In a Tripoli arcade, players banter amid the bleeping and music of video games. Isolated by decades of dictatorship and post-revolution chaos, Libyan gamers are finally taking on the world.
It is late at night in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and in the suburb of Tajoura, teenagers with headphones clamped to their ears gaze into state-of-the-art screens in the ultramodern gaming complex. One sits behind a steering wheel, racing a vehicle. Others make their way through virtual worlds, huge 3D glasses covering their faces.
Such a space would have been unimaginable a few years ago in the North African country.
Photo: AFP
Unlike in other Arab states, “the gaming community was completely dead here” until recently, said Sofiane Mattouss, who runs the business set up last year.
Gaming industry experts say the Middle East and North Africa are high-growth regions, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt among the largest markets.
Libya lags behind, having seen little investment in technology or entertainment during the 42-year rule of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, whose toppling in a 2011 revolt marked the start of a violent decade-long power struggle.
However, as that isolation has ended, Libyans have shown “high demand” for places where they can play together and take part in tournaments, Mattouss said.
At just 18, the computer science student only recently began working at the center, putting an end to years of frustration playing on outdated university computers.
More than a decade since Qaddafi’s death, new pastimes and private-sector investment are surging into Libya, which even launched an e-sports federation in 2018.
Six gaming halls have sprung up in the capital, with others in major cities, such as Benghazi.
In Tajoura, comfortably installed on beanbags or perched on stools, rowdy students play soccer or engage in epic electronic battles.
In skinny jeans and a white jacket, Youssef Younssi trades wisecracks while playing a game on a giant screen.
The 20-year-old student was used to playing in small arcades in Tripoli and had “never seen” such modern spaces in Libya until recently.
Back on holiday from studying in Turkey, Younssi said he regularly visits big gaming halls in Istanbul.
“In other countries, when I travel, they are everywhere, but I didn’t expect to see so many people interested in it here,” he said.
Tripoli’s mushrooming arcades have driven rapid growth in Libya’s nascent gaming community, Mattouss said.
The increasingly organized community is “motivating players and pushing other young people without experience to start training,” he said.
He predicts that the sector would continue developing quickly.
While some in Libya’s conservative society criticize video games, Mattouss said that unlike dictatorship and chaos, they have not destroyed Libya’s youth.
E-sports give them a purpose, which is better than “hanging around outside doing nothing,” he said.
After finishing a game and putting down his headphones, 20-year-old student Karim Ziani said that the growth of e-sports is “a good thing, even for the development of the country.”
“I hope it grows, for the good of the youth and society,” he said.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other