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Mobile Gaming in Asia pp 73–89Cite as

Mobilizing Games, Disrupting Culture: Digital Gaming in South Korea

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Abstract

The South Korean mobile gaming market has grown rapidly in the past few years, adding to Korea’s already vibrant digital gaming ecosystem. Amidst these changes, however, some important elements of Korean digital gaming culture have persisted. Rather than replacing other digital gaming platforms, mobile games complement Korea’s rich history of PC-based online gaming. By looking to the recent past of PC-based online gaming, we can better understand the social and cultural impact that mobile games are having in contemporary Korea. This chapter explores the importance of place, time, and activity for a normative model of Korean digital gaming sociality, the implications that this has had for gamers whose behaviors mark them as non-normative, and how discourses around digital games and sociality inflect current evaluations of mobile gaming. Although mobile games afford different ways of coordinating place and time with respect to gaming, these factors remain salient not only for gaming experience, but also for evaluations of normative gaming sociality, just as they have been for PC-based gaming. Such evaluations can sometimes have serious consequences for gamers whose behaviors are identified as non-normative, including their enrollment in institutionalized disciplining strategies and techniques designed to “calibrate” them with normative gaming sociality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This survey allowed for multiple responses, and as these data indicate there is significant overlap between the two groups of respondents. Therefore, in the Korean digital gaming ecosystem it is more accurate to consider mobile games as complements to online games rather than as replacements.

  2. 2.

    Florence Chee (2006) provides an example of one of the ways in which mass play culture manifests in Korean online gaming socialities in her discussion of wang-tta—roughly “social outcasts”—documenting how young Korean boys especially avoid becoming wang-tta through playing online games with their peers. Indeed, Yeong-gi also told me, “When I was a middle school student, if you didn’t know how to play StarCraft, then you were wang-tta.”

  3. 3.

    Ok (2011) hypothesizes that eomji-jok is most likely derived from the Japanese term oyayubisoku, which means roughly the same thing. The salience of the thumb for mobile telecommunications and how it has become an icon not only of using mobile phones, but also of socialities associated with this use is fascinating and crucial to conversations around embodied interaction with technology. See Bell (2006) for a detailed ethnographic discussion of thumbs and mobile phones in multiple Asian contexts.

  4. 4.

    By some estimates, between 3000 and 4000 PC bangs had gone out of business every year since 2008 (Shim and Kim 2011).

  5. 5.

    KOCCA’s survey data lend statistical support to this trend of customer migration from the PC bang and into the home: 74.5 % of respondents named “home” as their preferred place for accessing the Internet, compared to only 1.7 % for PC bang (2015: 29). On the other hand, among self-reported online gamers specifically, the most often cited reason for playing in PC bang as opposed to anywhere else was “being with friends/colleagues” (48.2 %) (2015: 34). Furthermore, among PC bang customers, the overwhelming reason for visiting these places was to play games (81.3 %), with “information search” coming in a distant second (8 %) (2015: 33).

  6. 6.

    In its annual white paper on informatization from 2000, the National Computerization Agency—the governmental organization in charge of developing the KII—represented PC bang as a positive index of Korea’s flourishing information society, recognizing the central role of online games in the process: “The phenomenal boom in Korean version of Internet cafe, called Internet PC-Bang, closely follows the world-record rise in Korea Internet users. At first, online games like Starcraft brought the young gamers to Internet PC-Bang where they can enjoy low priced, high speed, LAN-based Internet access. Now it becomes common place for users across age, region and income to surf the cyberspace for e-mailing, chatting, online stock trading, data searching and so on. Internet PC-Bangs, unique to Korea, are now drawing attention of global Internet communities. Especially online game firms and their distributors envision a lucrative business pocket [sic]” (NCA 2000: 11).

  7. 7.

    This incident has taken on special significance in the Korean social imaginary around online gaming culture, and PC bang in particular, due in no small part to the attention that it received in the international press (e.g. Tran 2010; Salmon 2010), and it was even made the subject of a 2014 documentary about Korea’s so-called “game addiction epidemic” (Veatch 2014).

  8. 8.

    The word itself is a compound of two Sino-Korean (hanja) characters: pye, which describes something that has been “discarded” or has “become stale,” and in, which simply means “person.” It may be used in various contexts to describe individuals who exhibit two interrelated characteristics: patterns of socially-isolated activity—e.g. “study pye-in” (someone who only studies, always alone) or “TV pye-in” (someone who watches television all day long)—and passionate interests that border on obsession—e.g. “Naruto pye-in” (avid fans of the Naruto cartoon series) or “Girls’ Generation pye-in” (fans of the Korean pop music group Girls’ Generation).

  9. 9.

    Jooksooni is the feminine form of jookdori. However, none of my informants ever actually used the phrase “PC bang jooksooni,” perhaps because of how uncommon it was for female customers to fit this description.

  10. 10.

    Source: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/korea/part1/korea1.htm, accessed February 21, 2015. Translated from the Korean by Sam Derboo.

  11. 11.

    In Korean news reports and in the camp’s brochures, “RESCUE” is sometimes written in Roman letters, and at other times is transliterated into hangeul. RESCUE is an acronym for “Re-experience, Excitement, Socialization, Change, Unit, Escape.”

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  1. Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA

    Stephen C. Rea

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  1. School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Dal Yong Jin

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Rea, S.C. (2017). Mobilizing Games, Disrupting Culture: Digital Gaming in South Korea. In: Jin, D. (eds) Mobile Gaming in Asia. Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0826-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0826-3_5

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