Gaming international
Jim Rossignol
 
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Jim Rossignol is a British technology author specialising in video games. His work appears in Wired, PC Gamer UK and the web development portal Gamasutra.com. His essay on Korean gaming culture was recently republished as part of the DigitalCultureBooks anthology The Best of Technology Writing 2006, edited by Brendan Koerner. Rossignol is currently researching a book on gaming culture and keeps a research blog at www.big-robot.com. In "Gaming international", he tells us about the experiences he gained during a visit to Seoul and compares European and Asian approaches to gaming.
 
 
 
In Korea, the headlines said, people had died because they refused to leave their cafe gaming cubicles. In Korea, I read, social lives were shared not through bars or clubs, but through gaming salons and internet cafes. In Korea, the people who played massively multiplayer games ranked in their millions and watched five dedicated video game TV channels, complete with their own credible anchormen. This was a gaming nation that defied my provincial English expectations. So I went to South Korea, half gaming-obsessed tourist, half incredulous journalist, to witness this weirdness for myself.

What I discovered on the far side of the world was that video games are not the ubiquitous hi-tech products of a global machine that I might have assumed them to be, instead they were more like social trends. Gaming is as much a cultural process, shaped by local taste and regional politics, as it is an aspect of the progress of entertainment technology. Gaming is as much about gamers as it is about the games themselves.


Winter Wonderland

Seoul in early March can seem pretty bleak to a newcomer like me. A low winter sun hangs behind a high-rise skyline. Out on the coastal road from the airport you see row after row of prefab apartment blocks, together housing a city that had once been flattened by war. Anti-aircraft missiles sit atop hills around the city. I remembered that the threat from history had not faded away for the South Koreans. Perhaps they, as much as any nation in the world, deserve to enjoy the escape that video games provide. If games are such an important social phenomenon here, I thought, then perhaps it was thanks to some shared need to escape, together, to somewhere better.

It seems as if everyone in the West is familiar with Japan's gaming eccentricities – their strange role-playing games, cute characters and cuter gaming consoles. But Korea's gaming culture represents something else: a desktop PC-ecosystem, where multiplayer games of decade-old strategy games were shown on TV for entertainment; where gaming couples met and married in virtual worlds as well as the real one. It was outlandish, at once familiar and alien. It didn't seem to make sense. When most of the world was switching on the Playstation 2 and settling into a beanbag in the front room, why were the Koreans heading into the city and finding a place in a cafe?
 
 
 
There are, of course, internet cafes here in the UK. There's one just fifteen minutes' walk from my house, but the place isn't exactly a significant social venue. In the daytime there's some adult training sessions and in the evening a dozen teenagers practise the popular online shooter Counter-Strike. They're playing other teams in Holland and Germany over the internet, for glory, for escape. These boys are the ultra-hardcore of gaming in Europe: a thin tier of perhaps a few thousand gamers who make up the best the game has to offer. Meanwhile, their counterparts in the cafes of Seoul are just average young people enjoying a night out. While my gaming chums in the British internet cafe bark battle-language commands to each other across the room as they play out well-rehearsed combat manoeuvres, the Korean gamers might well be sat in a 'love seat' sharing some gaming time and soft drinks with their romantic partner. It's a different climate and a different world.
 
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