#Afghan find escape video game download#

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 percent of its network’s data traffic. 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. Habib said of violent video games, including PUBG. “If you can’t fight in the real war, you can do it virtually,” Mr. 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.

#Afghan find escape video game download#

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 centers became popular in Kabul in the years after the 2001 United States invasion, which reversed the Taliban’s ban on entertainment including video games and music. 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. Sharifi, 20, with a sly grin, as if he knew he was detailing the outline of an addiction to a passer-by. “On Friday I play from early morning to around 4 p.m.,” said Mr.

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. KABUL, Afghanistan - Rifle fire, hurried footsteps and distant explosions.