When we look to our friends far out west, the gaming gurus of South Korea, we see what can happen when a video game is introduced to another society with entirely different cultural, technological, and societal circumstances, and how it can produce an enormously different response from the public. Having lived in the United States all my life, and being pretty much obsessed with video games for majority of my 27 years, it is easy for me to discuss the rhetoric that Americans see in StarCraft in Brummet’s terms. But when it comes to South Korea, I really had to do a bit of research to understand exactly where their society was at when the game found its way overseas in 1999. I’d like to give a little bit of a history lesson, discuss how frighteningly popular the game is, and then try and ascertain what forms of persuasion were in the game itself to spark a cultural revolution by applying Ian Bogost’s ideas from Persuasive Games amongst other literature.
Now, for a quick lesson in South Korean history, Korea was under Japanese rule until 1945 when the Japanese were defeated in World War II, and tensions have remained high ever since. According to Jim Rossignol, an online editor at Rock, Paper Shotgun, a major PC Gaming website, the rivalry between the two nations “led to decades of trade restrictions that made early generations of Japanese game consoles prohibitively expensive for Korean gamers. If you wanted to play video games in South Korea then the cheapest way has long been to use a PC” (Rossignol). As if the restrictions weren’t bad enough, in the early 1990s a grave financial crisis struck the nation, impairing its most prized export of industrial trade. The economic turnaround was quick though; Starting in 1997, President Kim Dae-jung’s reform programs enforced a focus on “wireless telecommunications equipment, electronics, and online endeavors” in order to shift the nation’s focal point of its economy to technology (U.S. Department of State). Rossignol points out one specific reform that Dae-jung will forever be known for:
The nationwide focus on the development of cutting edge technology led their newly democratic government to seize the potential in broadband communications and, in the late 1990s, they used the then state-owned telecommunications company to install the infrastructure necessary to connect almost every building in Korea to high-speed broadband. The Koreans have taken to the net with the greatest of ease, with 60% of households boasting a broadband connection. (Rossignol)
With this widespread Internet connectivity, it seemed logical for the “make a buck quick” business of choice to be Internet cafes, or “PC bangs” as they are called by our Korean friends, and several of these sprouted up in cities across the country. The results were most unexpected though, as these cafes became “key centers for a youth culture thirsty for social activity and cutting edge entertainment” just as Blizzard’s smash hit StarCraft was making its way overseas in early 1999 (Rossignol).
It seems like the timing was perfect for South Korea and StarCraft: The socially depraved youths coming fresh off an economic downturn needed something to entertain them, something to belong to, why not this online game that had already proven itself half the world away? South Korea’s inclination toward advanced technology already made it so that high-speed Internet was offered pretty much everywhere by the federal government, affording the South Korean teens the opportunity to take up the game as a hobby and keep playing over and over again. Other games were introduced over time, but as we can see in the YouTube video from 2009, it doesn’t look like the original favorite is going anywhere anytime soon.
I love looking at various factoids about StarCraft in South Korea, because it all seems so surreal to me. An entire culture that not only supports video gaming, but rewards those who dedicate their time and energy to being the best at their craft (pun intended!) seems impossible to me given the skepticism Gamers face in society here. For example, according to Mei Fong of the Wall Street Journal¸ one of the most famous players, 24-year old Lim Yo-Hwan reported making “over $300,000 in 2003, had his fingers insured for $60,000, has his StarCraft team of fellow players sponsored by the likes of Samsung and Coca Cola Inc., and even had a DVD released of his winning plays that outsold The Matrix Revolutions” during the year of its release (Fong).
The game was and still is marketed completely different in South Korea, as you can see in the accompanying media:
The game was and still is marketed completely different in South Korea, as you can see in the accompanying media:
Here is a bag of Dorito’s brand chips utilizing an iconic Terran character from StarCraft in an attempt to sell its product. Could you imagine the same company attempting to do that with an American audience? Who would respond positively when we have already established how poorly video games and the act of playing video games are viewed in our society.
Next, we have a humorous commercial where a Zerg unit known as a Hydralisk terrifies a poor South Korean man mid-flight, followed by an American commercial which advertised the release of StarCraft 2:
I do have to admit, I was shocked when I saw this other commercial during the ESPY awards last year, anight dedicatedentirely to sports and physical activity:
But it’s so fascinating to see how the game has to be sold like a movie—choosing to show all its cinematics rather than any of the gameplay. Meanwhile, the South Korean commercial might not show gameplay, or really any hint as to what the heck the commercial is about, the iconic figure of the Hydralisk is enough to make a pop culture reference, and to excite the public for a particular date. Even just the advertising/pop culture differences between this video game in America and South Korea is huge, and warrants a study all its own!
If I haven’t stressed it enough, the professional StarCraft players are complete rock stars in their home country. Stadiums were erected with the sole purpose of allowing the public to bear witness to major gaming events that all started with StarCraft. Over a “third of the country’s population plays the game, which is roughly 17 million” out of the country’s 48 million people (Rossignol). There are television stations dedicated entirely to airing StarCraft matches complete with screaming commentators. But I guess my main question is why? I understand the socioeconomic conditions were covenient, but there were several other games out there already, why did it take StarCraft coming over for this sudden boom?
It is a well-received game, as evidenced by its winning Game of the Year, but there has to be something more that spoke to these people that kept them coming out to the Internet cafes, and continues making the game such a huge hit in the country. Blizzard’s CEO Mike Morhaime has no answer for it, he simply says “with each game we develop, our goal is to make the best game possible, but the reception of StarCraft in Korea is nothing we could have possibly dreamt of or expected" (Business Wire). The game was created by an American country, with no intention to target this country in particular. Barry Brummet suggests that “meaning is sometimes beyond awareness – people may not consciously know what a particular text means to them…Participation in making meaning need not be done intentionally and with full awareness,” and I think this is a wonderful example of just that. Neither the games producers nor the public that ate it up intentionally assigned meaning to the game, but they managed to create a specific rhetoric between the two of them (Brummet 84). What exactly this rhetoric was, will be analyzed in the next post. From there, we can understand what it will take to form a new, educational rhetoric towards video games in the United States.
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