Arash Jafari is a rare bird at Gamescom, Europe’s biggest video games fair. He is an Iranian creator hoping to make a splash with his Persian warrior Garshap at an event dominated by Americans, Japanese and Europeans.
With his checkered shirt, beard and pony tail, it was only his nationality that set Arash Jafari apart from other exhibitors at the industry show that ran from Thursday until yesterday in the German city of Cologne.
Jafari’s story began on a college campus, at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.
With a basketball teammate who had also studied in California, he founded a company that developed professional software.
Because of their love of video games, the pair invested profits from that company into creating Garshasp, an adaptation of the US video game Gods of War, that has a Persian warrior as its star.
In a dark, medieval universe that resembles many video games on the market, Garshasp must battle a series of bloody monsters and is armed with an array of bladed weapons.
The “game has to be fun,” said Jafari, who acknowledged he had collaborated with Iranian ratings’ authorities to get the game launched.
“As with the music, there are red lines,” he said.
His hero fights only monsters for example because it is forbidden to kill other human beings, even if they are not real.
Another video game producer, Amir Salmazadeh, who sells educational content for very young players, skirted the Islamic veil issue by using only children or animals in his work.
RATINGS COMMISSION
In Iran, the ESRA commission works with psychologists and sociologists to rate video games according to their “conformity with the Iranian and Islamic cultures.”
Its logos, which closely resemble those of US counterpart ESRB, authorize the most benign games for those at least three years old, and the most sensitive for those who are at least 25 years old and married.
“Porn and drugs are forbidden,” as is alcohol, unless associated with an evil entity, said Behrouz Minaei, managing director of the Iran National Foundation of Computer Games.
“We are working for better quality in video games,” he said.
Iran has 35 design studios, a fledgling industry of which the government sometimes has “a negative point of view,” Minaei added.
SEEKING INVESTORS
“We are here to find investors. Our games, based on Iranian history, are unique,” he added.
The Iranians are present for the second year at Gamescom, which bills itself as Europe’s biggest trade fair for interactive games and entertainment, and have presented their work at a fair in Dubai.
Happy to be presenting his work in Europe, Jafari said he hoped “to show Westerners the true culture of Iran, not the distorted one they can see in the media.”
Western children wanted to be exposed to different kinds of video games, he added.
In Cologne, he said he had made contacts with industry figures from Britain, Germany and Italy, but had not signed any contracts so far.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
DEFENDING DEMOCRACY: Taiwan shares the same values as those that fought in WWII, and nations must unite to halt the expansion of a new authoritarian bloc, Lai said The government yesterday held a commemoration ceremony for Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, joining the rest of the world for the first time to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Taiwan honoring V-E Day signifies “our growing connections with the international community,” President William Lai (賴清德) said at a reception in Taipei on the 80th anniversary of V-E Day. One of the major lessons of World War II is that “authoritarianism and aggression lead only to slaughter, tragedy and greater inequality,” Lai said. Even more importantly, the war also taught people that “those who cherish peace cannot
RSS