Fares' Ambition

The passion of Josef Fares and his team at Hazelight Studios.

Josef Fares during his tangent on the games and film industry. With Geoff Keighley, awkwardly laughing by his side.

(Note: This excerpt is originally from March 2020. I was taking a film history class where the prompt was to write a brief idea on a potential documentary I'd be interested to making.)

The noun “ambition” described by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is defined as “the desire to achieve a particular end,” or the “desire for an activity or exertion.” Josef Fares is a Swedish-Lebanese former movie director turned video game director who decided to change his line of work after not being satisfied by the movie industry. In December 2017, Fares was given a spot with the host Geoff Keighley to promote his new game titled A Way Out at The Game Awards 2017 with the gaming industry’s high profile developers and movie celebrities in the audience. With 11 million people watching all over the world, Fares used this time to instead rant featuring many “vulgarities” about how making video games was better than making movies and culminates this thought by saying “Fuck the Oscars!” and discussed the controversy surrounding major game publisher Electronic Arts (who was publishing his independent game) with “loot boxes” in their games like FIFA, Madden NFL, and Star Wars, exposing gambling to children for cosmetic items in-game with countries like China requiring companies to show odds for obtaining specific items and later being mentioned in the November 2018 Congressional hearing with Cambridge Analytica's data leak. Fares backed up EA by saying “EA has been very good to my team, all major publishers fuck up sometimes!” and was taking up the show’s time and said “I’m a little jet-lagged. I'm sorry, but I’m a very passionate man, if the whole world tells me my game is shit, I would say: no, it’s not. That’s how much I believe in it!” Making a documentary with this event being at the forefront would create a message I would like to give the audience being that video game development should be taken more seriously even at the same “independent” level as Fares’ game pick-up from a major publisher within the year of his game’s development starting.

Why choose this subject? What message would you try to portray to a potential audience?

I chose this subject because even with the internet joking that Fares was on a drunk tirade and will be put on a blacklist for the 2018 Game Awards, (he was invited back) Mr. Fares demonstrated a level of passion that is rarely seen in any entertainment circle, whether it may be movies or music, Josef Fares was very passionate about his game and wasn’t worried if this would jeopardize the revenue from his publisher mentioning a case that was in headlines in major publications for weeks prior to his rant. I would interview Josef Fares, Geoff Keighley, host of The Game Awards, and Andrew Wilson, CEO of EA. Ethical responsibilities to these interviewees would include that we would mainly discuss the event that occurred in December 2017, focusing on Fares’ rant rather than any loot box discussion also, talking about the rant in a distinctive manner showing a passion in the industry that is rarely seen. The reaction I want from my audience is that the general public still sees video games as “time-wasters” or even “brain-rotting” but should consider looking at the sometimes grueling processes video games may take in development, which isn’t too different from movies nowadays as both can have immense or smaller budgets to convey a message a storyteller wants the world to see.