Global Village

GLOBAL VILLAGE

South Korea’s Gaming Obsession

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In 1997–98, a deep economic crisis hit the formerly booming economies of East Asia. Banks and corporations failed, exports fell, and unemployment soared. South Korea’s new president responded to the crisis with a unique recovery plan for his country: make South Korea the world’s leader in Internet connectivity. By 2004, South Korea had achieved this goal and then some, with more than 70 percent of the nation connected to the fiber-optic broadband network. Today, that number is 95 percent.1 Perhaps the most interesting phenomena arising from this degree of broadband penetration is the advent of Internet cafés known as PC bangs–literally “PC rooms”–in South Korea.

By 2004, more than thirty thousand PC bangs dotted the country, and they became the main hangout for teenagers and young adults. “In America they have lots of fields and grass and outdoor space. They have lots of room to play soccer and baseball and other sports,” explained one PC bang operator. “We don’t have that here. Here, there are very few places for young people to go and very little for them to do, so they found PC games, and it’s their way to spend time together and relax.”2 Some PC bangs, like Intercool in Seoul’s Shinlim district, cover two floors, one for smoking and the other for nonsmoking patrons. In a country where most young adults live with their parents until they are married, PC bangs have become a necessary outlet for socializing.

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By far the biggest draw of PC bangs, with their rows of late-model computers and ultra-fast Internet connections, are online video games like StarCraft and Lineage. Because of long-standing resentment against Japan for its years as an imperial ruler over Korea, Koreans shunned Japanese-made video game consoles such as Sony PlayStations and those made by Nintendo and Sega, and instead preferred to play video games on PCs, a pastime that now feeds the popularity of the broadband network. The PC game StarCraft is so popular in South Korea that two-hour battles among the nation’s best StarCraft players are featured on prime-time television, and an entire sports channel (OnGameNet) is devoted to StarCraft competitions and interviews with the biggest StarCraft celebrities. One player, Lim Yo-hwan (also known by his StarCraft identity, “BoxeR”), began playing in PC bangs as a boy because he couldn’t afford his own computer.3 Lim became the first professional Korean gamer to be signed to a salaried corporate sponsorship contract: South Korea’s largest cell phone company hired him to captain its now legendary gaming team, SK Telecom T1, which went on to win four hundred televised matches.

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Today, e-gaming is a legitimate career in South Korea, where league champions can earn as much as $500,000 a year.4 Gamers who reach the competitive circuit are followed like “characters” in any televised drama, can draw millions of members to their fan clubs, and can become such huge celebrities that they need disguises to walk outside of their houses. “When you look at gaming around the world, Korea is the leader in many ways. It just occupies a different place in the culture there than anywhere else,” said Rich Wickham, the global head of Microsoft’s PC game business.5

With more than half of Korea’s fifty million people playing video games, and a culture that celebrates gaming as a sport, it’s no surprise that some Koreans spend large amounts of time in front of their PCs.6 Generally, Koreans view gaming as a good stress-reliever, especially given the enormous pressure put on Korean youth to succeed academically. A typical Korean student plays about twenty-three hours a week.7 But studies have also confirmed that 4 percent of adolescent players in Korea are seriously addicted to gaming. Dramatic stories of addicted users playing fifty to eighty-five hours nonstop, getting fired from their jobs, failing school, and even dying in the midst of a gaming binge because they’re neglecting grave medical symptoms, point to the dark underbelly of Korean gaming culture.8

The Korean government has responded with numerous approaches to combat addiction, including public awareness campaigns, offers of free software to limit the time people spend on the Web, government-sponsored counseling clinics and treatment programs for gaming addicts, and Internet “rest camps.” Most recently, the government has gone for industry regulation: They have banned all teenagers under age sixteen from access to highly addictive (MMORPG and first-person shooter) games between midnight and 6 A.M. (a ban that some have found can be bypassed with an alternative ID). image

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