#What is Gamers Nights about? #What does the gaming community in Uganda look like? Any events, meetups, any impact or community projects you can tell us about Currently the Gamers Nights community has about 300 members. It is supported by players and by donations from the local technology community. Our primary sponsor is Liquid Telecom who generously donated a $20,000 server, rack-space, uncapped access to their international backbone, and low latency access to every network they interconnect with in Africa. Past sponsors include the S7 Project, Smile Telecom, Orange Telecom, Outbox, and Hive Colab. #Any recommendations on gaming gear readily available in Uganda? Uganda is still lagging behind in the gamer hardware space. Most games demand high end hardware which comes at a hefty cost here in Africa. So much that it actually makes more sense to get it all from abroad. #Are there some locally made games, traditional, mobile, web or video games that we might not know? Gamers Nights has not gotten into game development yet. We’ve been too busy playing already existing games :). However, there’s a mapping project that we’ve been thinking of doing. You know how in games like Call of Duty, you can choose a “map” play from? Using various 3D mapping tools, we would create custom 3D representations of some places in Kampala, integrate them into Call of Duty and play in more familiar grounds. This project is still in the works though. We’ll keep you updated as it progresses. #Can you also talk about your Oculus Rift experience with the Askari (local security guard) that went viral and how you conceived the idea We were filming an episode for our forthcoming Gamers Nights TV show on Urban TV. We wanted to do a review of the Oculus Rift and luckily one of our members had recently acquired an Oculus Rift DK2 virtual reality device. A few of the gamers gave it a go and seemed to be handling themselves well, since being gamers, they are familiar with various forms of reality. Then the producer of the show suggested to have a “lay man” try it out and lo and behold, the askari was the lucky (or unlucky) one. As you can see from the video below, everything went “downhill” from there =).
