Dissertation preview

What better way to begin the New Year, than with a dissertation teaser?

Here it is.

Title: Online games as a medium of cultural communication: An ethnographic study of sociotechnical transformation

• Introduction
• Methodology and Rationale
• The Rise of Korean Gaming
• Gaming: from Subculture to Mainstream
• Conclusion and Moving Forward

Abstract:

This dissertation explores the place and meaning of online games in everyday life. In South Korea, online games are a prominent part of popular culture and this medium has come under public criticism for various societal ills, such as addiction. Humanistic accounts of Information-Communication Technology (ICT) usage are still a minority body of research. All too often, the explanations for engagement with technology are reductionist to the most basic variables and the social aspects omitted in the name of science. An ethnographic approach is employed in order to understand the place of games as a communication medium.

Exactly how has it come to pass, that online games have come to occupy such a prominent place in the media ecology in South Korea, and yet not been replicated in other national contexts? First, I outline the discourse on addiction as it pertains to online games and suggest some scholarly support for the viewpoint that the rhetoric surrounding a biomedical interpretation of online game addiction may not be the most appropriate way to address problems that have been typically laid at the feet of online gaming (or any other new form of media). Second, I transition into discussing my rationale for approaching South Korea as a fieldsite, the ethnographic methodology employed, and how this examination of online games is a particularly illustrative case of the profound role played by culture, social structure, infrastructure, and policy in audience reception. Third, I delve into the foundational aspects of Korean social history and culture that I assert, set the stage for the present new media scene in South Korea. Fourth, I explore what games mean in the lives of Korean youth according to the ethnographic data I have been collecting during research stays in 2004, 2008/2009 and 2010.

Overall, this dissertation examines the contextual factors of which a medium of communication in the sociotechnical transformation of South Korea can begin to be understood within the porous boundaries of its national circumstances.

Keywords: Games; Ethnography; Korea; Addiction; Sociotechnical; Media; Anthropology; Communication; Culture; Social Structure; Infrastructure; Policy;

Game changers: the women who make videogames

An article in today's Guardian discusses women who play video games and more importantly, those who make them. What is notable are the reasons suggested for the traditionally low numbers of both, including the numbers of women in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) disciplines.

Culture:
Mitu Khandaker, who started programming at the age of 12 and now runs her own indie development studio, Tiniest Shark, credits "a complicated mix of marketing, early arcade culture, and deep-seated cultural expectations" for the status quo. "There are a lot of things in games that women can point to and go 'this isn't for me', whether that's eye-rollingly sexualised female characters, or just the openly misogynistic attitudes to be found within many gaming communities."

Technology:
Reddy reckons that games development is becoming more appealing to girls as a potential career because it is no longer about a computer sitting in the corner of the room, it's about phones, laptops and social networks. "I look at the generation of young women coming through school now and they've all grown up with technology, they've grown up in an era where entertainment, games and music are interconnected."

Our role:
"I think young girls need to have their eyes opened to the different avenues open to them in games," says writer Rhianna Pratchett, who has worked on several titles with strong female leads including Heavenly Sword and Mirror's Edge. "They can be artists, animators, writers, designers, producers, programmers … We need to get them fired up about technology and find the Ada Lovelaces of the future. I think both the industry and the educational system have a role to play to achieve this. There are so many great female role-models within the games industry, but they rarely get the exposure they deserve."

Call for Papers, Iowa Journal of Communication

Feel free to distribute widely:

Call for papers: Iowa Journal of Communication

Special issue: Games and Culture: Asia-Pacific perspectives

As a cultural genre, online gaming has been one of the most dynamic in the world. Within a relatively short period of time, online gaming has become a major entertainment tool for fun, but it has also become another channel for human relationships as part of people’s actual lives. The vast popularity of online games around the world has closely coincided with the widespread proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which have facilitated communication and interaction at an unprecedented level. Through games as well as related activities, youth have used these technologies to nurture friendships through their engagement in online games, instant messaging, blogging, and the like, which assist them in constructing their own tightly-knit communities.

Therefore, the booming online gaming market should be seriously examined in its own socio-cultural circumstances and context vis a vis the global game industry. Primarily due to the accelerated pace of development, the academic research on online games, however, has been correspondingly sparse and limited in scope, with domestic literature tending towards either the celebratory emphasis of positive business development or the problematics of regulation and media effects oriented concerns, such as violence and addiction. While such research comprises important contributions to the emergent scholarship on online gaming, lopsided accounts tend to foreground the readily empirical observations and aggregate data to the exclusion of other possible macro factors such as globalization, intercultural communication, transnationalization of the gaming industry, and micro, more private but resonant problems in family or social life of those concerned.

As a region, the Asia-Pacific area is characterized by diverse penetration rates of gaming and broadband technologies. Two defining locations, Asia (including South Korea and China) and North America, are seen as both online gaming centers and the largest markets to which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Ever since Nexon, a Korean games corporation, introduced the world’s first graphic massively multiplayer online game with ‘Kingdom of the Winds’ in 1996 and two exceedingly popular online games thereafter (Lineage I and II), Korea has played a central role in the PC-based online game market and digital economy. In China, online games are also becoming social spaces, where new social relations, community networks, and a new type of life are formed.

In this special issue to be published in September 2010, we seek to exchange our scholarship on the politics of game play and its associated cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Harboring global gaming production and consumption sites such as China, Korea, and the U.S., the region provides a wealth of divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Welcoming a range of presentations, from micro ethnographic studies to macro political economy analyses and beyond, this special issue will provide an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of game production, representation and consumption in the region.

Suggested paper topics discuss games in terms of one of the following areas:

• History of the growth of online gaming as a global industry, discourse, and media product
• Critical interpretation of emerging local game industries in Asia and/or North-America
• Online games and globalization/regionalization
• Convergent technologies and the impact on established modes of game play
• Government regulations and types of game play
• Game fandom and free labor
• Gaming as social technology/media
• A culturally specific aesthetic to the production and consumption of certain games
• New media and experimental gaming
• Gendered consumption and production of games

Deadline for this special issue of Iowa Journal of Communication: 15^th March, 2010. Author(s) should submit all inquiries, expressions of interest and papers to Dal Yong Jin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; djin@kaist.ac.kr; djin@gmail.com).

All submissions are peer reviewed by two scholars. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically in Word or Word Perfect format and conform to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and should not exceed 9,000 words in length.

On being "Korean Enough"

Through his blog "Koreanish," writer Alexander Chee links to an essay published in Guernica titled, "Korean Enough: Alexander Chee on New Korean American Fiction." I highly recommend it, for anyone interested in the complexity of ethnic identity as it spans geography, generations, and even measures of authenticity.

I was interested in the article from the start, but by the second paragraph the article was thoroughly resonating with what I have found in my own experience and seek to convey as time (and my research) goes on:

My father’s family in Korea keeps traditions they brought with them from China in the 15th Century that the Chinese no longer keep; they use an archaic Chinese script in the keeping of our family’s records. They perform, inside the confines of my family, these rituals of this lost homeland—even as they tell me they fear I’m “not Korean enough,” with no sense of irony whatsoever.

Even this short paragraph is so packed with nuance: a) Korea's proximity to a dominant and large nation (China); b) How narratives are transmitted in a literate and oral context; c) The performance of ritual as a way to ensure continuity and affirmation of an all-too-fragile sense of identity; and d) The tenuousness of authenticity and representation.

I have to say that it hit me on a personal level of course--anyone who's ever been singled out as visibly different in their primary context of operation may relate to the feeling of being an 'alien' or of feeling "yes I belong" and at the very same time "how could I ever really belong."

As an ethnographer, or, "Professional Stranger," (as Michael Agar has written), the feeling of being an Angel, Ghost (as Grant McCracken has talked about), or Alien in the context one is studying--is part and parcel with the ability to see things as if one doesn't belong. And yet, we have the need to function (or sometimes not) within that context. When it's your job, culture shock is not shock anymore per se, but rather a constant state of orange/red alert that is physically and emotionally taxing and also par for the course.

In her address to the class of 2008 at the Berkeley School of Information last month, Genevieve Bell from Intel recounts her emotional experience with a Korean shaman and tells those in the audience that if one is not in tears at least once in the field in that manner, then one is not really embracing the experience.

Me thinks to self: Yep.

In my fieldwork experiences, my authenticity has been tested implicitly and explicitly many a time. We do this in many ways. Even as gamers, there is the said and unsaid about whether or not someone is "hardcore" enough--and almost a destructive culture of intensity where one's authenticity and social status hangs in the balance. Pain of (virtual?) death should one not prove worthy. I've written about this as it pertained to a particular raid in World of Warcraft.

Culture is shared knowledge in a system of meaning. In the Korean context, I was often told, "Once you know x, you will be truly Korean." x, at times equated with the ability to eat spicy food, knowing when to pay for the bill, knowing Seoul's expansive subway system, or how/why Tim Horton's to Canadian national identity can't hold a candle to the affinity Koreans feel for Kimchi and it's pervasive role in society, life, and death.

Alexander Chee's article was an excellent piece--driving home just how very much a state of mind authenticity is, and just how true (and necessary) the myths and fictions we create for ourselves often are. Have a read.

Start off the New Year right...

...with some reading from Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, published by SAGE.

Dal Yong Jin and I have an article published in the latest issue of Games and Culture (2008, Vol.3 Issue 1, pp. 38-58) titled, "Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry."

The table of contents along with access to the text can be found here at the Sage Journals Online website: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/vol3/issue1/

Alongside articles that take up games in the Asia-Pacific, our paper is a combination of political economy and ethnography from our research on Korean online games.

Abstract: In this article, the authors attempt to ascertain the factors involved in the swift growth of online games in the context of broader sociocultural elements. Through political economy and ethnographic analysis, they show that online games, like other forms of technology, are sociocultural products that have been historically constituted by certain forms of knowledge and social practice. First, they map out the forces driving their development by examining government policies and competition among online games companies in Korea. They then explore capital flow to investigate the major players in the market. Finally, they explore the sociocultural elements contributing to the diffusion of online games in the cultural milieu specific to Korea.

Key Words: ethnography • Korea • online games • policy • political economy

Happy New Year all, and happy reading! All accusations of geeking out apply.

China: Anti-Addiction policies not yielding desired results

"Whenever a new policy is set from above, ordinary people find ways to fight back. So we can always find our own ways to get around these restrictions."
- 15 year old Chinese Internet user

"Ordinary people," are who I have always found immensely more interesting in my work, because they're infinitely variable, numerous, and tragically under-emphasized in studies of technology and policy as are the circumstances in which they live.

China's self-described 'epidemic' of Internet addiction has been the inspiration for policies designed to control how much time gamers under the age of 18 spend online. There, "anti-addiction software" is installed which warns the user to stop after three hours, with the threat of point penalties if the warning is unheeded.

"One official report estimates that almost 6 percent of teenage Internet users — an astounding 3.5 million teenagers — are online more than 40 hours a week. That's why the government is requiring gaming companies to install anti-addiction software on their games to stop teens from playing too long."

In another part of the article, the industry perspective is: "What I want to say is we need this for our company," says Jackie Zhuge, spokesman for China's biggest online gaming company, Shanda Interactive Entertainment. "It's social responsibility we have to take."

Almost, but not quite. The burden of social responsiblity cannot reside exclusively in the hands of games companies. That gives too much credit to the design of games (which are in the end, for profit) and strips the discussion of any and all socio-political issues that motivate people to engage in such activities. But, isn't that what authoritarian governments would want us to focus on? Isn't that what we see in North America as well, with discussions about Grand Theft Auto and Anna Nicole obscuring our discussions of what is really important to our future?

The policies to curb 'addiction' probably are not working because the problem is hardly one of clinical pathology. What is driving Chinese youth online? The article touches upon some of these social problems: "China's one-child policy has indirectly led to this problem – spawning a generation of spoiled, but lonely, only children. The burden of parental expectation upon these children is often intense – as was once the case with another mother and her 18-year-old son. He now plays games for 10 hours a day. "He always used to be the top student, or No. 2, in his school," she says. "He even got a prize for being the top student in his school district. All the teachers had high hopes for him. Now he's dropped out. He has no future anymore." And these stories aren't unusual.

Does this -really- have to do with addiction to online games? With flashy Pokemon causing seizures in our brains, causing 3.5 million vacuous teenagers to become mindless helpless zombies under the power of the INTERNETZ? As my study in Korea echoes, gaming has emerged as a practice of up and coming youth who are dealing with the world they've been dealt. And it doesn't seem pretty.

Read the full article from NPR>>

"China now has 162 million Internet users. With 100 new users joining the online community every minute, China will overtake the United States as the country with the world's largest Internet population in just two years, officials say."

Guilt and technology

For better or worse, I've always had an over-developed sense of responsibility. I find I have to actually make concerted efforts to discipline things like 'email time' and 'unplug' to get some offline business accomplished (like reading). It is difficult however, when you feel the 'pull' of people trying to get a hold of you to get this, that, and the other done or your opinion of whatever... etc etc.
Such discipline is an attempt at long term sustainability, and ultimate interest in my sanity and productiveness. I've seen too many people in different places get overwhelmed.

Recently, I've been thinking of the broader themes of my research and possible ways to unify certain concepts I've been working on like myth, modernity, progress, and the like. On the bus ride home one night my brain just clicked into the concept of 'guilt.'

I scrawled some questions in my notebook to the effect of:
Is there something to be said for how guilt may play into people’s motivations to communicate—with home, work, or religious icons? How is guilt being negotiated and techno-mediated in various cultures? Are there historical explanations for manifestations of guilt within entire societies? Might the allure of technologies be their ability to absolve users of guilt, much as people once purchased indulgences for the sins of ancestors? How does addiction link up with guilt?

Looking at my piles of books and sources at home, I got all giddy because my neurons were firing. It was one of what I tend to call "click" moments (aka "Aha")... when it all comes into focus.

Guilt is a powerful concept, and one that I'm exploring as part of the human condition. It's gonna be a lot of work, but fun!