Abstract
This study explores how mobile media and gaming practices are integrated with urban young people’s lives in Seoul. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young Koreans, the study examines mobile gaming as the process of ‘gamification’, which refers to the increasing and seamless integration of gameplay with daily media use. In the study, the young people extensively used gameful apps for the efficient management of their everyday lives. In so doing, they thought that they were in control of the technology and the rhythm of their everyday lives. However, while the young people attempted to appropriate gameful technology as a manageable medium, there was little evidence of the subversive aspect of play in the gamification of mobile communication.
This chapter originally appeared as Yoon, K. and Jin, D. Y. (2016). The Gamification of Mobile Communication amongst Young Korean Smartphone Users. Asiascape: Digital Asia. 3 (1–2): 60–78. Reprinted with permission from Brill Publishers.
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Notes
- 1.
It was after 2010 that the smartphone penetration rate in Korea began to pick up fast; the rate remained only 2 % in 2009 yet increased to 14.0 % in 2010, which is still a considerably small number in comparison to 67.6 % in 2012 (Kim 2013).
- 2.
In order to refer to technologically mediated online games, games studies scholars and critics have used such terms as ‘video games’, ‘computer games’, ‘computer and video games’, ‘online games’, and ‘digital games’. The existing terminologies may not address the increasingly expanding scope of games – mobile gaming or gameful apps in particular. Thus, the present study defines ‘games’ inclusively, so that gameful mobile apps such as locative apps and social networking apps are also included as a type of technologically mediated game.
- 3.
Whenever a particular participant and his/her accounts are introduced in this paper, a pseudonym is used. Each pseudonym is followed by the subject’s gender and age.
- 4.
For example, Restaurant Story, a social dining game, requires its users to wait for particular foods to be ready to serve. Thus, the user’s response to push notifications is an important element in participating in the game.
- 5.
However, it is also important to acknowledge that the leading role of Kakao as a major mobile game platform has declined because several mobile game corporations have established their own platforms. For example, the prominent Korean game corporations Gamevil and Com2us, which were merged in 2012, have introduced their own platform, HIVE, in 2014.
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Yoon, K., Jin, D.Y. (2017). The Gamification of Mobile Communication in Seoul, 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_7
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