The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

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and a half I go to my gym, where I work out. Then I
come home and play until 1 a.m. After 1 I can play more
matches or I can go to sleep if I want.”
He smiled. “But not many players sleep at 1.”
Mr. Lim sat in what might be called the players’ lounge:
a spacious parlor of plush couches and flat-screen televisions.
In an adjoining apartment, the focus was on work.
More than a half-dozen other members of the team sat at
rows of PC’s demolishing one another at StarCraft, made
by Blizzard Entertainment of Irvine, Calif. Outside,
guards for the apartment complex kept an eye out for
overzealous fans.
“Without covering myself up in disguise it’s really difficult
to go out in public,” Mr. Lim said. “Because of the Internet
penetration and with so many cameras around, I don’t have
privacy in my personal life. Anything I do will be on camera
and will be spread throughout the Internet, and anything I
say will be exaggerated and posted on many sites.”
“It’s hard because I can’t maintain my relationships with
friends,” he added. “In terms of dating, the relationships just
don’t work out. So personally there are losses, but I don’t
regret it because it was my choice to become a pro gamer.”
Hoon Ju, 33, the team’s coach and a former graduate student
in sports psychology, added: “Actually when he goes
out we know exactly where he is at all times. That’s because
the fans are constantly taking pictures with their cellphones
and posting them to the Internet in real time.”
Mr. Woo of the federal game institute estimated that 10
million South Koreans regularly follow eSports, as they
are known here, and said that some fan clubs of top gamers
have 700,000 members or more. “These fan clubs are
actually bigger in size than the fan clubs of actors and
singers in Korea,” he said. “The total number of people
who go spectate pro basketball, baseball and soccer put
together is the same as the number of people who go
watch pro game leagues.”
The celebrity of South Korea’s top gamers is carefully
managed by game-TV pioneers like Hyong Jun Hwang,
general manager of Ongamenet, one of the country’s
full-time game networks. “We realized that one of the
things that keeps people coming back to television are
the characters, the recurring personalities that the viewer
gets to know and identify with, or maybe they begin to
dislike,” he said. “In other words, television needs stars.
So we set out to make the top players into stars, promoting
them and so on. And we also do a lot of education
with the players, explaining that they have to try to look
good, that they have to be ready for interviews.”
For his part Mr. Lim cultivates a relatively low-key image.
He knows that at 27 he is nearing the end of his
window as an elite player. There are 11 pro teams in the
country, he said, and they are full of young guns looking
to take him down. But he said experience could make up
for a few milliseconds of lost reflexes.
“The faster you think, the faster you can move,” he said.
“And the faster you move, the more time you have to think.
It does matter in that your finger movements can slow
down as you age. But that’s why I try harder and I work on
the flexibility of my fingers more than other players.”
Despite the stardom of pro gamers, in most Korean families
it’s all about school. That is a big reason the game market in
South Korea is dominated by personal computers rather than
by game consoles like Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s
Xbox that are so popular in the United States and Europe.
(The deep historical animosity Koreans feel toward Japan,
home of Sony and Nintendo, is another reason.)
“In Korea it’s all study, study, study, learn, learn, learn,”
said Park Youngmok, Blizzard’s Korean communications
director. “That’s the whole culture here. And so you can’t
go buy a game console because all it is is an expensive toy;
all it does is play games. But a PC is seen here as a dream
machine, a learning machine. You can use it to study,
do research. And if someone in the household ends up
playing games on it” – he paused, shrugged and grinned
– “that’s life.”
Cho Nam Hyun, a high school senior in a middle-class
suburb south of Seoul, knows all about it. During his
summer “vacation” he was in school from 8 a.m. until 8
p.m. (During the school year he doesn’t finish classes until
10 p.m.) On his desk in his family’s impeccable apartment
sits a flip chart showing the number of days until
his all-important university entrance exams.
But no matter how hard he studies, Mr. Cho tries to get in
just a little gaming, and with his parents’ encouragement.
“They are at school all the time, and then they have additional
study classes,” said his mother, Kim Eun Kyung,
“so games are the best way to get rid of their stress.”
His father, Cho Duck Koo, a photographer, added:
“Certainly the games can be a distraction, and now that
he is studying for the university exam he plays much less,
but in general gaming helps the children with strategic
thinking and to learn to multitask. We’ve told him if he
goes to university we will get him the best PC possible.”
It’s all part of a dynamic that has taken technologies first
developed in the West – personal computers, the Internet,
online games like StarCraft – and melded them into a
culture as different from the United States as Korean
pajeon are from American pancakes.
Is South Korea, where gaming is encouraged and viewed
as a communal activity, leading a trend?
Sitting outside another packed soundstage at another
cavernous mall, where around 1,000 eSports fans were
screaming for their favorite StarCraft players over the
Quiet Riot hard-rock anthem “Cum On Feel the Noize,”
a pinstriped banker illustrated how South Korea has become
the paragon of gaming culture.
“We’re not just the sponsors of this league,” Kim Byung
Kyu, a senior manager at Shinhan Bank, one of the country’s
largest, said proudly. “We’re the hosts of this league.
So we have a bank account called Star League Mania,
and you can get V.I.P. seating at the league finals if you’ve
opened an account.”
“When I’m in the U.S., I don’t see games in public,” he
added. “The U.S. doesn’t have PC bangs. They don’t have
game television channels. What you see here with hundreds
of people cheering is just a small part of what is going
on with games in Korea. At this very moment hundreds
of thousands of people are playing games at PC bangs.
It’s become a mainstream, public part of our culture, and
I don’t see that yet in the U.S. In this regard, perhaps the
United States will follow and Korea will be the model.”
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Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.