'No micro transactions, no bullshit': Josef Fares on Split Fiction and the joy of co-op video games

Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, "It doesn't matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that's refreshing – but isn't it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares' adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war. Twenty years, five feature films and three video games later, Zozo was just one of many cathartic endeavours for Fares. "I've always been a storyteller," he says. "When I was young, I'd draw my own comics.