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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.
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.
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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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
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.
"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?
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"
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.
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.
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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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!?
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.
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...