For all that publishers like Ubisoft trumpet from the highest press conference stages how much research they cram into series like Assassin’s Creed, games also get a lot wrong. Years ago, I wrote about how they manage to mangle the concept of vents, for example. Ever since then – during which time I became obsessed with podcasts like You’re Wrong About – I’ve wanted to expand on that idea. And now I am. Introducing my new show, You Are Error.
You Are Error isn’t a series of nitpicky debunkings. As with the aforementioned podcast that inspired it – as well as others like Maintenance Phase, If Books Could Kill, and Factually – my goal is to explore inaccuracies as a means of understanding games, the people who make them, and the culture surrounding them. I hope to use games as a jumping off point to ask the sorts of questions I’d like to see more of in journalism and cultural criticism: Despite all our technology, in what ways have people always been the way they are today? How can we better empathize with each other, despite differing backgrounds or points of view?
Each episode interviews a different guest about something that either games or the people who play them frequently get wrong. It could be something mechanical, like climbing. It could be something born of narrative and world building, like Cyberpunk 2077’s obsession with artificial limbs and exoskeletons, as opposed to what disabled people in the real world actually use. A topic could be fairly lighthearted in nature, like horses, or it could be heavier, like an exploration of how arms manufacturers use games as advertisements.
The show’s name is based on the classic video game meme “I am Error” from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Initially, I just liked how it sounded, but then I did some digging and learned that we got that one wrong as well. For years, people have assumed it was the byproduct of a slapdash English translation, when in reality, it was likely intentional on the part of the game’s original designers. In the Japanese version, there was another character named Bagu, or Bug, giving us a tidy little in-joke: Error and Bug. But in the English version, only Error’s name was translated, while Bagu’s name remained Bagu. Anyway, now you know!
That is not what the first episode of You Are Error is about, though it would have been fitting. What we’ve got instead is, in my opinion, much more interesting and, frankly, important. Today’s topic is Arabic.
I wanted to start here as a statement of intent. Contrary to what some ardently wish to believe, games help shape culture; they impact how we perceive the world and the people around us. So for this first episode, I wanted to trace how something as small as linguistic mistakes in games – symptomatic of studios not caring enough to have people of specific backgrounds in the room – can feed into the sorts of mindsets that allow for, and in some cases even cheer, genocide in Palestine.
My guest is Rami Ismail, an indie developer, speaker, and consultant formerly of Vlambeer, the studio behind Nuclear Throne. Rami has spent his entire career trying to grow the global game development scene and ensure that people who want to make cool shit face as few barriers as possible. He has also consistently called out nonsensical attempts at Arabic in games and pop culture, in hopes that, eventually, things will improve.
They have, kind of, but we’ve still got a long way to go. Rami is currently producing on a Palestinian game project that has an “in case of our creative director getting massacred” contingency plan. That game, Dreams On A Pillow, is based on a true story from the 1948 Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” and just kicked off a crowdfunding drive today.
We talk about that – and much more – in You Are Error’s first episode, which you can listen to below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, please consider leaving a review. It really helps shows find listenerships on those services!
Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this show was very literally made possible by readers and listeners like you; this podcast was one of our subscription goals for 2024, which you all cleared (and then some). So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this. I hope you all enjoy it.
Here are a couple excerpts from our conversation:
Rami: Funnily enough, in the further past, games tended to get this right. This is something I realized later, but Metal Slug had Arabic in it. That Arabic was Arabic. I think to some degree because it was harder to write Arabic in a computer, it was hand drawn. And because it was hand drawn, somebody would draw the thing that they knew they had to draw. The problem with Arabic is, the way computers are created, they were created in the West by Western people. Even when you look at how characters are saved on a character, they’re saved in something called Unicode, which is a standard for saving characters.
Arabic is actually not a default part of that standard. It came in later. Arabic is a little weird in that our characters have to be connected to each other. So if you have a glyph like the letter A, it’s very easy to put the letter A and then the letter B. But in Arabic, if you do B A, then the B will change depending on the A. So these letters now need to change shape and connect. That system of writing is just fundamentally not what computers were built for. On top of that, computers were not built for anything going from right to left. Computers were created for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 in that direction, left to right.
So Arabic is this massive stash of complications for computers just because they were not set up for us. Case in point: Microsoft Office did not formally support Arabic until five or six years ago. You could write Arabic in it, but it was not formally supported. It only kinda worked. There was a unique version of Office for the Middle East – a separate version.
When people started relying on computers more, Arabic went wrong more and more often because they weren’t built for that. Photoshop still doesn’t properly work with Arabic. So if you’re a game developer and you’re like “Here’s the Arabic text. Get it from Word, paste it in Photoshop,” you won’t know that it’s broken. An Arab could see it immediately. They’d look and be like “Nope, that’s wrong.” But if you’re not an Arab and you’re just copy-pasting things right to left, and something comes out [you think] “That’s probably right.” Because you’ve never had to think for a moment that your language is so unimportant to the people creating computers that copy-paste doesn’t work. Imagine having to copy-paste a sentence in English and then having to check whether it’s still the right sentence.
Nathan: It’s an extra step that you don’t even consider.
Rami: Right, and so if you’re working in a language you don’t understand in an alphabet you don’t understand – that you don’t really know the shape language of the language – then when you do that copy-paste, it’s wrong, and you just put it in there. So with that should have come an extra step of “OK, now that we’re creating these games and using this technology, we should check whether it’s right.”
But nobody did because Arabs were always the bad guys. We’re not the point of the game. We’re not the main character. We’re not meant to be the main character. We’re the foil. We’re the one that gets beat up and destroyed so that the heroes can have their hero moments. They don’t even use our actual countries. They made up a new country. We jokingly call it “Arabistan.” It’s a vague Arab-esque territory where we can just blow up as many Arabs as we want.
If we’re not the point, nobody goes and checks. That’s the part that you start noticing, and that’s the part that I started noticing. This was everywhere. Every action game has levels in the Middle East where the budget has clearly been spent on making sure my fellow Arabs fall over in realistic ways, and there was not a $100 voucher for somebody who could check the Arabic. There was no effort made whatsoever. That starts hurting.
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Nathan: Recently you tweeted about a game you’re producing on, and you specifically said that you have an “in case of our creative director getting massacred” contingency plan – which is one of those things that even on paper boggles the mind. You’re like “I can’t believe I’m seeing these words.” How did that come about, and what does that look like?
Rami: In this case we’re talking about a game developer by the name of Rasheed Abueideh, who is a Palestinian game developer who lives in the West Bank. He’s best known for a Unity game he made in 2014 called Liyla and the Shadows of War. It’s a small little Unity game where you play a child that is surviving the 2014 invasion of Gaza – when Israel also invaded Gaza. There were a few notable moments in [that invasion] that stood out and gained international recognition. One of them was the killing of four children – by an Israeli missile strike – that were playing football on a beach. And then the use of white phosphorus, which is a war crime under international law. A few moments like that.
So Rasheed made a sidescrolling platformer where you were a little girl trying to survive all that. And that game did well for the little freeware thing that it was. It struck around the world as a perspective that hadn’t been seen before – and a perspective that people could now embody for a moment that they had never embodied before. What does it feel like to be on the other side of all that?
Obviously that game got banned by Apple and a bunch of other companies that said it was too political. I met Rasheed around that time, and I had contacts in the industry at that point, and I sent them games where, like, you play as an Israeli missile with an Israeli flag attached to it, where you strike targets, and I was like “Are these not political?” They were like “That’s a fair point. We don’t want to reinstate this as a game because it’s about the news, so we’ll put it as a news app.” I was like “So you’re gonna put Call of Duty as a news app?” Eventually they sort of relented and just put it back as a game. But it required somebody in the industry to step in and go like “Hey y’all, come on.”
So me and Rasheed became friends, and he left the games industry because [there was] no money for a Palestinian, no funding for a Palestinian, nobody is interested in what a Palestinian has to say or do in the games industry because it’s too risky. It’s too dangerous to get involved with a topic that complex, apparently. So Rasheed opened a nut roastery, and he did that for a few years. Liyla and the Shadows of War kept having an impact. So when the 2018 invasion of Gaza happened, there were fundraisers from the games industry as well, and Liyla and the Shadows of War was very front and center for that. And then for every subsequent invasion, the game has sort of regained some popularity.
So for Rasheed, when it comes to making the world a better place, the thing that he has made with the most impact in his life – more than anything he has created or done in his life – Liyla and the Shadows of War is the thing that has had the most global impact. So when the current genocide started happening, Rasheed said “I want to make a video game.” And he’s been thinking about it for a while, but he didn’t want to make it about now. He wanted to make it about how it started, so it’s a game about the Nakba in 1948. So we went around and started looking for funding, and every single publisher turned us down. There was one publisher that sort of touched it because they have experience in games with similar themes, but eventually passed on it because it was not a genre fit. But we’ve been working on this for about a year now.
But as the genocide started expanding and terrorists and colonists started attacking the West Bank, we came to the conclusion that Rasheed publicly making a piece of media that might oppose the narrative of how Israel was created will put him in actual danger – him and his family and his children. So we had to come up with a plan for that. If we’re gonna be raising funding, if we have all this work on this game, if Rasheed is captured or killed or maimed to a degree where he can’t continue work on the game, we need a production plan. We do need to think about what happens. Does the game just die? Would that not be the final insult to Rasheed’s life if the game he’s making ends because he was killed?
We started setting up plans. We have documents and files and have mandated certain people on the team to continue certain parts of the game, and then we’ll bring it together under someone else. But yeah, we have an actual plan in case our creative director gets killed.
Nathan: With that in mind, not to go too deep into it, but I would assume that that probably necessitated a very clear idea of what the vision is for this game, so that if, god forbid, somebody has to take over, they can do it and see his vision through – as opposed to having to do a lot of guesswork?
Rami: Days and days of conversation and plotting things out and talking about what it means – why he’s taking a certain symbol or moment, why he really wants to include this or that. Really understanding where he was coming from was a big part of that. Normally as a producer in the games industry, you’re focused more on shipping the title than the meaning of the title. You’re the one who’s responsible for keeping everybody else to a timeline. But in this game, I sort of by necessity had to step into the creative role a bit every now and then, just to make sure I understand why we’re doing certain things.
Rasheed really wanted all the dream sequences – which are sort of historical sequences where you play our main character when she’s a child in Palestine before the Nakba – to start and end with you coming home and opening the door with your home key. And so one of the items you always have in your inventory is this key. We asked why he was so obsessed with the key, and he was like “Many Palestinians, when they were displaced in the Nakba, they kept the keys to their home.” Even though they were banned from ever returning to their home, they kept the key as a symbol of “One day we will return to this.”
And I know this. I’ve been told this story many times. But to see somebody use it with that much intent in a game– my brain has never thought about how you can tell stories as an Arab in a game, because I’ve never felt the permission to. Rasheed is beyond asking for permission. He needs help. He needs funding. He has a dream of a game that will allow him to talk about what life must be like as a Palestinian. And I’m Egyptian. I can’t imagine it. As Arabs, we’re the cheapest blood on Earth. But the Palestinians? They’re a different level. They’re being life exterminated. Right now.
Nathan: On a daily basis. In a very visible way.
Rami: On TV. It stopped being news! It’s just “Yep, that’s happening.”
