Lual Mayen, a video game developer based in Washington, D.C., remembers the first time he saw a computer. He was just a kid at the time. It was 2007, and his family was registering for benefits at a refugee camp in Uganda, where they'd settled after fleeing civil war in South Sudan.
He didn't tell anyone at first, but in that moment he knew in his heart that he wanted to learn to code, he says. More than a decade later, Mayen is garnering international recognition from Facebook and the global gaming community for an innovative video game that brings players into the life of a refugee.
That was the inspiration for the mobile phone game, Salaam, which he spent the following months creating. In the game, players take on the identity of a refugee escaping a conflict zone and have to gather resources like food and medicine while running away from violence to stay alive.
Mayen is now focused on bringing Salaam to a larger audience by releasing an enhanced version on Facebook Instant Games, through the company he created, Junub Games. His vision is to use the game to inspire empathy for refugees. And he says he's working on a charitable component so that when players make in-app purchases of extra resources in the game, a portion would go to a grassroots organization at a refugee camp. As people pay to "stay alive" a little longer in the game, they're supporting actual refugees' lives.
Olebe says so-called "social impact games" like Salaam are a category that has the potential to push the industry to expand its definition of success.
"Lual is actually making a difference in this world by inspiring people to be better," he says. "That's a very different and important metric relative to retention rates or lifetime value of a player or other things people talk about more often in the games industry. I don't even know how you place a value on helping somebody better understand the world. He's playing a whole different game altogether."
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