The Birth of Korean Cool (23 page)

“Those are key markets, but they’re also console countries,” Kim said, meaning most of their playing is on consoles like Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo—produced in Japan
and the United States—rather than on PCs. Korean game developers have focused almost exclusively on PC-based games: a peculiar gap, indicative of cultural and commercial phenomena. Partly, it
was due to history: “Most of the [coin-operated] arcade games in Korea were imported from Japanese companies like Sega,” Kim said. “If Korea had developed its own arcade games,
there would have been great potential for it to enter the console market.”

Korea’s reputation for illegally copying games discouraged console manufacturers from entering the market, said Kim. By contrast, online games come from central servers, so piracy is a
nonissue.

There is also an amusing cultural reason for preferring PC online games to console, said Kim: “Console games are the kind of thing you’re supposed to play in your living room with
the whole family. In Korea, parents don’t play games with their kids.” Part of the reason Korean online games have not made it to the west, he said, is that in addition to their
preference for consoles, Westerners prefer to geek out alone in the privacy of their homes. Furthermore, he adds, Europe doesn’t have enough high-speed infrastructure to make a huge move from
console to PC games. What Europe does have is a powerful mobile network, which is significant, since many industry experts are banking on phone games becoming big in the future. Part of the reason
for the surge in phone gaming, said Kim, is that it appeals to older people who didn’t grow up playing video games: “Online games are hard, so adults don’t want to make the
effort. Mobile games are very easy, so there is less of a generation gap with mobile games.”

That said, certain cultures have their own distinct gaming preferences. Korean games, for example, are a slightly different species than their Japanese or American counterparts. Korean games
tend to focus on plot rather than graphics, whereas American and Japanese games have hyperreal details like individual hairs and the infamous jiggle of female characters’ bosoms. Also, Kim
said, “Koreans prefer team games. They’ll say, ‘You be the healer, I’ll be the fighter.’ ”

Korea’s close study of its export countries—particularly Japan—makes it easier for Korean companies to market and sell games to fit the tastes of the niche market. Case in
point: most of Korea’s top video game companies devote a subdivision to developing games in the Japanese language for the Japanese market. U.S. game manufacturers like Blizzard Entertainment
or EA don’t do that. This might be one of the reasons why games that are top sellers everywhere else in the world—
Grand Theft Auto
,
Call of Duty
,
Halo
—are not even in the top thirty in Japan.
²

South Korea is the world’s biggest manufacturer of free MMORPGs in the world. In this format (
World of Warcraft
is a popular American example), people can play with tens of
thousands of people around the world simultaneously—forming teams with them or combating them. As with a smart drug dealer, the game maker’s strategy is to make the first hit free.
It’s when the players want to buy more tools for their avatar (a sword, a gun, virtual money), or advance to higher levels in the game, that the game makers start asking for credit card
numbers.

South Korean game makers make it easy for the proliferation of MMORPGs by putting game servers all over the world. Many U.S. game manufacturers don’t do this; there is no server in Japan
for Blizzard’s
World of Warcraft
. This doesn’t make it impossible for Japanese to play, but it does make it a good deal more difficult.

According to Kim, the gaps in technology throughout different countries are gradually decreasing as nations catch up to one another, so people won’t have to choose what games to play based
on their local technology. This is good news for Korean game manufacturers, whose emphasis on story rather than graphics will benefit from this change.

One major limitation to the industry’s growth starts at home, with the Korean Youth Protection Act. While the government does not ban games outright, they give adults-only rating to a lot
of games that, in other countries, children have easy access to. Excessive violence or sex is a common basis for a clampdown. As a result, many games aren’t widely available, and game
designers leave Korea to create games in more tolerant markets. “Only Germany and a few other countries have youth protection laws. Korea’s is one of the strongest. I think it’s
because of Confucianism. [The Youth Protection Act] is basically a parents’ rights law,” comments Kim. In recent years, the Korean government has cracked down on video games far more
than on other entertainment genres, like film. President Lee Myung-bak (2004–2008) clamped down hard on the Internet and on game content in particular. His legacy continues. The game
Homefront
, released in 2011, in which players fight against a North Korean occupation of the United States, was banned because it was deemed too politically explosive. The re-release of
the fighting game
Mortal Kombat
was banned in 2011 on grounds of extreme violence.

Kim thinks the prudishness also has to do with pressure from Korea’s Christian leaders—Lee was the most openly practicing Christian president in Korean history. He strongly enforced
the youth protection laws. But the situation might be looking up. Kim said, “The current president, Park Geun-hye, is facing something like the IMF situation. [This is what Koreans call the
Asian financial crisis.] The economy is bad, there’s a lot of unemployment. It’s quite a similar situation. Now Park’s slogan is the ‘creative economy,’ so
they’re creating incentives and an environment for new technology that will foster creativity.”

The Korean gaming industry has come under fire, domestically and internationally, following widespread reports of Korean Internet addiction. In 2005, a twenty-eight-yearold Korean man died after
playing
StarCraft 2
for fifty straight hours in an Internet café. Another incident heard round the world took place in 2009, when a Seoul couple neglected their baby daughter, who
starved to death because they were spending all their time at an Internet café playing an online game called
Prius
.

Kim thinks that the game industry is being unfairly blamed for what is really an underlying Korean ailment. “Korea’s development has been very condensed, so the society as a whole
has high stress. Students are very stressed, adults have to make money fast, and when the government makes policies, there have to be results right away. The biggest problem in such a condensed
atmosphere is unhappiness. Korea has the highest suicide rate in the OECD. Everyone is blaming everyone. So the game industry is the scapegoat.”

The press usually overlooks gaming in its coverage of Hallyu, and of all the forms of Korean-produced pop culture, gaming bears the faintest Korean stamp. But government number crunchers know
that gaming is leading the wave. And unlike K-pop music, for example, the video game industry creates new jobs for all sorts of ordinary citizens—software developers and even professional
players, not just a select few superstar performers.

STARCRAFT 2

A Korean cottage industry on its own is Blizzard Entertainment’s real-time strategy (RTS) video game
StarCraft 2
. The world’s top ten players are all
Korean, even though the game is U.S.-made.
³
At the time of its 2010 release, the game, which involves combat between humans and alien forces with
supernatural powers, was the fastest-selling role-playing video game in history: some 3 million copies were sold in its first month on the shelves. There are currently fewer than half a million
active members, but there are 3.4 million teams, suggesting that many players serve on multiple teams.
⁴

One of Korea’s most famous
StarCraft 2
figures is the director of the Global StarCraft 2 League, Chae Jung-won. Chae hosts the GSL games on GOMTV, a streaming television network
based in Korea. Four to five days a week, for four to five hours a day, Chae’s show broadcasts live tournaments, in real time, with Korean and English simulcasts. The matches culminate in a
world championship four times a year, with a $50,000 cash prize for the winner. All players have corporate sponsorship. And, according to Chae, the championship finals have as many as half a
million viewers worldwide (a high number for a streaming broadcast), of which 70 percent are outside Korea.

It is now possible in Korea to make a living in e-sports (video game tournaments); Korea has five television channels devoted to gaming twenty-four hours a day; the United States only has one
well-known gaming channel, G4. Chae is emblematic of the vast changes in Korean culture in recent years: he studied to be a geneticist but has abandoned that plan. However, he’s semiretired
as a player and focuses on his career as gaming channel host. “Video gamers are like professional athletes,” he told me. “You can’t do it forever.”

When I asked why
StarCraft 2
in particular was so popular in Korea, he said, “The game ends quickly, so you can start a new one,” echoing one of the traits for which Koreans
are best known—impatience. “Koreans like games that are fast and they like to compete.”

Furthermore, said Chae,
StarCraft 2
is conducive to playing in a social setting, with most playing occurring in Internet cafés, where people can sit alongside all their friends,
rather than at home alone—a hallmark of Korean gaming.

Chae is truly a symbol of the millennial generation—not just in Korea, either. He is among the first crop of gamers for whom a lifelong career in e-sports was a viable option. The Korea in
which he grew up is nothing like that of my childhood, in which we had to sneak into arcades to play outdated American and Japanese video games. Fortunately, technology breeds short memories. Once
the next gadget comes out, people seem to forget all about the previous one. If it were not for this, Samsung would have been royally screwed.

JUST A FEW DECADES AGO, ALMOST EVERY PIECE OF
electronics that came out of Samsung factories was a piece of crap. As business professor Chang Sae-jin
noted in his book
Sony vs Samsung
, even simple technology like the Samsung-made electric fan “was so poorly designed and manufactured that merely lifting it up with one hand broke
its neck.”
¹
Communist East Germany probably made better electronics than Samsung did. In 1993, Samsung couldn’t even convince its own
countrymen to buy its cell phones. Samsung ranked a pitiful fourth place in the domestic mobile phone market, and outside Korea, the phones were practically nonexistent. The fact that the world has
forgotten this is a testament to how successful Samsung has been in turning around its product quality and rebranding itself from a low-level manufacturer known for cheap microwave ovens to the
world’s premier producer of smartphones, semiconductors, and LED and plasma 3-D televisions.

As with many of Korea’s success stories discussed in this book, Samsung’s rise to the world stage is attributable at least in part to two factors: the direct intervention of the
Korean government at crucial stages and its willingness to dive into the digitial revolution because it had no choice.

How amazing is Samsung today? Here’s one indicator mentioned in chapter 1. Apple iPhones are made with Sam-sung microchips, even though the two companies are archrivals in the smartphone
market, even though they had over fifty simultaneous patent lawsuits against each other in 2012.
²
Why would Apple do this?

According to Dr. Chang Sae-jin, it makes perfect business sense. Apple could, of course, buy chips elsewhere, but “Samsung was the most efficient producer of key components. [Apple] has
alternatives. But Samsung was the cheapest and most advanced supplier.”

That said, of course, Samsung chips have become a thorny issue for Apple. When Samsung first started selling chips to Apple, it wasn’t making products that posed a threat to the iPhone.
But, said Chang, “the issue came up when Samsung began to sell its own mobile phones in the same space as Apple. Samsung came up with the Android phone to compete with the Apple iPhone. So
Apple got pissed. It’s very natural. It’s not right or wrong.”

Apple was right to be pissed. In 2012, Samsung was number one in smartphone market share: 39.6 percent compared to Apple’s 25.1 percent.
³
Samsung
is one of Korea’s greatest sources of national pride. The company generates about
one-fifth of South Korea’s GDP
, and it’s the ninth most valuable brand in the
world.
⁴

Samsung—like all Korean electronics companies—did a 180 in terms of quality in the last two decades. Even as late as 1985, when my family was preparing to move from the United States
to Korea, we had so little faith in Korean technology that we bought all new appliances, including a Sony Trinitron TV, to bring with us, even though import duties were spectacularly high, because
having a Korean television was not much different from having none at all.

Chang believes 1995 was the year of reckoning for Korean electronics companies wishing to engage in self-criticism. “Goldstar  couldn’t do anything about [their reputation], so
they dropped the name ‘Goldstar’ and came up with a new brand called LG.” As for Samsung, “They did market research and came up with good news: nobody had heard of
Samsung.” So the name stayed, even as they reinvented themselves, in what has become a textbook case of successful rebranding strategy.

Samsung (which means “three stars”) began in 1938 as a Korean-owned fruit and fish company, during the period of Japanese rule. Chang explained that following World War II, some
Japanese companies left assets in Korea, which the government had to sell off. Those with government connections got a good price; Samsung was one of these companies.