MMOGs in South Korea And The Future For Us?

Opusthepenguin writes "There's an interesting article from the AP via Excite about the popularity of massively multiplayer games in Korea. There are 2.2 million people in S. Korea playing MMOGs in a country of 48 million, versus 700,000 in a country of 300 million for the US. Are the social ills discussed in the piece specific to Korea, or is this something other regions of the world should be concerned about as MMOGs grow in popularity?" We also recently ran a story on how far ahead Korea is in terms of broadband infrastructure compared to the US.

Comments

South Korean Culture Different from US

[jgardn]

I've lived in South Korea for more than three years. My wife is a Korean. Let me explain why these MMORPGs are so popular.

When a kid comes home from school, he doesn't go straight home. He has to go to after school classes. Sometimes, he has some spare time, and he spends these few hours in the game rooms. Today, that means he is spending his time in a "PC Bang" which literally means a "PC Room". A decade ago it was a video game room.

What are these places? They are a small part in a building with anywhere from 10 to 50 complete PC systems. It costs about a buck an hour, depending on the quality of the system, and the cost of living of the neighborhood, so it is pretty cheap.

The games that are available are pretty much what's available here, with quite a few home-brew one. Starcraft and Diablo are pretty popular. However, the most popular games are the ones where you interact with other people online. Since these rooms have excellent internet connections, these games run flawlessly, compared to your average AOL user.

The most popular game for a long time was a Korean-made one that was pretty much like Ultima Online, but far more cheesier. It was something like "Land of the Wind" -- in Korean, "Param ae Nara" -- or something like that.

Why do these games get so popular? Because the kids have nothing better to do, and they certainly don't want to spend the time doing homework. You got to admit, if you had a couple hours every day you had to kill, and you had limited options and a couple of bucks, you would waste it on something like Everquest or Ultima Online if it were available. That's what I did when I was waiting for a train or an airplane when I was there.