Tag: iran

1979 Revolution
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Being banned in Iran isn’t stopping 1979 Revolution reaching Iranians

1979 Revolution is a game about the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. It came out back in April this year and, two weeks later, the Iranian government announced its plans to ban it. Specifically, Iran’s National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) planned to ban any website or individuals selling the game, to block 1979 Revolution‘s homepage, and over 30 more websites that even mention it. “Games like this can poison the minds of the youth and young adults about their country by means of false and distorted information, and also damage their spirits,” said the NFCG to the Tehran Times. The Iranian government plans to…
Engare
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Engare, a videogame about the mathematical beauty of Islamic art

Iranian game maker Mahdi Bahrami is the kind of person who answers a question with more questions. I don’t think he can stop himself. “What will happen if I add a short line to one of the tiles in a mosque?” he asks me. “If we take into account the tiling rules of the mosque, what would the whole wall look like after we add the line? What if we change the rules? What would the mosque ceiling look like?” I don’t know. But for Bahrami, that’s entirely the point—his upcoming puzzle game Engare is about exploring this unknown space and…
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Graphic novel tackles issues of contemporary Iranian identity

In an international context, Iran is often thought of as a news headline, or a generalized and vague region in the “Middle East.” When the youth in Iran make statements about pop culture and their relationship to it, like the video of Iranian youth dancing to Pharrell’s hit Happy, it immediately becomes an item of politicized news. However, with recent movies like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), described by director Ana Lily Amirpour as the first “Iranian vampire spaghetti western,” Iran gets a chance at an international identity without the typical assumptions or politics. That said, Amirpour is American-Iranian, rather than a…
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1979 Revolution remembers the Black Friday massacre in animated short

On September 8th, 1978, the Iranian government opened fire on a large group of protestors in a public square in the country’s capital of Tehran, killing almost 100 and wounding several more. The event came to be known as Black Friday. It was one of the pivotal moments in the burgeoning Iranian Revolution, one of the first and most devastating examples of the Shah’s abuse of military power against his people during a time of civil unrest. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the last. “If I sit silently, I have sinned.”  The upcoming game 1979 Revolution will begin its story at…