Friday, February fourteenth, the UN says at least 22 people have been killed in a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. Over half of those killed were children. No one has claimed responsibility for Friday’s incident but the opposition parties blame the killing on the government.
Cameroonian game creator to break the "exotic wall" build by US and Europe
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Way before its official release just last month, Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan—an African action role-playing game about a mythic black hero—was lauded for its originality and country-specific nature by the international press.
And though Olivier Madiba, a Cameroonian game creator and
founder of Kiro’o Games studio is happy with all the attention,
he’s clear on one thing: Ultimately, he doesn’t want Aurion or future games
from his studio to be bogged down in debates around racial diversity and what
it means to be African.
“I hope that the gaming industry in the US and Europe
will break the exotic wall in their mind about games,” Madiba told me over the
phone.
The exotic wall, explained Madiba, is created when games
from Africa are lumped together as African games for Africans or a niche
foreign audience, as opposed to games with African influences that anyone can
enjoy.
The challenge for Kiro’o Games studio, said Madiba, was
to “take an African basis, but to put it in an universal form.”
Aurion follows the story of Prince Enzo Kori-Odan from a
country called Zama. After wedding a woman called Erine, he is overthrown by
his brother-in-law, and must visit other countries with Erine in order to
gather troops for a rebellion. The game is rich with specific African cultural
references. Take, for example, allusions to a popular Cameroonian hit song about being
drunk, or the fight scenes based on the donga, a stick fight performed by the Surma people in
Ethiopia, which Madiba describes as having no
winners or losers.
Though the game has been in the works since 2003, Madiba
said he and his team noticed how bored Cameroonian gamers were with foreign
action titles like God of War that featured Greek
divinities, and decided to come up with a remedy.
“We wanted to try something riskier—a games series based on
an African fantasy war,” said Madiba, whose game aims to depict a Sub-Saharan
civilization, and a scenario focussing on the “inner quest to be a leader.”
“We want to be part of this worldwide exchange, and not
be limited by the fact that we are African”
Ultimately, Madiba wants ‘Aurion’ to compete on a level playing field
with other international indie game titles, and set the standard for future
games coming out of Africa. That’s why he made a game for PC rather than
mobile.
“The idea was to make a great game and create enough
confidence from potential investors so that we can enter the mobile market
next,” he said.
Though Madiba and his team have had to fix a few bugs in
the game, and straighten out their faulty English translation since Aurion’s release, he was
confident that they gang would overcome such hurdles.
“The main challenge is that we really want to see other
creators in the world try to use African ideas in their own games. We want to
see creators mesh African things with Chinese things and create something
really crazy,” said Madiba, who counted US games as well as Japanese manga
among his influences.
“We want to be part of this worldwide exchange, and not
be limited by the fact that we are African.”
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