A few weeks ago, James played Revolution 1979,
and I think this little indie game might have just cracked the case on how to make a documentary game.
[Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM]
It's got no free-roaming camera, you control like a tank,
the graphics are poor, the action sequences feel more distracting than tense or meaningful,
and yet, we're still gonna talk about it because, for all of that, it's an important game.
Now I won't say that it's a bad game, or that it's an unplayable game.
In fact, James is very glad for his three hours with it,
but I want to start with its faults because acknowledging those simply goes to
show us how much further people might run with the idea behind this game.
The idea of a game as documentary.
Revolution 1979 is a telltale-esque game set in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
But, unlike so many games, the setting here isn't just window dressing.
Here, the setting is the point. Living through and walking through the events as they unfold over those pivotal few days in
Iranian History is why this game exists. But, unlike so many games that might earn the label 'edutainment,'
this was something different. Rather than teaching you about the events explicitly, you instead ride along, taking on the persona of a
photojournalist having just returned to his native Iran on the eve of the revolution.
In doing this, it provides us an opportunity to present the player with far more than mere facts.
It presents a glimpse into the culture and an opportunity to see many sides of an incredibly complex issue.
As designers, I think there's a lot we can take away from this.
Especially from how they chose to present their narrative and the character they chose to have the player inhabit as
they walk through this tumultuous world. First and foremost, unlike many games, They didn't put the player at the center of things.
You won't ever be meeting the Shah or Ayatollah Khomeini, and you won't be shaping major events.
That is essential because in a game that plays like a documentary, in a game that's about observing a period or an event, the player can't change those events.
They can't fundamentally alter history. But, since agency
is such a big part of the power of games, they had to take another approach.
And so, instead by dropping you in a much more local, much more personal story of somebody who just
happens to be living through those events, they were still able to imbue the players choices with a sense of meaning.
How do you deal with a parent who might believe the revolution is wrong?
How do you defend a brother who's working for the military during all that?
These sorts of choices still feel incredibly meaningful as a player, and can actually have different outcomes as they don't affect the overarching history.
Beyond that, they also help to shed more light on what a traumatic and divisive event this really was for the people living through it.
So, unlike a god's-eye perspective on history, or even the perspective of the superhuman adventurer or the soldier
we so often control in games, this more personal narrative helps to imbue the player with a
sense of the excitement and the terror that surrounded those events. And while in Revolution, it's pretty clear they couldn't
build out all of the impacts of the players' choices that perhaps they wanted to, this idea of narrative
built around minor characters that aren't part of the historical record is a great one.
It lets player decision-making change the game without changing the history.
And yet, even though they set you up as a character outside the historical record, by making him a photojournalist,
they present a reason for him to be at many of the major events. And more than that, by making the character an Iranian,
it allows the developers to expose the players to elements of the culture.
Small things, things we don't think about and that aren't often put down in history books.
Things like the ritual of serving tea, or a love of traditional Iranian Street bread.
Things that give the player a better more well-rounded perspective on the setting
and the events that happened there. Rather than simply presenting these events as history,
they bring in all of these little elements of the culture and show that through all of this,
the people of Iran were vibrant and alive. And by presenting us with a character that loves these things,
it grounds the player and helps to make them feel present in the event rather, than like they're reading from a history textbook.
But perhaps most importantly, by giving the player friends and relatives in the country and by setting the gameplay
just before a major historical turning point, when anything still seems possible,
the developers set up a situation where characters within the game can debate both sides of what's going on
It's so hard to make that feel natural in any medium, and yet, it provides such a powerful springboard for carrying
the conversation beyond the textbook or the game where you first learned about it.
Which is why, while other games have at times perhaps skirted the idea of a documentary
experience, Revolution 1979 gives us a sort of blueprint for how it can be done right.
Unlike with film, games can't simply capture events verbatim.
So for some time, there's been this question of how we participate in this type of historical examination.
It was never a question of bias, or of not presenting things perfectly accurately,
and that happens all the time in film too. It was more a question of how to allow the player to make meaningful choices
while still dealing with a fixed world and fixed events, like in a documentary.
And while 1979 isn't perfect by any means, it certainly shows that games can do that.
And because they showed us that the solution might come from the narrative rather than the mechanics,
it's my hope that this opens us up to a slew of new games exploring this same genre with a host of different mechanics and approaches.
I think we have just begun to see how games might record a moment in time.
And I very much look forward to playing through other examinations of events in our world.
See you next week!
[Outro Music: "Depths of Phendrana" by Buoy feat. Stephan Wells]
Subtitle Author: Caden Choi, Extra Credits Fan