Navid Khavari writes hit video games such as Far Cry 6, but only wants to talk about music | Canada Voices

Each month, generations reporter Ann Hui takes readers along to hang out with fascinating Canadians – regular people and celebrities, teens to seniors – joining them in their favourite pastime for up-close and candid conversations.

Writing a song is not like writing a video game. There’s a structure to writing music. A standard format to follow. 1-4-5-1. Verse, verse, chorus, verse.

But video games are different. They need adventure and objective. Characters and backstories. An entire world created out of sheer imagination.

Just ask Navid Khavari. Like many kids, he dreamt of becoming a musician. But, like many adults, he found that life got in the way. He ended up making video games instead.

Today, the 42-year-old Mr. Khavari is a creative director at Ubisoft Toronto, where his job is to build the worlds that millions of gamers immerse themselves in – games such as the popular Far Cry series, and his most recent, Star Wars Outlaws.

He’s what Geppetto was to Pinocchio – the wizard behind the curtain of some of the world’s most high-profile video games.

It’s a snowy Monday afternoon and we’re sitting in a rehearsal space. This was where he wanted to meet – this grubby place in Toronto’s west end where musicians rent rooms by the hour. I wanted to talk about creativity, where he gets his ideas for games. But Mr. Khavari was mostly interested in talking about music.

He untangled his guitar cables as he explained. His main creative outlet is in the world of games. But music – whether it’s at home playing his guitar, or at this studio, with his buddies and bandmates Steve Yee and Owen McIntosh – is often what stimulates that creativity.

“Whether it’s writing a song, or in a writers room with the team,” he said, the goal is the same. “It’s all about storytelling.”

Mr. Khavari’s own story begins in Iran. After the 1979 revolution, his parents fled to England, where he was born. The family moved to Canada a few years later.

Growing up in Binbrook, Ont. – a small town that’s now part of the city of Hamilton, and where his parents ran a restaurant at the mall food court – he was obsessed with two things: music and video games. He was always either playing the guitar, or at his friend’s house gaming – at least, until his parents finally relented and bought him a Super Nintendo.

Right after graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in history and political science, he landed a writing job at a video-game studio, working on an interactive comic based on the TV show Lost Girl. After that, he stayed on at that studio as a game writer. He moved to Ubisoft Toronto in 2010, and has been there ever since, working on projects such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and the Far Cry series.

“There were no schools to learn this at the time,” Mr. Khavari said, referring to the craft of game writing. It was the early 2010s, and video games were still a burgeoning industry. Unlike writing a song, or even a film or TV screenplay, a video game is a choose-your-own-adventure. Every choice a player makes opens up new possibilities. Every decision can lead to different dialogue and outcomes. A film can only have one ending while a video game might have dozens.

“It was a lot of learning on the fly,” he said, “especially the narrative design part.”

It was also in these first years as a video-game writer that he began to notice a pattern. When he was engrossed in a project, he’d work for days without rest. He’d sleep at the office – if he slept at all. He went to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder.

As Mr. Khavari described this, he was still setting up, still tuning his guitar. But he gestured at the rehearsal space around him. Again, this related back to music.

He said there are so many misconceptions about creativity and bipolar disorder.

“When you’re running a high, you feel like it’s a superpower. There’s a beauty in being able to be creative – to be able to generate ideas, and to be fast and on fire.”

But he’s learned that this makes it all the more important to have structure: to balance work with downtime, and to build into his schedule something other than work – like music – that allows him time to rest and recharge.

And, he added, it’s during this time off that he often gets his best ideas.

The inspiration for a video game, he said, can come from something as simple as a single word. For the Star Wars game, it was the word “scoundrel” – the idea of building a game around a rogue villainess. For Far Cry 6, the game he completed right before that, it was the idea of “revolution.” The game is set on a fictional island, based loosely on Cuba, in the midst of a political revolution.

Creating Far Cry 6, he said, was a deeply personal experience. Mr. Khavari’s own parents fled Iran in the revolution because they belonged to the Baha’i religious minority, which faced intense persecution. His grandparents, who stayed in Iran, were imprisoned. His aunt was killed. Revolution was a subject they debated over the dinner table – and the source of many of his family’s traumas.

He wanted to ensure that the game reflected the messy, complicated and brutal realities of revolution. As such, he hired writers from Cuba, who understood the country’s history. And he worked with experts on political instability in the region, who could ensure the story was respectfully told.

“I wanted to make it clear to folks that we were taking this very seriously,” he said, “and not just trying to say, like, ‘Oh, this game’s just fun.’”

Not long after, Mr. Khavari and his bandmates were finally ready to begin playing.

Mr. Khavari briefly listed his musical inspirations. They read like a millennial bingo card: Oasis, Radiohead, Elliott Smith. The soundtrack to the movie Garden State.

He also added a disclaimer. There was a time, he said, where he wrote music because he wanted to be good. He wanted to perform, and impress an audience. He wanted, one day, to win a record deal.

As he began to play, strumming his first few chords, he said the goal has changed.

“I’m not thinking about being good or bad,” he said. “The joy is in creating. That’s its own reward.”