SPECIAL REPORT

Why Mahdi Bahrami believes his beautiful puzzle game Engare might be taken down from Steam any day

In October last year, Mahdi Bahrami released Engare, a beautiful puzzle game about mathematics and geometry. But he was afraid. He was worried that it would be removed from Steam the next day. “I worked on this game for a few years, and it would be so painful if that happened,” he says. What if he’d never get the proceeds from its sales? What if no one would be able to play it?

Bahrami is worried because he’s Iranian. He is technically unable to sell games on Steam because of trade sanctions the US has imposed on Iran since 1979. And he can’t officially be paid the money Engare has earned because most Iranian banks can’t interface with US ones. “The money is not directly coming to Iran, so from Steam’s point of view they are paying someone in the US,” Bahrami says. “I didn’t have any option, but I’m waiting for the day I receive an email saying that they discovered I’m in Iran and they remove it.”

Engare is quite unlike any game you’ve played before. It’s part Spirograph-like art tool and part puzzle, and it asks you to find patterns in movement. Levels present you with rotating circles and swinging joints which, when you plot a point on them, then draw out lines that build up into repeating geometric shapes as the components move. As a puzzle game, each level has you figuring out where to plot your point in order to draw a specific shape. “For Engare the puzzles were not about how I could make them complicated, it was more that I wanted to show an interesting idea to the player,” Bahrami says. It’s an exercise in observation and recognition, and when you get it right you’re rewarded with revelation as the shape iterates over and over, the lines you scribed translating into a beautiful pattern.

It’s strange to think that in today’s massively connected world, in which you can send a message instantly through your phone to anyone on the globe, a game as imaginative and original as this could face such issues being made widely commercially available. But those are the realities of being Iranian, and Bahrami is used to it. He often finds Apple’s App Store will let him download apps on one day and won’t on the next. Every day the rules change, some Engare’s level select screen celebrates decorative geometric forms.

Every day the rules change, some days for better and some days for worse

days for better and some days for worse. “You can’t count on anything here,” he says. “But I released the game five months ago, and it’s okay so far.”

More troubling is the fact that these blocks threaten to obstruct a game that opens doorways into experiencing and understanding the culture of Iran and the Middle East. Engare doesn’t shout about it, but the patterns you draw in it are strongly related to the geometry that makes up traditional Middle Eastern art. “A lot of art and architecture is all about geometry, so you don’t see human faces, because there’s a belief that you shouldn’t draw living creatures,” Bahrami says. “In Europe it’s different, because a lot of its art is about humans, and you see a lot of human statues everywhere. That was the main source of inspiration for Engare, making a game about the abstract ideas we see in the Middle East.”

Exporting Iranian game culture

In Islamic tradition, to draw living creatures is a sin because it’s seen as an attempt to recreate God’s creations. “If artists wanted to express feeling sad, they couldn’t draw a sad human face, so they had to invent a different method of drawing which allows you to feel what they felt. Of course, I think everyone should create anything they want, but it was a good limitation because it made this art special. It helped them make a new language, a different type of artistic expression.” And so in Engare, Bahrami echoes this expressive form, bridging visual art and mathematics. “It really worked for me, because that’s what I think I am good at. I’m not good at writing stories about someone going out to save someone, but I can show ideas about mathematics and make a story out of that, about ideas that start simple and become more complex.”

The result is a game as distinct as the art that inspired it. But Bahrami found releasing it extremely difficult. On a domestic level, Iran has an annual game expo, the Tehran Game Convention, and a domestic PC digital store called Hayoola. But he wanted to make Engare internationally available. “I worry about stuff that other game developers don’t,” he says. The US travel ban on Iranian nationals means he couldn’t personally show it at expos like PAX and GDC (he did go to GDC in 2014 so he could show Engare at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and he wowed the audience). And the uncertainty he faces in making his games broadly commercially available means taking on a team to make bigger projects is far too risky.

It used to make him angry. In 2009 he won a game dev competition, and had problems receiving his $5,000 winnings. In 2010 he went to TGS and couldn’t book a hotel because he can’t have a credit card. But when he decided to move back to Iran, having studied at university in the Netherlands, he resigned himself to the problems he faces. “I knew bad situations would happen, but I’m going to try it and in the worst case scenario, which is not being able to sell my game, I will make it free and maybe a lot of people will try it, and I would be happy.” Alex Wiltshire