Pretensions was looking back on her last week in South Korea, and their, shall we say, intense attitude to gaming. Korea University, one of the holy trinity of universities in South Korea, has launched a Global Games Education course this June in collaboration with Korean MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game) giant, Nexon. The collaboration is intended to groom talent for the games industry and students can take an internship with Nexon as part of their course. Students can also opt to continue on to a Masters in the subject at Carnegie-Mellon University in the States.

Nexon Corporation is the developer of hit MMORPGs such as the quirky anime-celtic Mabinogi and hit MapleStory and now has divisions all over the world. It is just one of the Korean game giants, the other being NCSoft, the developer of Lineage 2 and Guild Wars. Korean MMORPGs have their own unique slant on gaming not completely similar to Western success stories such as World of Warcraft (which is also popular in Korea btw) . For example, Mabinogi allows players to pursue non-violence and apparently there are lots of players who seem to like playing virtual musical instruments around campfires for the interaction. Others are more traditional, yet even Lineage 2 plays up its factions' socio-political aspects a lot more than most traditional western MMORPGs. Most conspicuously, the mainstay of the Western PC game, the first-person shooter (FPS) is conspicuously absent from the Korean gaming scene. I'm not sure why - perhaps it's a self-fulfilling prophecy generated by the Korean media coverage of MMORPGs, which have huge magazines dedicated to them. In contrast, many popular Western games are little known in Korea (Half-life 2, huh?).

Jim Rossignol of PC Gamer wrote an excellent piece on Korean gaming culture which I don't intend to reproduce here. Not so much has changed since 2005 when the feature was written. Gamers are still regarded the way athletes are in other countries, aka as beings to be admired for their skills. The PC is still the major gaming machine thanks to the wonderful broadband penetration in Korea (90% of household are broadband subscribers and it's fast), even new whizz-bang consoles like the Nintendo Wii have had underwhelming sales in Korea. Starcraft, Blizzard's hit SF strategy game is still plenty popular in the land of Kimchi, the US games company's announcement of Starcraft 2 last year played to 10,000 eager people. Korean gamers can even learn English through Starcraft with special Starcraft English training books!

PC Bangs, the collective gaming rooms where players can play LAN-based PC game competitions are still around and uniquely to P, actually seem intended to appeal to more than male gamer nerds, boasting posters of fashions and popstars on the walls. They're also a lot less stinky and dirty than eg the mainland China equivalents (Wang Ba).  This sort of social acceptablity and sociability of gamers seems to be the unique point of Korean gaming culture - it'll be interesting to see how this progresses over the next ten years or so!