GameSpotting


 Greg Kasavin
Executive Editor, PC Games
Now Playing: Operation Flashpoint, Conquest: Frontier Wars, Anarchy Online

 Recent Favorites: Max Payne, Arcanum

 All-Time Favorites: Ultima V, Street Fighter II, Samurai Shodown, Fallout

The Prehistoric Offline PK

There was a great article on Time.com some weeks ago about the online gaming scene in South Korea. As you take in this article, you can't help but think about how the gaming scene there seems like it's worlds apart from how things are in the United States--namely in how much more seriously games seem to be taken in that country. The article opens with an anecdote about how some poor guy got a serious real-world beating after player-killing some other guy's character in the extremely popular Korean online role-playing game Lineage: The Blood Pledge. Apparently, the guy who got player-killed decided to seek out the player killer for a little offline retribution. On the one hand, you read this stuff and can't help but be shocked that people would sink this low, or at least go to these lengths. On the other hand, you might realize this kind of story really isn't as alien as it first appears.

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People regularly get their asses kicked on account of this game.
Both of the times I've been jumped in my life--jumped, as in, assaulted by someone on the street--it was because of video games. Luckily for me, neither occasion was particularly serious, and I suppose I'm proud to look back and realize that I defended myself in both instances, even though I was a lot younger and undoubtedly pretty scared. Ah, yes, good old San Francisco! On one occasion, I was leaving a video rental store with a copy of some old Genesis game in hand. A couple of kids flanked me as I was walking home and tried to swipe the game from me--but I wasn't about to give it up. It was broad daylight on a fairly busy street, and I held them off for long enough that they finally up and decided to bolt. On the other occasion, I was leaving downtown after playing a bunch of Street Fighter II. A couple of kids followed me home and tried to rob me of the rest of my money at knifepoint. They got an entire quarter out of me before letting me go.

These incidents happened because of games, but they weren't specifically about them. That is, the kids doing the bullying probably couldn't have cared less about which Genesis game I had on me, or whether or not I could do Guile's handcuffs--they just wanted my stuff. Still, it was games that put me in the wrong place at the wrong time in these cases. Are these stories of mine--aside from being less consequential and less interesting than the Time story about the guy getting beaten up over Lineage--really all that different than the so-called "offline player killing" going on in South Korea? Not really. Boys will be boys. They'll find a reason to pick fights.

 
 Have you ever been in or witnessed a physical fight caused by something that happened in a game?

Yes
No
I'm not sure

 
As I've said the last couple of times, I grew up playing a lot of arcade games. Arcades taught me a thing or two besides how to do quarter-circle motions with a joystick. They taught me to watch my mouth, mind my manners, be polite, and respect my elders. It's not like I was raised in the wild by a bunch of Karate Champ machines--I'm just saying that the arcade scene in this country has some real culture to it, too. In particular, there was a whole world of etiquette surrounding Street Fighter II in its heyday. Since the original 1991 version of the game had certain bugs and glitches in it--serious bugs, such as the ability for bitter players to reset the game on command, making both players lose their money--everyone had to agree among themselves to avoid using these detrimental moves. If not--for instance, if I was beating your Dhalsim with my Ryu, and you decided to reset the game on me--then you'd be cruisin' for a bruisin'. I saw a lot of people get beat up, or at least affronted, because of Street Fighter II over the years. No wonder--it created tense situations between complete strangers, and there was even money at stake. Players would literally crowd around the Street Fighter II cabinets. There could have been volumes of legislature written just about how to properly wait in line for your turn. And what would you do if all your buttons worked perfectly, but your opponent's roundhouse kick wouldn't come out?

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People have probably killed each other over Guile's handcuffs.
The answer is, of course, that you'd let him win round two if you won round one. But you wouldn't give up round two without a fight, because that would be rude. Of course.

My point is that games and gaming culture in this country are pretty weird, too. The dramatic conclusion of the Time article quotes one bleary-eyed player as saying that Lineage "doesn't affect reality...reality affects the game." It's a strong conclusion, and perhaps a shocking one initially, but if you're anything like me, then you know exactly how that player must feel. You can completely relate.

Is South Korea really so obsessed with gaming? Or is it just experiencing another version of a phenomenon that's already long since affected our country, though on a slightly smaller scale? It's true that maybe we don't know a lot of people who are or at one time were totally obsessed with games. But we probably all know at least a few people like that and have related stories about how games have caused people to do things like lose sleep, miss class, get hurt, ruin their personal relationships, and more. That doesn't make games bad, it just makes them interesting. For one reason or another, they've always been serious stuff to me.
 

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