"It's really hard to take this throughline of peace and conflict resolution and carry it through everything that you do. "In the games business, it's really easy to fall back on orcs and goblins," says Olebe. He's the global director of games partnerships at Facebook, which co-developed the Global Gaming Citizen category for the Game Awards. Most notably, more than 26 million people watched via livestream as Mayen was named a Global Gaming Citizen at the 2018 Game Awards in Los Angeles, for using gaming to promote "positivity" and community.Įven within that category Mayen is a standout, says Leo Olebe. Mayen shared the game on his Facebook page, and that's when he started attracting international attention. Players gather resources like food and medicine while running away from violence to stay alive. 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. That was the inspiration for the mobile phone game, Salaam, which he spent the following months creating. This is war." He started to wonder what if, instead of a game that encourages players to take violent actions, "I could make the same thing happen, but for peace and conflict resolution?" Mayen says he was drawn to the game, which is famously violent, but "I felt like this is what is actually happening in my country. That same friend also gave him a copy of his first video game: Grand Theft Auto. He couldn't access the Internet, but a friend gave him coding tutorials loaded onto a flash drive.
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He eventually found a generator in a distant part of the refugee camp and says he walked three hours each direction to get there every day. His first hurdle to mastering the computer was simple but significant: finding a place to charge it. Also, he wasn't sure where to begin learning to use it. He worried that if he didn't take advantage of her gift, his mother would take his or his brothers' desires less seriously. Mayen was astonished and grateful for the gift, but he says it also came with a downside. After three years she saved $300 and surprised him with a laptop. Mayen says his mother quietly began putting away part of her earnings from mending clothes for other refugees at the camp.
'What are you going to do with a computer? Who's gonna train you?' But because she was a mother to me, she didn't discourage me." When he eventually confessed his dream to his mother, he says she laughed at him. The latest version of the game - called "Salaam," which means "peace" in Arabic - will be released on Thursday.īut before that could happen, Mayen had to get his mom to take him seriously. 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. 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. 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. Lual Mayen, a video game developer based in Washington, D.C., remembers the first time he saw a computer.
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