Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (review)

In 2010, a match-fixing scandal involving the popular game StarCraft exposed the brutal labor conditions experienced by Korean professional computer gamers and the cutthroat nature of the digital gaming industry. Although the scandal itself is not discussed in Dal Yong Jin’s Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, the exposure of the scandal confirms that one element of his thesis proved prescient. Jin’s primary focus is an analysis of the Korean gaming scene from the perspective of political economy, but he also adopts a Marxian approach to labor commodification and exploitation of professional gamers and fans. For Jin, these groups represent ideal commodities, ripe for manipulation, within the new media and knowledge-based postindustrial economy.

Jin examines the historical evolution of Korea’s online gaming industry. A confluence of developments produced the necessary conditions for the industry to flourish: “favorable government policies, a competitive market structure, a swift development of Internet communication technologies, the transnationalization and globalization of the game industry, and people’s mentalities about accepting new technology and online gaming” (p. 35).

The deregulation of the Korean telecommunications industry and its convergence with older media such as broadcasting provided a niche for the development of Korean professional “eSports,” but in doing so, exposed small local developers to powerful foreign competitors because the government also encouraged foreign investment in the online gaming industry. Put simply, eSports is the moniker given to professional digital gaming, as it represents a coming together of computer games, media outlets, and sports. Korea remains the country most enthralled by eSports, and for Jin, this demonstrates a uniquely Korean “convergence of culture and work” (p. 81). The line between work and leisure, especially for professional gamers, is increasingly blurry there.

Professional gamers live a stressful existence, as job security is tenuous and pay is low. Training conditions are brutal and corporate team owners oversee the personal lives of professional gamers strictly; moreover, the dexterity and mental acuity necessary to compete at the highest levels mean careers last but a few years, with most retiring by their mid-twenties. Jin also suggests that fans are equally exploited and commoditized, as data collected by corporations from fans’ online social networks provide free market and advertising research. Jin questions whether online gaming fandom represents an oppositional culture, but concludes that exploitation, and not resistance to corporate manipulation, is the rule.

For historians of technology familiar with the Japanese era of high-speed growth, many parallels are evident between Japan’s and Korea’s transition to a postindustrial economy. Jin, however, repeatedly denies any similarities between the two countries. For example, his emphasis throughout the book is how government promotion of the indigenous gaming industry by the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism proved instrumental in the country’s recovery from the 1997 economic crisis. Comparisons to efforts by Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry to modernize that country during the era of so-called high-speed growth are inescapable. Yet Jin asserts that Korea consciously avoids mimicking Japan because of the legacy of colonial oppression. He states that Japanese products are unpopular in Korea, as local gamers devote themselves to PC games and boycott consoles like Sony’s PlayStation because they are deemed Western. Despite these assertions, the chosen image for the book’s cover is a Play-Station 2 controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. Such contradictions undermine his arguments.

Other contradictions include his positive assessment of neoliberal globalization while simultaneously promoting socialist views of workers as exploited commodities. Jin concludes that Korea’s online gaming empire is the envy of the gaming world, but admits that Korean companies cannot compete with transnational corporations. He laments that Western firms dominate the global digital gaming industry because Korean firms lack sufficient capital to penetrate foreign markets effectively. Finally, his predictions that Korean firms will ultimately utilize their soft/cultural power to create a “contra-flow” of cultural influence from East to West will likely not occur because foreign-developed games like StarCraft remain...