Empowering MENA and SWANA Developers: Rafif Kalantan's Mission

The London Games Festival's Ensemble initiative showcases the work of underrepresented games professionals in the UK, with a new cohort featured each year. For 2024, Rafif Kalantan, a rising star in narrative and game design from Saudi Arabia, is part of this cohort. She spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about her journey from studying computer science to winning the 2023 Yugo BAFTA Student Award for her puzzle game, Eros Xavier's Love Solutions. Before moving to the UK, Kalantan studied computer science at Effat University, where she took a game development course that sparked her interest in the industry. However, she faced challenges finding a suitable career path in Saudi Arabia after graduating. Kalantan notes that it's harder for people from the Middle East and North Africa to be taken seriously by larger studios. To overcome this, she worked in VR for three years and then pursued a master's course in game design and development at the National Film and Television School in the UK. Her final year project earned her the BAFTA Student Award for Games, a first for a female director, non-European, and Arab. This success led to her inclusion in the Ensemble cohort and inspired her to co-found the Gamedev Initiative for the Global South (GIGS), a mentorship program aimed at supporting budding developers in the MENA/SWANA region. Kalantan believes that games can deliver emotional narratives in a way that other media cannot, and she draws inspiration from games like Spiritfarer. She hopes to tell stories infused with the mythology and culture of her homeland and encourages developers to include people from diverse backgrounds in the conversation to create more authentic and enriching narratives. By doing so, Kalantan aims to promote a more positive representation of the MENA and SWANA regions in the gaming industry.