Nintendo can liberate Iran

Novelist Salman Rushdie has said that Iran can be liberated” by dropping Nintendo consoles and Big Macs from the sky.

The author – known for his controversial 1988 book The Satanic Verses – made the comments in an interview with Big Think, as reported by Game Informer.

If you look at the opponents of the Iranian regime and the green movement in Iran, that clearly represents a young, liberal, modernising spirit,” he said.

They don’t want to live according to the rules that the old grey-beard mullahs set for them, so I think if we want to look at the Muslim world you have to look at it in those ways. You have to look at it as a world in conflict. And what we need to do is to support that modernising positive way of being a Muslim.

I often think that the best way to liberate Iran is just to drop Nintendo consoles from the air. And Big Macs.”

When asked how video games are influencing linear forms of storytelling, Rushdie talked about Red Dead Redemption.

He added: One of the most interesting things to me is the looser structure to the game and how the gamer doesn’t have to follow the main narrative of the game at all.

I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I’ve always thought that one of the things that the internet and the gaming world permits, as a narrative technique, is to not tell the story from beginning to end – but to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can choose between.”