Stars in Their Eyes: South Korea’s Love Affair with StarCraft
by Regnard Raquedan, MBA 2001
Korea’s de jure national sport is Taekwondo, but ask Koreans what occupies their collective recreational time and the answer is most likely to be StarCraft.
StarCraft is a wildly popular personal computer (PC) game in South Korea. The game has sold over 11 million copies globally and South Korea accounts for almost half that number. There are professional video gaming leagues that draw thousands and being a full-time gamer is actually a profession in the country. Only in South Korea is a national love affair with a video game possible.
Released in 1998 by Blizzard Entertainment, StarCraft is a space-themed Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game where players command battle units of different alien races to defeat opponents. The battle units belong to the Terran, Protoss, or Zerg factions and each type of unit has its unique abilities, as well as having its distinct set of strengths and weaknesses.
In the game, players can play through different missions and campaigns against the default Artificial Intelligence (AI) or compete against other players in the multi-player network mode. The unique game design of StarCraft has significantly contributed to its immense popularity in and out of the PC Bangs (what gaming cafes are called in Korea).
StarCraft’s popularity is also boosted by the fact that roughly 90 percent of South Korean households are wired to high-speed broadband Internet and there around 25,000 Internet and gaming cafes scattered throughout the country. With an “always online” culture pervading in the country, a video game becoming a fixture in the online scene is not entirely surprising.
But what is surprising is the extent how far StarCraft has managed to stretch its presence beyond the personal computer in South Korea.
Apart from being a pastime, StarCraft is big business and bringer of career opportunities in the country. According to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), the video gaming market is expected to be worth $5.5 billion in 2010 with a 17 percent growth rate.
There are two major StarCraft national leagues where gamers can turn professional and get paid for playing StarCraft full-time. This career move, while unheard of in other countries, is good turn for Koreans. This year, the average annual salary of a professional StarCraft player is approximately US$ 60,000. (The average annual salary in South Korea is $16,291). Lim Yo-Hwan, regarded as one of the all-time the top players in the StarCraft leagues, is said to have earned more than $1 million at the height of his popularity in the 2000’s.
These StarCraft tournaments are treated as big events. StarCraft holds the Guinness World Record for the largest audience in a gaming competition, when 120,000 fans attended a national finals in Busan in 2005. Professional gamers that dominate the national leagues ascend to public celebrity– the same way basketball players are revered in the Philippines and cricket superstars are idolized in India and Pakistan.
Other sectors in Korean society also made their own plays for StarCraft. The Korean army and navy created their own StarCraft professional teams to attract more recruits. Television feature shows that replay StarCraft games, with a couple of channels exclusively showing only video gaming content. In 2005, there was at least one Korean television channel showing a StarCraft game at any given time. Korean Air emblazoned several of its 747 planes with the StarCraft logo as a support to the booming e-sports culture in the country.
StarCraft also penetrated the academic life in South Korea. Cyber-universities have sprung up where students learn game-planning and other high-tech subjects, and that includes mastery of StarCraft. This becomes an appealing option for a lot of aspiring professional gamers as enrollment in such cyber-universities postpones mandatory military service.
This phenomenon is permeating outside of South Korea. The University of Florida approved last August 2010 a course called “21st Century Skills in StarCraft” that aims to “teach valuable 21st Century Skills through a hands-on approach.” The course posits that key StarCraft gaming skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making will translate into practical use beyond the game.
Moreover, scientific research are backing what the folks at South Korea and the University of Florida are on to. A study from the University of Rochester found that playing action video games conditions people to make the right decisions faster. In addition to the key finding, the study also found that playing video games improves a general skills such as multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town. Korean professional gamers have been known to perform hundreds of game actions per minute.
Despite the boost StarCraft has provided to to South Korea’s grand cyber community, growing pains of a wired society have started to show.
Online addiction is a serious problem in South Korea– according to the government, about two million South Koreans — nearly one in 10 online users — are addicted to the Internet. In 2005, a man collapsed and died of exhaustion after playing a StarCraft almost non-stop for 50 hours. In a more shocking case, a man was sentenced to two years in prison after he and his wife allowed their three-month-old daughter to starve to death while they raised a virtual child in an Internet cafe.
But Korean society is moving forward– the government has implemented measures such as controlled Internet connection for underage game players and a Korean medical research facility has been testing a drug called Bupropion that claims to reduce gaming addiction among StarCraft players. The Starcraft leagues continue to pour in money as they set a new records in giving the biggest prizes in gaming competition.
South Korea’s decade-long love affair with StarCraft can never be found elsewhere. It carries an intensity that borders on national passion and cultural obsession– from the smokey PC bangs to the grand big stadium gaming events, from sleek computer monitors to the television screen, from the Internet gaming addicts to the the glamorous professional video gamers.
With the release of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty last July 2010, StarCraft will continue to fascinate South Korea for years to come.
