Breaking Pakistan’s cyclic brain drain paradigm | The Express Tribune

PUBLISHED
November 09, 2025

During the recent flooding which led to a devastating situation leading to despair, the fragility of traditional, large-scale agriculture was laid bare. This widespread disaster severely devastated fields, farms, farmers, and agricultural produce across rural areas, highlighting a profound systemic vulnerability. It was yet another challenge for the entrepreneurial sibling duo, Nabhan and Kenan Khan, who remained driven during the pandemic.

Once again, the duo, operating under NiK&KiN Design Studios, put on their thinking caps and came up with a digital response: Farmverse. This immersive experience, now in Open Beta on the Roblox platform, is a powerful vehicle for social change and a definitive proof point of their long-standing commitment to leveraging tech for social good. They designed Farmverse to create resilience amongst the masses by helping them adopt and deploy positive habits and techniques to cultivate small farms and kitchen gardens to develop a sense of belonging, shared responsibility and participation to contribute to the food basket of the country in a sustainable manner. They have taken their mission to make the world a better place and address fundamental issues like climate change, resilience, and food scarcity through the playful, accessible world of virtual farming. Their track record includes the development of the acclaimed “STOP the SPREAD,” the world’s first experiential learning game focused on public health during the pandemic, alongside the branding and campaign of TECH desiNATION Pakistan to promote tech sector of Pakistan around the world along with initiatives in global virtual robotics, STEM/STEAM learning, and the creation of the “National AI Policy GPT,” a bilingual groundbreaking tool to democratise and invite public participation to complex governmental policies.

Climate change, urban gardening and the UN SDGs

The conceptual foundation of Farmverse is rooted in a clear, actionable mission: to address several of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those focused on Zero Hunger, No Poverty, Quality Education, and Climate Action. The inspiration for a gardening-focused game grew directly from the developers’ own hands-on experience with urban gardening.

In a world increasingly dominated by concrete structures, they decided to deploy their past experience in regenerative agriculture, knowhow in agri-tech, sustainable farming and kitchen gardening and began experimenting by utilising overlooked urban spaces, specifically rooftops, to cultivate their own produce. This personal endeavour quickly revealed the transformative potential of simple, decentralised food production, especially when combined with resourcefulness, such as repurposing discarded materials like old water bottles for irrigation and planting. This practical experience provided an authentic, grounded perspective that would later be digitised into the Farmverse experience.

The alternative they envisioned was a massive, decentralised empowerment campaign. Instead of depending solely on faraway commercial farmlands, individuals—particularly youth, women, and children—could be equipped with the knowledge and motivation to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency through “Kitchen Gardens” at home. Farmverse serves as the digital incubator for this movement. It gently, but effectively, nudges players toward a sustainable mindset by making the act of growing food, saving water and resource mobilisation intrinsically rewarding and enjoyable. To secure the food basket and bolster localised food production, the game encourages a mindset shift towards urban kitchen gardening as a lifelong skill, accessible to anyone, regardless of their physical proximity to traditional farmland.

Promoting sustainability

A game’s success is measured not only by its noble intentions but by its ability to hold a player’s attention. Farmverse excels by skillfully blending community interaction with rewarding, well-paced game aesthetics and mechanics.

From the moment a new player claims their virtual plot of land, they are immersed in a world of positive choices. The core loop involves selecting from a diverse catalog of seeds or instantly gratifying options like fully grown flowers, raising happy chickens that lay fresh eggs, and expanding their agrarian empire by selling produced goods at the virtual marketplace. This market loop provides tangible, in-game feedback, turning work into immediate, observable progress.

However, the key distinction in the Farmverse model lies in its innovative approach to time. Unlike many hyper-addictive games that demand constant presence, crops in Farmverse continue their growth cycle even while the player is offline, as it happens in the real world.

This mechanism is a deliberate design choice that rewards natural consistency in farming and foresight over compulsive participation. It teaches players about the natural cycles of growth and the value of patience, fostering a healthier relationship and engagement with the community digitally. This design philosophy aligns perfectly with the overarching mission: to model purposeful, responsible, and sustainable behaviour, not just create a frantic simulation.

Beyond the agrarian cycle, the game is designed to be a crucible for positive human connection. Features like the ability to purchase and gift flowers to other players are not mere embellishments; they are programmatic tools designed to build community and actively counteract the negativity and animosity so prevalent in many online environments. The developers argue that this simple, virtual act of kindness, rooted in the shared experience of gardening, helps players feel grounded and serves as a powerful antidote to a polarised world. It is a subtle, yet effective, psychological intervention that promotes friendship and a plant-based, green and healthy lifestyle ethos over digital hostility.

The technical leap

The duo’s previous projects, like the AI Policy GPT, demonstrated their focus on accessibility. With Farmverse, their greatest technical challenge was the language barrier on a global platform.

The primary target market for the game includes Pakistan, where an estimated 150 million young people—a vast demographic representing roughly 60% of the population—are often more fluent and comfortable in Urdu than in English. Critically, the Roblox platform, while globally dominant, lacked native, comprehensive Urdu support. This absence threatened to make a mission-driven game inaccessible to the very audience it was designed to empower.

The designers did not wait for the platform to adapt; they built the bridge themselves. They engineered a custom, single-click translation syst em that dynamically converts the entire in-game text from English to Urdu. Nabhan described the formidable technical hurdles: “We thought, okay, let’s go around it and we’ll build some kind of a script which will actually make all the text in Urdu.” It was “extremely difficult” and required coding solutions to integrate an orthographically complex language seamlessly into the platform’s interface.

The impact of this feature is twofold. First, it immediately opens the game to a massive, underserved, and highly engaged audience who can only understand Urdu. Second, as Kenan points out, it embeds an educational function: “If the players want to switch to English, they will understand what these words mean and they will catch some English.” This cross-linguistic exposure subtly encourages English language learning, transforming playtime into an immersive, low-pressure bilingual environment. Moreover, this innovation provides a critical counter-argument to the scepticism many parents hold towards gaming, demonstrating that digital play can be a powerful medium for educational and skill development, effectively bridging a cultural and linguistic divide that often restricts youth engagement.

Tapping into Roblox’s ecosystem

Farmverse is leveraging a platform that has achieved truly global scale and demographic balance. Roblox’s official data for Q2 2025 confirms its immense global footprint, with Total Daily Active Users (DAUs) reaching 111.8 Million—an impressive figure that confirms the platform’s ability to reach a massive audience.

The data highlights several key demographic opportunities that directly benefit Farmverse’s mission:

Global spread: The platform’s fastest and largest growth region is Asia-Pacific (APAC), which accounts for 31.8% (35.6M DAUs) of the global player base. This confirms the immense potential for the Urdu localisation feature to capture a rapidly expanding audience in South Asia, a critical area for the game’s social impact goals.

A mature, balanced audience: While historically viewed as a children’s game, the audience is rapidly aging up. 63.5% of DAUs are 13 years or older, with the 18+ age group comprising the largest segment at 41.3% and is highly receptive to the complex, purpose-driven narratives and soft-skills simulation that Farmverse offers.

Gender parity: The platform maintains a highly balanced user base, with 44% of DAUs identifying as female and 51% as male, making it an ideal environment to empower women and children, a key goal in the game’s foundational mission to promote self-sufficiency through “Kitchen Gardens.”

This definitive data serves as a compelling proof point: Farmverse is not just an idea; it is a meticulously designed movement that has been successfully launched onto one of the world’s most massive, demographically balanced, and fastest-growing digital stages, turning qualitative vision into verifiable global reach.

The impact

The core of the Farmverse vision is its commitment to quantifiable real-world impact. The developers have structured this mission around what they term “six levels of awesomeness,” a framework designed to ensure that the virtual experience translates into tangible, positive outcomes. These levels focus squarely on driving three key objectives: awareness, activity, and mindset change.

The model is financially and ethically transparent: a percentage of the proceeds generated from in-game donations is directly channeled to fund charitable initiatives. These initiatives are specifically designed to equip children and people from less privileged backgrounds with essential life skills, providing them with the tools and knowledge necessary for self-sufficiency that the game champions in principle. This direct correlation between virtual support and real-world results transforms the player base into a community of active social activists and philanthropists.

This impact architecture extends to the promotion of essential sustainable practices. As part of the gardening initiative, the game actively teaches and promotes safe water practices, such as rainwater harvesting. By integrating these lessons into the resource management mechanics, players instinctively learn about conservation and efficiency, skills that are immediately applicable to real-world environments facing water scarcity challenges.

Furthermore, Farmverse is an interactive educational tool for the UN SDGs, with specific in-game elements mapping to global objectives:

No Poverty: Through self-sufficiency and resource management

Zero Hunger: Focus on food production and crop diversity

Climate Action: Through sustainable practices and resource conservation

The developer duos’ vision is not merely to create an engaging experience, but to establish Farmverse as a central platform for measuring positive impact, offering a new model for verifiable corporate and social responsibility reporting.

Forging the future

The entrepreneurial duo are actively pursuing a robust partnership strategy designed to integrate Farmverse into the broader economic and social ecosystem. Their outreach is broad, targeting a diverse spectrum of organisations, from local agricultural alliances like the Pakistan Agriculture Coalition (PAC) to major food and agriculture sector companies, and even influential global institutions such as FAO, the Asian Development Bank, the IDB, and the World Bank, to name a few. The partnerships are based on a multi-prong strategy: to gain expert insight into agricultural best practices, to secure funding for real-world charitable initiatives, and to validate the game’s impact metrics on a global scale. It proves that gaming can be a measurable force for genuine, quantifiable social good.

This ecosystem strategy is built upon a philosophy articulated by Kenan: “We have invested our own time, energy and effort to make this game, however with your generous donations, we can equip these children with essential skills and support our vision of people, planet, plants, positivity, prosperity, and purpose. Together, we can reach millions and make a meaningful impact. We have played our part, it’s time for you to do yours by playing and supporting Farmverse.” This mantra encapsulates their belief in a synergistic model where commerce, charity, and creative play reinforce one another to drive a collective positive outcome.

The philosophy

Farmverse is underpinned by a profound philosophy on mental health and social well-being. The game’s gentle pace coupled with simple and effective UI/UX and nature-focused content are designed as a therapeutic counterpoint to the high-stress, negativity-driven echo chambers that define much of modern digital interaction.

In a world, where rates of anxiety and digital-fatigue are escalating, virtual gardening is seen as a form of “digital grounding.” Research shows that engaging with gardening activities, whether real or virtual, can have a calming, soothing effect, helping to lower stress and reconnect individuals with the rhythms of nature. Farmverse provides a safe, accessible environment for players to engage in the restorative act of cultivation. The encouragement of shared positive interaction through gifting and teamwork is a deliberate effort to spread positivity and friendliness, displacing the hostility and animosity that taints many online interactions.

The broader vision is for the game to be adopted by schools and colleges. Since the experience is completely free to play, it represents an accessible, low-cost tool for integrating practical lessons on gardening, environmental stewardship, and sustainability into the academic curriculum. The team hopes that educators will utilise Farmverse to allow students to ‘get their hands in the soil and seeds’—metaphorically connecting with nature in a safe, fun, and deeply educational setting.

Nabhan and Kenan Khan have managed to design a product that commands attention by offering genuine value. Farmverse is more than a game; it is a meticulously designed movement that proves technology can be harnessed not for distraction, but for meaningful societal progress.

The Farmverse experience is available for free now on the Roblox platform. You can begin growing your farm and contributing to this global movement today: https://farmverse.blogspot.com

The writer is a curriculum developer and educator with over 30 years of experience in child development, psychology, and extensive experience integrating technology and gameplay into learning

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer