The video games of South Korea and beyond

Some weeks ago, on the way to the post at reference 1, I signed up for the MIT technology review. A signing up which did not require me to put my hand in my pocket straightaway, but which did get me a certain amount of free access and a fair number of emails. The material on offer does, so far, look to be of good quality. One of the freebies, reference 2, is the trigger for the present post.

It seems that around the end of the last century a company called Blizzard invented a online video game called StarCraft, a game which took South Korea, then emerging from an all-Asian financial disaster, by storm. A game which a large chunk of the youth – presumably mainly male youth – took to playing, often in places called ‘PC bangs’, where one bought access for around one $US an hour. A game which is now a nostalgia fest for the middle aged, with newer games having taken its place with the young.

While seeming cheap or free to play, there were plenty of opportunities to spend money and plenty of young people racked up considerable debts. With some of this being very like gambling. And apart from money, plenty of young people were spending what seemed (to old people) like an unhealthy proportion of their day on these games. Indeed, the whole phenomenon is not unlike that of online gambling. I note in passing that Bet365 of reference 3 has made a very large amount of money from this last, quite a lot of which is paid over as tax and quite a lot of which is given over to charity – thus confusing the morality argument.

And in South Korea at least, these games have become serious sports, with tournaments, teams, players – both professional and amateur – and spectators. A serious industry involving lots of money, not unlike that which has grown up around other sports, such as football.

At the same time, lots of people are worrying about the potential of these games to do damage. The South Korean parliament has debates about them and sometimes makes laws about them. Agitation which has come to the point where WHO has now included – rather controversially – addiction to online gaming in its 11th revision to its catalogue of disorders. What it carefully calls ‘gaming disorder’. Interesting from a medical point of view in that, along with gambling, it is a behavioural addiction rather than a substance based addiction. Furthermore there seems to be a connection with the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For all of which see reference 4.

So do these games cause the problems or are they a healthy response from the youth of today to the world in which they find themselves? Are they a bigger problem than mobile phones and social media generally? And what about the webtoons referenced below? Does the online gaming industry needed to be regulated, in part to restrain the greed of the people who have floated to the top? All fascinating stuff and having been alerted to it, I shall keep my eye out for it.

PS: amused by the fact that the business model of the MIT technology review, view now pay later, is not so very different from those of the online gaming companies! Or indeed of lots of other companies, busily extracting money from us all.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/global-warming.html.

Reference 2: Arguments over whether game addiction is real have led to feuds between government departments and a national debate over policy - Max S. Kim – 2019.

Reference 3: https://www.bet365.com/#/HO/.

Reference 4: https://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/.

Reference 5: https://play.euw.leagueoflegends.com/en_GB. A more recent game. StarCraft a bit dated now.

Reference 6: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/battle-pass/chapter-2. Another more recent game. There is a ladies’ league, with a successful team therein, from Gen G and Bumble, snapped above.

Reference 7: https://www.webtoons.com/en/. ‘We started a whole new way to create stories and opened it up to anyone with a story to tell. We’re home to thousands of creator-owned content with amazing, diverse visions from all over the world. Get in on the latest original romance, comedy, action, fantasy, horror, and more from big names and big names to be - made just for WEBTOON. We’re available anywhere, anytime, and always for free’. A sort of specialised version of YouTube?