Slashdot Mirror
Taking Games Seriously In Korea
elph writes: "Seems like some kids in Korea have been taking an online role playing game, Lineage: Blood Pledge a little too seriously ... You can check out the CNN.com article here. Ban the RPGs! They cause kids to kill eachother! Evil! Satan!" The article paints Korean society with a fairly broad brush, but the numbers are still astonishing -- imagine if 5% of all Americans all played the same online game, for instance.
You can download it at http://www.lineagethebloodpledge.com It's about 170 megs if I remember correctly. You get a 5 day free account, after that you have to pay for it. There's 2 US servers, but the population seems to be a pretty thorough mix of Korean, Japanese, European, and American players, judging by the languages being spoken and the way a lot of people speak English...
I just quit my Lineage habbit 2 weeks ago after playing the game for about 6 months.
It is one of the most hostile and unenjoyable games I have ever played in my life. They have a server in Cali which went commercial about a month ago. First of all, 50% of the players on the US server are Koreans who live in the US and Canada. This would be ok except that there is incredible hostility between US and Korean players. This hostility leads to more racism than a Klu Klux Klan convention. I never imagined that kids could be so incredibly racist, and this goes on ALL DAY on global chat. Some of my friends have recieved death threats from other players.
For anyone considering paying for this game be warned: NCsoft does not reply to emails. I sent an email concerning my account payment to them 2 months ago with no reply. My friends have had similar results. This is incredibly frustrating since they charge us $15 a month, which is kind of high compared to the competition. During the beta test we basically got screwed by NCsoft. There were absolutely no gamemasters. NC refused to reply to email. Simple bugs like korean text that had not been converted to english were left unfixed for MONTHS. Then we discovered that all testing was being done in korea. The graphics in the game look ok but are very choppy even on very fast machines.
Gameplay: this game is very frustrating. If you can handle the constant hostility and racisim on a daily basis, you wil discover that the gameplay sucks. Fighting consists of pointing and clicking with the mouse and then just waiting around to see which player dies first. There is absolutely NO strategy of any kind. When 2 players duel the player with the highest HP or the strongest weapon (of which there is a very limited selection. Almost every knight uses the same sword: the katana) or the most money to spend on potions wins. There is a pet system where you can train dogs to help you but this has caused me more grief than anything else. Imagine spending an entire month to lvl a dog to level 30, to only have it DIE when your isp disconected you. If you get disconected before you can kennel your dogs OTHER PLAYERS WILL KILL THEM. I have friends who have lost months of work because of this. Also dogs have completely destroyed any teamplay in the game. Lineage is just a game of 1 man and his army of dogs. I hear that they will fix this in the next update due this month though by limiting the number of dogs a player can have.
The classes are limited and unenjoyable. Knight, Elf, Mage and Prince. The mage class has had a serious bug FOR OVER 2 MONTHS NOW and NCsoft will not even admit it exists. The bug is that when a mage levels up they are getting VERY low MP gain per level. Everybody in the game knows about it and NC does nothing. Also there are hardly any spells for the mage class, and the higher level spells cost an arm and 2 legs. Also there is NO way regen Magic Power. there are no MP potions. If your mage runs out of MP be prepared to sit in town for half an hour doing nothing while you wait for it to regen.
Sorry that this turned into a rant, but I truly hate this game now and I could not help myself. Be warned. This game is not worth your $15
Unfortunately, it will probably be Jon Katz.
I just quit my Lineage habbit
It is one of the most hostile and unenjoyable games I have ever played in my life
This hostility leads to more racism than a Klu Klux Klan convention
NCsoft does not reply to emails.
The classes are limited and unenjoyable.
Fortunately you are now in Slashdot, which is so different.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Also, if you meet a Korean person, you'll often be asked your age. This question arises due to the necessity of fitting each person into the Confucian hierarchy.
Other languages also reflect social structure, but Confucius formalized these tendencies, and the language has more terms describing social and family relationships. For instance, "aunt" is broken into "aunt on the father's side" (como) and "aunt on the mother's side" (yimo). It gets complicated, but most cultures have some traces of this practice.
There's also a polite informal tense which gets around much of the status-checking.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
While the article makes it seem that the game has become a major threat to societal order, I would interject a bit of skepticism due to recent history with respect to Korean authorities and the Internet.
The rest of the world has decried net censorship, but the Korean government has embraced it wholeheartedly. Police have acted on the theory that free speech and communication are causes of crime. Websites advocating suicide have been shut down, their user logs have been confiscated, and users have been investigated by the police, based on claims, made by the same police, that people have committed suicide after visiting the sites. More broadly, the government recently issued a secret list hundreds of thousands of "forbidden" web sites, which are to be blocked by ISPs.
While in the West we have become accustomed to tabloid journalists and cheap political hacks attacking the Internet, we should realize that Korea already has an institutionalized FUD network, and any claims should be taken with a dose of salt.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
The game looks a lot like Ultima Online..
They've got at least tens of thousands of players last time I heard.. I'm sure that's 5% of something..
Anyway, I suspect geography has more to do with it then culture.. I bet if the USA was populated the way south korea is, the UO player density would get high enough to lead to similar effects..
Thank god when I kill and tease people, odds are they're a good long car ride away from being able to punch me in the face over it..
see the discussion already in progress at Lum the Mad's website.
And to add to the on-topic discussion: it's interesting to see what can happen when the majority of 'net users don't actually own their machines but rent them by the hour at the cafes. Get your character ganked 'cross-country, can't do a thing. Sitting next to the guy, or a few blocks away? Maybe you'll rough him up.
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You'd love to see this game?
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Personally, I'd find this pretty damned offensive if I were of Asian decent of any sort. Sorry, folks, this is embarrassing.
Why should someone of Asian descent be offended by a characterization of young males in Korea? After all, the article didn't paint all Asians with the same brush. Furthermore, while you or I, being proud of our diversity and rightously politically correct, might resent stereotypes of any type, Korea is proud of its homogeneity.
One might even say that games like this provide a relatively safe outlet for the same hormone-induced impulses which young males around the world experience, allowing for both an escape from and the preservation of the status quo. I can recall many a time in highschool when a good Robotron session kept me from bloodying my fists for no particuarly good reason.
Spend some time in a "PC Bang" in Korea and the article will seem perfectly reasonable.
100,000 lemmings can't all be wrong.
Your sig contains a syntax error.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
When I was still at school, a friend of mine doing a paper on the growth of Christianity among Koreans in the US interviewed me as an (extremely minor) authority on Confucianism for my perspective on the compatibility of these two traditions. I thought I was making a fairly innocuous comment when I said that there were some elements of Christian morality and Confucian ethics as they existed in Korean society that seem, on the surface, to be incompatible.
Imagine my surprise after the paper was presented when I was physically threatened (!) for having the audacity to "judge" Korea and Koreans, and this from individuals who routinely attend clubs and bars where non-Koreans are refused entry.
I understand that centuries of being squeezed between major powers can give a nation something of a chip on its shoulder, but I find the whole "No one but Koreans may say anything about Korea" thing silly, an example of ethnocentrism taken to the extreme. People will look at what you do and draw conclusions; everyone is subject to the same scrutiny in this way. Get over it.
In my experience, the game that has prompted the most fist fights is Goldeneye for N64. When one drunken frat boy keeps shooting rockets at another drunken frat boy that can't get to a decent weapon, controllers get dropped and punches get thrown.
As another poster mentioned, Super Smash Brothers is a good fight starter. When one person feels like they're being picked on by two or three people, wrestling often ensues.
-B
This is nothing new. When I was going to college in Buffalo, NY, ten years ago or so, we had the usual gang of misfits and slackers who would stay up all night in the computer labs playing MONSTER (a text MUD-type game) or GALTRADER (a variation of the space-trading game Elite, also curses-based) on the VAX cluster. Physical violence, in the form of fistfights and sucker punches, erupted more than once as the result of player-on-player violence in the game. "Clans" or gangs were formed, protection, yadda yadda yadda. Only thing that's different now is the graphics are better - the people are still pretty much the same.
They already do. It's called AOL.
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Help us build a better map!
And I thought *I* had no life....
:)
I found the comment about "off line PK's" humorously ironic though.
And the bit about sexual favors for in game items... Someone doesn't have their priorities straight, I don't think.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Ok.. here's how I see it.
I was, more or less, addicted to Ultima Online for about the first 6 months after its release. I played it a MINIMUM of 8 hours a day on weekdays, frequently up til 2 in the morning, having to be at work by 8, this was a bit of a challenge. I would also try to sneak in some play time at work if I wasn't being watched. And once I got home, UO is all I did until I went to sleep.
On weekends, it was wake up, UO until I couldn't stay up anymore, then sleep. Thats it. that was my life. Nothing else.
I would wake up thinking of nothing else, I would spend any waking moment that I wasn't on the machine thinking about it. I wrote extensive documents logging activities, trying to come up with new strategies against my foes in the game, researching the online sites about the game, etc.
Every time they put in a patch, I was disgruntled. BIG TIME. Because every patch meant I had to completely change the way I played the game. Figure that if every 3 weeks you had to move, completely change your diet, change to a new job, and take a pay cut at the same time. After a while, this would get extremely annoying. Thats to some extent what it felt like playing the game after a while.
Server crashes caused a great deal of frustration. That just meant I lost time. Imagine waking up one day, working hard for 14 hours straight, then right before you go to sleep at the end of the night, Everything gets wiped out so you are back where you started at the beginning of the day, the entire day wasted. In UO, this was typical.
Add in to that, I had a bad internet connection that would drop frequently, and always at the most inopportune times, so I died many more times than I should have. Travesty of the greatest, I can assure you.
However, while this game might have been an addiction, it was by no means a dependancy. One day in Feb '98, I was at work thinking about UO, like I usually did, and read a newsgroup post about some hot topic, and I wrote a lenghty reply. I'm not sure exactly what the topic was about, but I got off on a few rants and a tangent and by the time I was done writing it, I had decided to quit playing. I went online that night, gave away all my online stuff, shut it down and never played it again.
And the weird thing is, I never WANTED to play it again. I had no desire whatsoever to play it. I quit thinking about it, I actually accomplished other things, slowly gained a grip on a life again. Never looked back.
And the way I see it, it was like an annoying hobby, one you somehow feel you must participate in, but you never really want to. I can't imagine how I began to feel that way about the game, but by the time it was all over, I never wanted to do it again. Since that time I have hardly played any online games, in fact, I've hardly played any games at all. There was a brief stint with starcraft after I quit UO, but at least with that game, after playing it for 2 hours, I was bored with it and quit for a while. Games could actually be completed (won or lost) and that closure allowed me to go on and do other things, whereas with UO, it never ends. And until it ends, you don't want to stop playing.
I can't say from a marketing standpoint that this wasn't effective. People who had never played an Ultima game played UO. People who had never played ANY computer games were playing it. Scary.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
If it wasn't this, it would just be something else. If you want to stop violence or whatever other problems any activity creates, you either eliminate the need for people to express themselves that way, or your run a police state. Take your pick. Sometimes both options are pretty similar.
I think your last sentence is pretty much on the mark. People aren't going to stop occaisionally punching each others' lights out, so I guess our options really are: (a) live in a police state, or (b) tolerate violent outbursts now and then. (can you tell I'm an American?)
I think the more interesting question the article raises is not whether online RPGs lead to crime and hooliganism, but whether they are bluring the distinction between the real and virtual world. I used to be an avid RPG player, but I haven't done played for many years. These massive on-line games have piqued my curiosity, because they are at once similar to, but very different from what we used to do.
In the old days, you played in the same room with your friends. It was a cooperative venture, because everyone was there to enhance the game of everyone else -- otherwise you don't get invited back. "Evil" characters were operated by essentially friendly players who were out to enhance the game. The universe of players is very limited, and player game and real behavior is very tightly, if implicitly, controlled.
Online RPGS are broader, more anonymous environments where people (other than clan members) only experience you through your character and anyone can join. Is it really role playing anymore, or perhaps, to some degree, you are what you play? I wonder if it actually posisble to act evilly in an online RPG, as opposed to just playing an evil character? Evil behavior would be playing in a way designed to spoil the experience of other players -- to cause suffering, not of the character but of the player behind him. I think it is even a more interesting question if we leave the question of real world fraud and hooliganism out.
Also, as these games become a larger phenomenon, I definitely see the lines between role playing behavior and "real life" behavior blurring. You can already see that with the cited examples of economic integration of the RPG world with the real world (including various forms of crime). The idea of people gathering in the virtual world to petition the government (the game operator) for justice is a striking thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've been playing lineage for about 6 months now. I can tell you Lineage inspires this kind of thing. I have been insanely angry at other players in the game enough at times, I probably would have beat the sh_t out of them if they had been across the room too.
I guess you have to play lineage to understand, I will try to explain. The game is damn addictive for some reason or another. I haven't spent this much time playing a game since warcraft II (multiplayer of course). The graphics suck and the sound is really repetitive, yet for a few months I found myself playing 6 to 8 hours a day. By the time your player hits L35 or so you have spent a lot of time wandering around and killing shit. The game gets gradually harder to level and it takes more and more money (a hard resource to come by in decent quantities) to buy armor and weapons that are good enough to do damage to the kind of monsters you are hunting. All that is great until some smart ass shows up and decides that you are a prime target for them to bully around. Sometimes its completely unprovoked and you just discover you have been jumped, sometimes a battle of words elevates to blows, or you get pulled into someone else's conflict because your in the same pledge. Once it comes to blows a P-P conflict goes one of two ways. Either you are more powerful and you kick their ass or they kick your ass. The result either way can be REALLY frustrating. If you win and end up killing them there is a good chance you will end up loosing a lot of lawfulness points and hence 'going chao'. This isn't bad in itself except now if your killed you drop stuff as well as loose exp. This means that you loose armor and weapons that might have taken you a month to get while you are trying to become lawful again. It doesn't matter how 'good' you have been. Killing someone is instant chao. Now the monsters are all aggressive towards you and you have other players who take it upon themselves to hunt in packs and kill chao players. Basically your life sucks until you manage to gain enough lawful points to stop attracting monsters, other players, and dropping your hard earned equipment. Being killed is often times just a better situation. That though has its own tribulations. As mentioned above if your not lawful enough you drop items when you die. Its like 'bamb' the last weeks worth of playing down the drain in the 5 seconds it takes to die. Not only that but you loose 10% to 15% of your current level (down leveling if necessary to loose that much). When your level 20 this isn't a real issue because you can make 15% in a half hour of playing. When your level 45 it can take 20 hours of play to make that much exp. So someone kills you and you drop your +6 Elven Plate Mail. Then your in the hole 400,000 adena (probably about 60 hours of play to make that much money if your L30) and another 20 hours of play to get the 15% exp back. Then the rage starts. WFT!, was that person thinking coming up and messing with me when I was just out here minding my own, hunting in Dragon valley. Then the rage really kicks in, I just spent the last 20 hours of my life to have this ass come along and mess it all up! There are very few options because the type of player that just killed you is now level 50 has a -50 AC , a +7 sword and 6 L30 dogs. Your only hope to exact revenge is to knuckle down, gain a few levels and then teach that SOB a lesson. On the other hand you could call upon your pledge to start a war with this other persons pledge. Now you have involved 20 of your friends in the fight along with 30 of the other guys friends. Which results in 30 new people in the game who are out to kick your ass when they see you out hunting and trying to gain a level. Ahhhhh! frustration!
NCsoft started a new server where you can't PK other players. Except that now there is absolutely no deterrent to keep people from hanging out on already over crowded orc beach and stealing your totems or the 50 other problems in the damn game. The problem is in the beginning the rewards are easy to come by. The game is fun and you quicly become addicted. Then its like bad drugs. It takes more and more effort to find the fun part (killing new monsters, getting a new level or some new spells, whatever) and the rewards are slowly overcome out by the anoyances of the game. This ends up leading to fustration when you want a new spell but you have to kill another 10,000 orcs to get enought money to buy it or you have to kill some outragious number of Ghast, Basi or whatever in the hopes that you will get lucky and have the item dropped for you. After four weeks killing ghast and you still don't have summon monster the frustration builds and builds and builds. Eventually you turn into a bully to burn off some steam, thereby frustrating some other lower level player who just had a few hours of work destoryed for your cheap thrill, or you quit the game. The end result is unhealthy for the game. The good people quit, the bad people stay around and bully the other players around.
I was in Seoul recently (this past week) It was interesting to see how much differently computer games pervade society. There are posters everywhere for Lineage, various Blizzard games, and Tribes 2. There are little PC cafes tucked into seemingly every street corner.
I spent a couple afternoons in one of those playing Starcraft with some Korean friends. I beat them down, but they took it good naturedly. The youth there seem to need more of an outlet, an escape from reality, than the people I know here in California.
I wasn't looking, per say.. Normally you dont have to look for something that sticks out like an unexpected redirect to goatsyouknowwhere
Slashdot stories are becoming more of the same. The range of topics seem to usually be under one of the following headings -
"Linux zealot gets arrested"
"Linux hater gets his due"
"Capitalism BAD - Napster.. GOOOOOOOOOOD!"
"John Katz's Overanalytical movie review corner"
"All OS's but Linux Suck"
"Linus Torivalds drinks a beer/takes a piss/gets some"
"[insert microsoft product] Beta Software has bugs"
"The price of tea in china, and what it has to do with the columbine incident"
"Stealing Music & Movies - Why we should be allowed to do it" or, rather "Capitalism - We just don't get it".
In addition, It seems that the moderation system here seems to work like so:
Pro linux/oss post, >4K = +5
Same, >2K = +3
Any post over 5K that uses big words = +5, insightful
Any post that has a writer who is articulate, however makes no sense - +4
any anti-linux post: -1
One more thing:
"Linux kicks ass!" +5, Insightful
"Windows is actually a decent operating system, with strengths and weaknesses all is own" -1, {Flamebait, Troll, Redudant}
"authorities were deluged with complaints from Lineage gamers-tells of a 14-year-old runaway"
"A number of the 16-year-old's gang sport the close-cropped haircuts"
<sarcasm>
Blame the game makers, movie makers, music makers, blame em all. However don't you dare say a fscking thing about the good parents who teach kids right from wrong.
Don't talk about the types of families these kids are coming from because that's just downright insulting of any media outlet. You wouldn't want to read a farily written informative article now would you? Shame on you
Look when game makers, movie makers, etc., do their thing, they aren't in their right minds. We need more Disney to teach kids morals, not some more violent material from these scumbag corporations flooding the market and forcing our kids to be killers, thugs, etc.
For crying out loud we're parents, and we don't need the task of teaching kids right from wrong, morals and ethics. Thats the job of others god damnit.
</sarcasm>
Want Root?
hmm..
Heroin is usually administered with a needle.
Video games aren't
Heroin is an autonomic system depressant.
Video games aren't
Heroin releases massive amounts of dopamine.
Video games don't
An excessive usage pattern of heroin administration will lead to withdrawl symptoms when the supply is severed.
Video games *aren't* physically addictive
Video games *are* safe to use without a physician's presence
Video games *do not* present a high potential for abuse.
The only criteria I can see for scheduling video games is that they have no currently accepted medical applications.
And by the way, if you read ahead of the current government propaganda, you can find plenty on non-scheduled alternatives.
prolixity
The Big U by Neil Stephenson. 'cept without the rats...
The article is written in such a manner that it seems as if a similar type of thing doesn't happen here in America. What about the people who get addicted to EverQuest and destroy their social lives by never leaving their room?
If it wasn't this, it would just be something else. If you want to stop violence or whatever other problems any activity creates, you either eliminate the need for people to express themselves that way, or your run a police state. Take your pick. Sometimes both options are pretty similar.
I didn't get the impression that time.com was against the online game, but still.
Okay, I'm a 26 white american male, of irish descent and I probably am pulling this out of my ass. However, I'd like to think I pay attention, know a bit about sociology, and watch too much Asian Cinema! :)
:))
:)
Things like games, animation, comics, games, etc in the United States are considered only for a "minority" of people. Even though there are millions and millions of copies of Diablo 2 sold (a game I frequent) I know no one in real life who plays Diablo 2 online other than myself. I know a few who played it on their personal machines, and then put it away and went on with life. I myself feel "different" with this respect.
In general, going online in any form, especially gaming, is usually considered for Geeks in the US, at least from the vibes I get. If there are people playing this game with me, they aren't talking except on web boards and email.
However, this isn't the case in Asia. The common example is Animation and Japan. For some reason, they see Animation as a very important part of their culture. People hold parades to look like their favorite anime characters in Japan! Anime is for all ages, as you can see by the wide selection of everything from the super sappy to the hard core violent and sexual scenes one can only see in "adult" anime.
I don't think I can really explain it, but its something to do with games, gadgets, technology, etc. Its just that stuff that is considered "geeky kiddie stuff" in the states, is revered in Asian cultures for all Ages.
It just so happens that in this case, its not very healthy. (as opposed to Anime Tentacle Porn which is very healthy!
I wonder if something like Slashdot would be considered mainstream in Korea?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I think this is a really BS argument because that's equivalent to saying that every article out there should be about the most significant piece of news out there in the world, which means that we'd get a newspaper about a single topic every morning. We'd never hear about the girl down the street that won a science fair because it's less significant. The truth is that reporters DO write articles about the problems with the US everyday. How many articles have you read in the last 10 years about various problems in the US? How many about game addicted Koreans? You do the math.
You and I both know there are a lot more to Koreans than being glued to 19" monitors, but this is not the way to react.
Check out the review of Lineage : The Blood Pledge at The Adrenaline Vault.
From that article about the Garriot brothers:
The brothers also announced a partnership with NCsoft, the South Korean company that runs the world's largest subscriber-based online game, Lineage: The Blood Pledge.
The company has 2 million subscribers in South Korea alone; under the partnership, Lineage will be repackaged and relaunched in the United States this fall. Meanwhile, Lineage creator Jake Song will move to Austin to help develop games, which NCsoft will help launch in Asia.
Education is the silver bullet.
I can't believe this article. It reminds me a LOT of the bad hype D&D got in the 1980s. Find a small (non-representative) instance of foul play and apply it to the whole. This power the media has makes me sick. Right now, there are no doubt hundreds (probably more) reading that article and drawing the conclusion that the entire mud/online rpg genre is evil, seductive, and too realistic.
This is just a bunch of kids who got too caught up in a game of play-pretend (that is all rpg's are after all; elaborate versions of the games every grade school child plays).
The media LOVES this shit. They eat it up and spit it out at their audience. The media blew Columbine out of the water and should be held to blame for at least thre quarters of the copycat school shootings that followed, and now this.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
So the S.Korean cops are calling real world violence stemming from in-game behavior "offline PK"... The only question after that is who'll scoop this phrase first- Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling? I can totally see a new cyber-pulp series wrapped around this one phrase. ;-)
The article characterizes all South Koreans as game-obsessed nutjobs, drawn into this fantasy as the product of some cultural flaw.
Actually, the article characterizes the South Koreans who are game-obsessed nutjobs as game obsessed nutjobs. It stays pretty solidly on-topic, and has very little to say about the 95% of South Koreans who are not game-obsessed nutjobs.
"Hey, somebody is saying that our national culture has some flaws! Oh no! How offensive! Everybody knows that only Americans have bad culture!"
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The analouges in French would be the formal 'vous' versus the informal 'tu', or in German, the formal 'Sie' versus the informal 'du.' Note that these don't come close to the level most of the Oriental languages do. English really has no equivalent; think of it as speaking with a Texan drawl and dialect to somebody younger than yourself, but with a nasal Boston accent to somebody older than yourself. Different sentance structure, different vowel intonations, different words.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
there are more than 10 million people living in seoul. if 5% of them play lineage that is at least 500,000 players, in a single urban area. it would be very easy to reach out and touch ("off line pk") somebody in such a densely populated area (in terms of lineage players). it only takes a few hours by train or car to get to the most southern part of korea (pusan, which happens to be the second largest city).
although my knowledge of korean society is just that of an observer, i know that each korean has a set of "seniors" and "juniors". relationships between juniors and seniors begin in school, clubs, churches, etc, in almost any type of activity. a person can call on his "juniors" to help him in a time of need. and a person can be called on by his "senior" to be helped, or can call on his "senior" to ask for his assistance. these relationships can be used for initimidation of others or defense from others outside the group. DO NOT THINK THIS IS THE ONLY REASON FOR THESE RELATIONSHIPS. they are more often used for financial assistance, help moving to a different apartment / house, drinking, doing the activity in which the relationship was formed, etc. i hypothesize that relatioinships formed in on online game in korea would work in the same manner. the stronger protect the weak within clans. the weak members in the clan band together to protect one another. the level of loyalty in these types of junior / senior relationships can get somewhat high.
korea is a very stressful place. workers work 5 and half days a week with tons of overtime. you could get "IMF'ed" (laid off) at any moment. school children (middle and high school) are the same. to get into a good college, you have to be in a good class (each grade consists of severl classes depending on your test scores). students are ranked from middle school, upto their final year in high school. this final year entails waking at 6am in the morning and studying from about 7am to past midnight. the students study for the college entrance exam. there is a high suicide rate amongst high school students in korea. this stressful society paves the way for people trying to escape, trying to be more than what they are, trying to live a life outside of their means in reality.
somebody else made a point that online gaming in korea is very popular. i would like to reinforce his statement. i went to korea very recently and was surprised when i found myself watching a game of starcraft on tv that was being commentated. i saw a show where people were flocking to get the autograph of a person who had just won a starcraft / other online game comptetition. (this was about two months ago when i visited korea.) i've read articles (submitted to slashdot and got rejected) where american and international net gaming "professionals" were moving to korea because there was more opponents to practice and more competitions for money (last year).
okay, i'll stop now. i just wanted to add a disclaimer that i'm an american born korean that lived in korea for one year. if there are any pure koreans that would like to comment on anything that i've said here, go ahead. i know i don't have a full understanding on how korean society functions. i'm just trying to fill in some background that the article may have left out.
andrew
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
Games are extremely addictive, as my poor wife can attest.
This got me thinking, considering how pervasive games are, and how the "mainstream" is trying so hard to demonize video games, how long is it before we hear this exchange?
In my experience, how well you do in a fight is inversely proportional to how much you play online RPGs.
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""For the gamer, the game world is much more attractive than reality," he writes, based partly on his own experience. "Reality is only a space in which he makes a small amount of necessary money for continuing the game." "
This reminds me very much of William Gibson's 'All Tomorrow's Parties', in which one of the main characters lives his life inside a cardboard box in a Tokyo train station. How long until wireless is so pervasive and cheap that even the homeless are playing massively-multiplayer rpg's?
It makes my skin crawl.
These numbers are from Gamespy's Stats page as of a few minutes ago...
Not exactly 5%, as with 270million folks there'd have to be 1,3500,000 people playing, but then again, are we talking 5% playing, or playing at the SAME TIME?
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
The article characterizes all South Koreans as game-obsessed nutjobs, drawn into this fantasy as the product of some cultural flaw. Of course, the press isn't generally so kind to Western (American, Canadian, even Western European) gamers, either, but at least it generally has the courtesy to consider us some bizarre subset, rather than the entire culture.
Personally, I'd find this pretty damned offensive if I were of Asian decent of any sort. Sorry, folks, this is embarassing.
Still, I would LOVE to see this game.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Because most of Western society loves machines, but fears chemistry and biology?
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WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG
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The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
At least, that's what 75% of the kids in Austrlia seemed to be simultaneously obsessed with a year ago or so.
For those of you looking to addict yourselves to yet another type of crack...
Not A Sig
anways watch what happens, Korea will be further along in gameing the rest of us. Everytime something goes wrong and its even partly attached to gaming and its in the US its big news, everyone gets involved, politicans start talking about it, and so on. Society will be much slower to change than technolgy.
The article wasn't blaming the game makers for the violence that was taking place. If it was blaming anyone, it would be the unique Korean culture that leads to this sort of blurring between online and offline gang behavior.
Besides, who said the parents are the only ones responsible for teaching their kids right and wrong? Whatever happened to the individual's own responsibility to learn it?
Anyone who's played D2 public has had the experience of the incomprehensible, infuriating "gosu" korean PK whirlybarb. It gets to the point where you begin to think the entire korean race are nothing but faceless goons out to kill you and shout "KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE" whilst doing so (that is an actual quote).
(sigh)
It's not just some silly "well they're so repressed in their daily life!". I'M repressed in my daily life, and so are many others like me, and we don't make massive NUISANCES out of ourselves online. The thing is, they have a CULTURE in which it's seen as acceptable to be a total prick online. That's the only real difference.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
First, are we saying five per cent of all Koreans alive? Or five per cent of all Koreans online? Or five per cent of all Koreans who play games? Or five per cent of all Koreans who use computers at home?
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These are all different numbers
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
imagine if 5% of all Americans all played the same online game, for instance.
I don't know the actual percentage, but we already do.
It's called "find the defunct ISP and make them stop charging my credit card for the monthly fee".
--Blair
Alright I went and found them myself. Check them out here.
What scares me is that the experience points they gain will make them super-powerful. If there's anything worse than street gangs, it's street gangs full of 15th level fighters!
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Mmm... delicious white marbles...