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.
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
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.
--
Help us build a better map!
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 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.
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"
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!?
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.
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!
--
--
Mmm... delicious white marbles...