younger self’s hang-out spots.“
But a video game can offer certain things that a satellite image or a static map of a place can’t, like context, tone, and perspective. 1979 Revolution is bold in its exploration of truths, even hard ones, sewn into the fabric of the place where my father grew up — truths that you can’t trace on a map. It’s an acknowledgement of personal experiences, which is a uniquely special thing in interactive mediums. I’ve been having fun seeing my home city of San Francisco condensed into video game form in Watch Dogs 2, but to see a city in the country of Iran, so abused by popular media, come alive as the focus of a video game is profound.
I hope for more games like 1979 Revolution: Black Friday in the future.
1979 Revolution nails more than just the place, but the culture too. The accents of its largely Iranian-American voice actors are refreshingly real. Strewn among the English-language dialogue are bits of Farsi (the Persian language), which I’ve grown up hearing my whole life. As Americans, we are so used to hearing languages like this as conveyors of hostile “death to America!” sound bites, but in the home of my youth, Farsi was as common as English. It’s a poetic language that Westerners are conditioned to hear as angry and foreign, so it was heartening to hear it spoken by protagonists. Just as it was heartening to stumble on 1979 Revolution’s many collectible tidbits of trivia on Persian culture, which covered everything from Iranian pop singers like Googoosh (whose dusty cassettes my dad still has in his office) to the etiquette of chai.“
1979 Revolution: Black Friday isn’t a perfect game, but as an educational experience and an exercise in empathy, it’s one I won’t forget. Playing through it with my dad was a highlight of my year. I hope that anyone who isn’t connected to the events it portrays still has something valuable to learn from its story. And I hope, too, for there to be more games like it in the future, that explore someone else’s overlooked story — stories we could all afford to learn more about. Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.