![]() 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 center 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 center, 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. It’s a closet-size room on the lower floor of a shopping center, with TVs, couches and Playstations. 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% of the population lives below the poverty line. invasion, which reversed the Taliban’s ban on entertainment including video games and music. Gaming centers became popular in Kabul in the years after the 2001 U.S. And it’s becoming widely played across Afghanistan, almost as an escape from reality as the 19-year-old war grinds on. The game is called PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds, but to its millions of players worldwide, no matter the language, it’s referred to as PUBG (pronounced pub-gee). His left hand is tattooed with a skull in a jester’s hat, a grim image offset by his lanky and not-quite-old-enough demeanor. “On Friday I play from early morning to around 4 p.m.,” said Sharifi, 20, with a sly grin, as if he knew he was detailing the outline of an addiction to a passerby. ![]() But for Safiullah Sharifi, his behind firmly planted on a dusty stoop in the Qala-e Fatullah neighborhood, the death and destruction unfurled on his phone, held landscape-style in his hands. It could have been any day in Kabul, where targeted assassinations, terrorist attacks and wanton violence have become routine, and the city often feels as if it is under siege. Rifle fire, hurried footsteps and distant explosions.
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