Wedged between the once oppressive Taliban regime of the 1990s and the growth of the internet and social media in the 21st Century, Afghanistan’s government has long walked a thin line - trying to balance its religiously conservative population with democratic freedoms.įor Mohammad Akbar Sultanzada, chair of the Afghan Parliament’s Transportation and Telecommunications Commission, the problem with PUBG is not just its violence. In 2008, several Turkish soap operas were taken off air because they did not align with “Afghan religion and culture.” PUBG is not the first form of entertainment to draw ire from the Afghan government. The official reckoned that more than 100,000 people were playing the game across the country at the time. The company, said one official, restricted access to the game just after midnight one day, and subsequently lost 50% of its network’s data traffic. The game’s developer did not respond to an inquiry regarding the number of players in the country.Īnticipating a possible ban of the game by the Afghan government, a major cellphone provider tried to figure out how much its network would be affected. But aside from anecdotal evidence, it’s hard to say how many Afghans play. The website PlayerCounter puts PUBG’s total at around 400 million players worldwide since its release in 2017, on phones, computers and video game consoles. “It distracts me from the city, the attacks, the robberies, the thieves and the crime.” “I get so busy with the game I forget about the world,” he said. Leaning outside Habib’s den, Ali, 23, pointed to the headphones around his neck, bought specifically to play PUBG so he can disappear in the game with his friends. “Now I barely have enough to get bread and food for the family.” “I used to earn 800 afs a day,” Popalzai said. It’s a little shop, with garage-roller doors, a generator, four TVs, four PlayStations and an aging foosball table. Now its popularity is cutting into Habib’s business and that of others in the industry.Ībdullah Popalzai, 20, has his own game centres across the street from Sharifi’s house. That’s when the fixation on PUBG took off. But his business was hit hard in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic when he - and dozens of other Kabul gaming dens - shut down for two months. The mix of children, teenagers, parents and assorted adults pay around 65 cents to play for an hour. Habib has rented his den for four years usually about 100 people a day come through. “If you can’t fight in the real war, you can do it virtually,” Habib said of violent video games, including PUBG. There are other gaming dens in the shopping centre, separated by doorways and different owners, but connected by neon lights and a dimly lit atrium where youths scurry back and forth looking for couch space and controllers. By Jim Huylebroek © 2020 The New York Times It’s a closet-sized room on the lower floor of a shopping centre, with TVs, couches and PlayStations.Ĭhildren play at Abdullah Popalzai’s game centre in Kabul. That costs as little as 60 cents.Ībdul Habib, 27, runs a video gaming den in West Kabul that features mostly soccer games. Sometimes, players pay a local vendor to download the game, a workaround to avoid taxing limited and sometimes expensive data plans for phones. But PUBG and other mobile games are usurping these staples because they are downloadable on a smartphone, and free, in a country where 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Gaming centres became popular in Kabul in the years after the 2001 US invasion, which reversed the Taliban’s ban on entertainment including video games and music. That is a remarkable feat on its own since only in the last several years have Afghanistan’s cell networks become capable of delivering the kind of data needed to play a game like PUBG, let alone communicate with people concurrently. He said he uses the game to communicate with friends and sometimes talks to girls who also play it. But Sharifi laughed at the mention of the proposed ban, knowing he could circumvent it easily with software on his phone.
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