For You Are Error’s inaugural episode, Nathan speaks to indie developer, speaker, and consultant Rami Ismail about video games’ long history of screwing up Arabic. Why is it such a pervasive issue, and did games inherit it from Hollywood, or did they take their own, equally fraught path to this point? How are mistakes like this symptomatic of a wider Islamophobic culture, and how do they, in turn, help shape that culture? And are things slowly but surely getting better? We discuss all that and more, including a Palestinian game project Rami is helping produce that has a contingency plan in case its creative director gets massacred before the end of development. Needless to say, content warning: violence.  

Credits

- Host: Nathan Grayson

- Podcast Production & Ads: Multitude

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About The Show

You Are Error is Aftermath’s podcast about common misconceptions in and around video games. 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 want and need. 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. Regardless, the goal is not to chide or condescend, but to explain how we got here and what it all means – both for games themselves and for culture more broadly. Games matter. Let’s start treating them that way.