On a hot day in central Lagos, Nigeria, there is only one way to cut through the traffic: Jump on a motorbike and whizz around oncoming buses, gaping potholes and street hawkers, all the while trying to avoid bribe-seeking policemen.
If that sounds too exhausting, an alternative is to stay home and play out the scene online.
In Nigeria, game developers are turning life into art with African-inspired video games that have set thumbs twitching across the continent.
In a global video game industry worth US$66 billion — more than Hollywood — the market has so far offered few Africa-centric plotlines.
“We wanted to use game[s] as an engine to share African experiences between ourselves and with the rest of the world through African narratives, sounds and characters,” said Hugo Obi, co-creator of Nigeria’s MALIYO Games, one of the first video game companies in west Africa.
MALIYO’s most popular offering is Okada Ride — the nickname for the motorbikes that dart dangerously through cities across the country.
Its answer to Angry Birds is Mosquito Smasher, now in its fourth edition. In the game, players battle against a villain who has mobilized the insects to keep away tourists.
The appeal for new adventures has jumped borders. Nigerian company Gamsole, which became the first in the region to clock more than 1 million mobile application downloads last month, said most of its enthusiasts log in from Brazil, India and the US.
“Some people take the bestselling games and change them to African characters, but our approach is to create games that are uniquely African,” MALIYO’s Oluseye Soyode-Johnson said.
As sub-Saharan Africa becomes increasingly plugged in online, a growing middle class looking for entertainment has resulted in Nigerian movies and music sweeping across the continent, with game publishers hoping to follow suit.
Leapfrogging PCs and consoles, the industry has exploded with mobile phone users across the country, which has the world’s fastest-growing mobile Internet usage behind China and India.
“I like these games for the same reason why I like watching Nollywood [films]: Everybody likes to see something they can relate to,” said graduate Sule Elaigwu, who purchased a smartphone for the first time last year, one of 21.5 million mobile phones bought in Nigeria that year.
The mushrooming industry has surprised some in a country that does not boast a single game design course.
“There’s so much demand that isn’t being met in Africa,” said Lakunle Ogungbamila, director of Kuluya.com, a game developer based in Lagos.
There are signs that gaming is ready for the next level. Founded in a small flat in the Nigerian cpaital, Kuluya’s 13-man team secured US$2 million in funding after just six months. The companies’ biggest hit so far, Oga @ The Top, has cashed in on a growing love of social media.
The inspiration for the game came from an incident in which a Nigerian policeman, unable to recall the police’s Web site address during a morning interview, claimed he had to ask his “oga [boss] at the top” for permission to divulge the site’s name.
The gaffe went viral on Twitter, prompting Kuluya designers to cobble together the eponymous game. Within three days, it had 60,000 plays.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
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