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Games Entertainment

Gamer Nation 39

Posted by Zonk from the i-have-a-dream dept.
The Escapist this week has up a feature called Gamer Nation, with a look at the games-centric attitude of South Korea. From the article: "The coolest kids in Gamer America high school go out for the StarCraft team. Gamer America's Commerce Department heavily funds a Domestic Gaming Agency to promote games to your mom and your grandma and the world. And there's a Gamer America network TV channel (not cable, network) broadcasting online game tournaments round the clock. No, wait, there are two channels. Sounds like an EverQuest fever dream? A console fan's Robitussin high? Okay, Gamer America doesn't exist - in America. But it lives for real - right now! today! - in the Republic of Korea (RoK)."
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Gamer Nation

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  • Korea, Korea...

    Isn't that the place that gamers go after they die?

    Oh wait, that's the place where only the old people use e-mail.

    • that's the place where only the old people use e-mail.

      And now we know why: it's because younger people would never notice when an email arrives because they're too busy playing StarCraft.
  • TFA reads like something out of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson.
    I wonder how difficult Korean is to learn...
    • 47 weeks, 7 hours per day, every working day. Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Center, Presidio of Monterey, Monterey CA.
      At least, that was how long it took in 1982...

      (shudders at old memories)

      • Re:Get your ass to Korea. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ZosX ( 517789 )
        I was just in Monterey (on vacation) and we drove by the Defense Language Institute. Interesting looking place. Hope you had a chance to go up to Carmel by the Sea, as it had one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen. The sunset there was quite lovely too and hell, where do I even begin on Big Sur? Truly one of the most beautiful places in this nation and very likely the whole damn planet. Every american should at least once go to California and drive the 1 down from Crescent City. I cannot think o

  • Blizzard (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @12:38PM (#13167296) Homepage
    Really, with a whole country living, eating, breathing, and sleeping StarCraft, you'd think Blizzard would do more with the license rather than constantly running back to old WC, which I personally found to be a much more derivative and uninspired setting.

    • Re:Blizzard (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 )
      I know. Starcraft 2 would be a sure win. Instead they make some FPS. *shrug* Personally, I don't see why StarCraft is still so popular. It's a fun game, but it's not nearly complex enough to encourage deep strategy.

      • Re:Blizzard (Score:3, Informative)

        by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
        because games that require thinking are not very popular. 'strategy' games like starcraft prevail, where the player with the fastest reflexes and best memory (these two units beat a rush of that unit) wins over someone able to actually come up with strategies while playing.
        • because games that require thinking are not very popular. 'strategy' games like starcraft prevail, where the player with the fastest reflexes and best memory (these two units beat a rush of that unit) wins over someone able to actually come up with strategies while playing.

          In starcraft/warcraft you have to do both. You have to be a twitch gamer and a thinker. There are people who do the same strat all the time, however they are very easy to beat because they are inflexible.
      • actually, complicating game mechanics does not lead to deeper strategy. in fact quite the opposite.

        the more you increase the complexity of the game mechanics, the more it becomes a contest of who knows the rules the best. surely you wouldn't say chess is less strategic than starcraft simply because starcraft is demonstrably more complex. (has more types of units, a larger board, several different types of damage and unit abilities, flying peices, etc.)
        • I've noticed this too.

          In starcraft it was common to amass a large number of same units, marines and medics, hydras, zerglings, bcs, or carriers. But in the actual combat, there wasn't much to it, attack ground, throw out a few psi storms, try and hit critical buildings.

          I've seen other rts's (war3, homeworld) attempt to create more complexity by forcing you to have varied types of units. But when you do that, it causes the armies end up being essentially the same, battle becomes chaotic, and the winner a
          • In starcraft it was common to amass a large number of same units, marines and medics, hydras, zerglings, bcs, or carriers. But in the actual combat, there wasn't much to it, attack ground, throw out a few psi storms, try and hit critical buildings.
            You weren't a good Starcraft player, were you? There's more to it than attack-move.
    • eating, breathing, and sleeping StarCraft, you'd think Blizzard would do more with the license

      They can't, BECAUSE of that complete popularity. The Koreans don't love StarCraft because of the "license"... they enjoy the very specific product. Gameplay is the most important factor, with the artwork and setting a distant second.

      If you say that Starcraft is the national game, then compare it against the USA's "national pastime" baseball. It would be crazy to release "Baseball 2" with significant changes,
      • Well then, why not do that at least? They could keep the core gameplay and add a new plot - expand it out with some new factions and additional units, keeping the original game as a pure subset of the new game so that people who wanted classic gameplay could disable new features. Look at the success of CS:Source - how many people bought Half-Life 2 just for that?

  • Why not in America? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @12:38PM (#13167305)
    I don't really see much of a problem for this to happen most parts of America. In big cities it wouldn't be hard to have the government wire the whole city and allow many different companies to compete for customers. I don't see it happening in rural America because it's really not cost effective to string 10 miles of fiber to farmer Joe.

    But the government doesn't want to get involved. They'd rather let a company do the wiring themselves and then charge that market all it can bear. Rather than creating a service that's good for everyone, we're all living the American dream, shouting a big FU to the country so that we can all scheme to get rich for ourselves. Then again I guess that suggest is communist for thinking that a minority of the population shouldn't hord a majority of the wealth.

    Sometimes I think America's worst enemy is a America itself. We'd rather make a lot of money than offer a quality product that's affordable for almost everyone.

    • Re:Why not in America? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Iriel ( 810009 )
      In a lot of ways, you're quite right. Not only would the American government not want to get involved, they probably can't. Only when we're so behind the times that we have the largest percent of the population in a developed nation without broadband would the government push legislation to only make it easier for companies to provide it to us; They wouldn't do any of the actual work to set it up.

      If someone proposed that they should, then we'd have arguments comparing it to socialized healthcare and commun
      • How can Americans expect their youth to become the next rising stars in the technology/gaming entertainment market when the common protocols are outdated and the new ones are usually too expensive?

        Simply we put, we can't but we have no desire to be that way either. The fact is, the United States has a fundamentally different value system; we place an emphasis on things such as athletic prowess not video game aptitude. I'm sure /. readers would love to see a change in that convention but too much of this
        • im sorry to hear about your experience in high school, but obviously here on slashdot im sure you arent the only one that felt that way.

          the fact is [obviously i dont know your age, but judging from the fact that you were playing online in junior high you cant be too old], things are slightly different amongst online games these days. i look back at the old days of quake and starcraft, and now i look at stuff like xbox live, and its night and day. i think that the future of online games will be different. p
          • Yeah that very well may be the case, I can't even get in to video games anymore [mid-20's]. Rather go surfing or running or hang out with friends etc so I can only draw on my own experiences playing a MUD and Warcraft 2. Although all the playing was online, I was playing with people in other parts of the world...life is give and take and to be honest I'm happy with who I am today even though I allowed myself to be derailed for a bit.

            I'm glad to see that technology is allowing for greater integration of t
        • heroes come from every walk of life. i have the utmost respect for lance armstrong especially. but how can you say that those amongst us who dedicate our energies towards technology and even games themselves are not heroes? there are alot of people in the technology field mainly stemming from their love of games and getting attached to the computer at an early age. im not always the biggest fan of bill gates myself, but you have to respect a successful entrepenuer. think about how many lives would have been
          • Hence I made the distinction between universal and individual heroes. From the perspective of an individual child, any one person can be a hero; there are no prerequistes for this but on a national level the head game designers at Blizzard will never attain the iconic status that say Lance Armstrong has attained, just not how our society works [even if some game designer came back from the brink of death because of cancer...he'd be a survivor but he'd never become an icon]. My post was never an attempt to
    • I don't really see much of a problem for this to happen most parts of America.

      The inalterable laws of physics make it impossible to build a network giving America the same internet performance of Korea.

      It's a simple matter of the speed of light... and geography... and nerve reaction-time. Korea is under 5% of the length of the USA, meaning the ping latency stays usually under 50 ms. In the USA, it can be proportionally larger, or up to 1000 ms (with all equivalent hardware installed).

      This means that
      • I call BS on the 1k ms ping... I can ping the USA from Australia between 300ms to 600ms, and anywhere in Australia with a sub 150ms ping. And Australia bigger than the USA, and in addition is a loooooong way from the USA.....
  • I can only imagine the religous group uprisings and congressional hearings that would follow if schools had CounterStrike or StarCraft teams. The problem here is that we have unlimited appetites when it comes to violence in tv, movies, sports, etc. God forbid there is violence in video games and it is promoted in schools and gaming centers all over the place, there would be an uprising on the right that would make the Rockstar "scandal" look like a joke...
  • What article?

    Summary: 95 words Article: 157 words

    Is any Slashdot Games reader unaware of the gaming culture in Korea? Was there anything informative in this article?

    How about a link to an article that actually has some content (and possibly some research figures):
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/korea.htm l [wired.com] [wired.com]

    The only thing today's article has that the previous one doesn't is, "Hey, this could be America!"
    • Oh wait... It's that width of 800 cutting off the "Next" link.

      This is why a width of 800 is unacceptable for web pages.
    • By the way, the article is not limited to what you see up front. There is a NEXT button so you can flip pages!
      • Please see my previous response re: screen width cutting off the next button when page is formatted to 800 width.

        I forgot, when I troll myself and then respond to my troll, I should have them in the same post ;)
  • Stuff South Korea into a trash can.

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