The Washington Post - 20.10.2019

(Darren Dugan) #1

E16 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019


video games


BY ALEX ANDREJEV

His surroundings are so much
different now. Lual Mayen sits in a
modern office space, set in a
trendy Washington neighborhood
that teems with beer gardens and
Michelin-star restaurants. He en-
joys the comfort of leather furni-
ture and a fiber-optic infrastruc-
ture. Cold brew coffee comes on
tap, and the water, once such a
scarce commodity, is citrus-in-
fu sed. The designer threads he
wears can be traced to his home-
land, but he wears them with an
American swagger befitting of a
CEO.
There was a time, though, when
thoughts of success w ere t rumped
by those of survival. Mayen spent
most of his young l ife doubting he
would live to see the next day. He
never had enough food. His
friends were conscripted as child
soldiers. Bombs regularly fell
from t he sky.
As a newborn in his parents’
arms, Mayen endured a 225-mile
trek from his war-torn home in
southern Sudan to a refugee camp
in northern Uganda. His two older
sisters died from illness while
making the journey. Though he
was too young to remember them,
he still finds ways to honor their
memory.
“We are five in my... we are
seven in my family,” Mayen cor-
rects himself when asked of t hem.
Mayen was born into war, but
his mission is peace. And the jour-
ney that began his life has
stretched in an almost unfathom-
able direction. Now 24, he is a
video game developer living in the
United States, leading his own
company and using the experi-
ences from his past to inform his
products: games aimed at peace-
building and conflict resolution.
“That’s the thing i n life,” Mayen
says. “If you’re going through
something hard and you survive,
the next thing i s, how do you come
out of that? How do you utilize
that opportunity to make your life
better?”
Mayen is in the process of
launching his company, Junub
Games, and programming its lat-
est product: a peace-building
game called Salaam. He pro-
grammed the first version of Sa-
laam, which means “peace” i n Ar-
abic, while still living as a refugee.
Mayen, like the other children in
the camp, played soccer, looked
for food in the bush and hid un-
derground from the nightly
bombs launched by the Sudanese
government that residents called
“antelope.”
In t he game’s n ew v ersion, play-
ers adopt the r ole of a refugee who
must flee falling bombs, find wa-
ter and gain energy points to en-
sure the character’s s urvival as the
player’s country journeys from a
war-torn present into a peaceful


existence. If the p layer’s c haracter
runs out of energy, the player is
prompted to buy more food, water
and medicine for their character
with real-world money. The mon-
ey goes beyond the game to ben-
efit a living refugee through
Junub’s p artnerships w ith v arious
nongovernmental organizations.
Salaam exists in a distinctive
category in the gaming world, but
one experts believe can have a
legitimate impact on conflict reso-
lution as the video game industry
grows. More than 8 in 10 teen-
agers say they own a gaming con-
sole or have access to one, and 90
percent of teens say they play
video games on a computer, game
console o r cellphone, according to
a 2018 Pew Center survey.
“[Gaming is] becoming this
ubiquitous way that people are
interacting with each other,” s aid
Leo Olebe, Facebook’s global di-
rector of g ames partnerships, who
connected with Mayen at t he 2018

Game Awards. “When you have
those moments of teaching p eople
how to interact in a civil manner,
in a respectful manner, in a way
that promotes peace and conflict
resolution versus tearing the
world apart, that’s where it’s all
going to start.”
Olebe said he thinks Mayen is
“leading the way” in the social
impact gaming category, but it is
not the only game with an empa-
thy-building or educational el-
ement that has shown a tangible
effect. A 2006 third-person shoot-
er game called Re-Mission fea-
tured a player traveling through a
human body as a nanobot destroy-
ing cancer cells. The game, de-
signed for young cancer patients,
had a measured impact on the
self-efficacy and knowledge of
players and, according to a 2008
study, resulted in improved treat-
ment adherence in adolescents
and young adults u ndergoing can-
cer therapy.
Through its in-game transac-
tions, Mayen’s game may offer a
real-world benefit for refugees. It
also s eeks to educate its players on
the trying life he and his family
endured.

Laptop that ‘fell from heaven’
Even while enduring the strug-
gles of the refugee camp, Mayen

had a unique ability to entertain
his peers. His mother, Nyantet
Daruka, recalled the shadow pup-
pet shows her son performed for
other residents of the camp when
he was 9.
“[Lual] would go and cut boxes
and put white paper on top of
them, and then get a light and put
it behind,” Daruka said during an
interview via Skype that Mayen
translated from her native Dinka.
“People would come from all over
the refugee camp. More than 100
people would sit in our compound
to watch Lual. It was a form of
television a nd a form of entertain-
ment.”
Mayen saw his first computer a t
age 12, a laptop at a refugee regis-
tration c enter t hat he thought “fell
from heaven.” He begged his
mother for one and she initially
laughed at the request. There was
not enough food to feed her fam-
ily. How could she purchase a
laptop? But Daruka thought back
to the boxes and the shadow pup-
pets.
“It was one of the signs that
showed whatever I invested in,
Lual would be able to focus and
make something out of it,” she
said.
Daruka also wanted some-
thing that would help her son
learn a nd would r educe the stress
of living in the camp, s he said. For
three years she worked sewing
clothes to save enough money to
buy her son a $300 l aptop. Mayen
said he cried when he received
the gift.
“I started blaming myself,” he
said. “There was no power to
charge it. There was no one to
train me. Was I just going to keep
it in my r oom, like in a museum o r
something? Again I thought about
it and I was like, if my mother can
work for three years to get the
money, why not me? Why can’t I
[find a way to] use i t?”
Determined to reward his
mother’s sacrifice, Mayen walked
three hours every day to an Inter-
net cafe t o charge the c omputer. In
the camp, he carried the laptop
around with him, keeping it hid-
den in a backpack so it would not
be stolen by others or confiscated
by his teachers. He t aught himself
English, learned graphic design
programs and became proficient
in programming by watching tu-
torials a friend f rom Kampala pro-
vided on a flash drive.
When he began to develop his
own game, he wanted to make
something h is friends c ould play.
“I distributed the first game to
the refugees in the camp,” Mayen
said. “Because my main focus was
to make a video game to give to the
refugees so they have something
to entertain them, something
where they were able to come
together and l earn or play.”
Mayen developed his first, mo-
bile version of Salaam in 2016. In
that version, players tapped
bombs falling from the sky to dis-
solve them w ith a cloud of “peace”
before they reached the village
below. Mayen posted a link to the
game o n his Facebook page, which
was picked up and shared among
the international gaming commu-
nity. H e was invited to speak about
the game and c onnect with i ndus-
try professionals in other parts of
Africa. Ultimately, it launched
him on his path to the United
States.

Opportunity at World Bank
In 2017, Mayen was invited to
serve as a consultant f or the World
Bank and was granted a G visa to
move t o the United S tates. He t hen
connected with managers at We-
Work Labs and joined an incuba-
tor program that provides him
with business mentorship and re-
sources to grow h is company. H e is
now working to launch his game
through various s ponsorships and
partnerships, including one with
NBA player Luol Deng of the Min-
nesota Timberwolves. Deng, who
is from what is now South Sudan,
discovered Junub Games online
and reached out to Mayen, in-
spired by Mayen’s mission to pro-
mote peace i n his home country.
The partnership with Deng is a
big step for Junub Games, a com-
pany that consists of Mayen and a
handful of others who contribute
to his code. Mayen is aiming to
have Salaam ready to launch in
December, determined to grow
the category of social i mpact gam-
ing to give back t o his community.
“Peace is something that is built
over time,” he said. “It’s not about
people coming together and sign-
ing cease-fires and so on. It’s a
generation of change. It’s a change
of mind-set. It’s a change of atti-
tude t oward each o ther.”
Personal affairs have kept May-
en busy in recent months. He has
been assisting his family with its
recent move to Canada by helping
them complete immigration pa-
perwork and sending money for
application fees and arranging
transportation to interviews.
Mayen said his family applied
nine o r 10 times over the course of
12 years until they were granted
permanent resettlement t his year.
Although h e is based in the United
States, Mayen urged them to apply
for Canadian rather than U.S. resi-
dence because he thought the im-
migration process would be easi-
er.
“If the Canadian government
had not accepted us, it was going
to be so hard for us,” Daruka said.
“We are so thankful to the Cana-
dian government for opening
these doors for u s as refugees.”
It’s been two years since Mayen
has seen his family in person,
though he calls his mother every
night to check in with her. His
mother, father, two younger
brothers and two young nieces
were able to make the move to
Canada. His brothers, Dng, 19,
and Manyok, 17, recently started
school. They want to study com-
puter engineering. Daruka said
they will be better off than her
eldest son since they will receive
more schooling than he did. Edu-
cation, she said, has always been
an important part of creating a
better future for her children. It’s
why she b ought h er s on a comput-
er, and why it wasn’t so hard to let
him go away to America.
“I never knew he was going to
be who he was today,” Daruka
said. “I was just being a mom to
him. I was just working hard for
him. Because life changes. Life
changes sometimes.”
[email protected]

This story appeared online at
Launcher, a new website covering
video game-related news and analysis
from The Washington Post. You can
visit Launcher at washingtonpost.com/
launcher.

From


reality as


refugee to


games for


peace


Mother’s gift in Uganda


camp inspired journey


to become CEO in D.C.


PHOTOS BY SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Former Sudanese
refugee Lual Mayen,
24 , has turned his
experience growing
up in a war-zone
camp in Uganda into
a peace-building
video game titled
Salaam, above, which
means “peace” in
Arabic. Players adopt
the role of a refugee
who must flee falling
bombs, find water
and gain energy
points to ensure the
character’s survival
as the player’s
country journeys
from a war-torn
present into a
peaceful existence.

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