Starcraft Animation!

Comments

1. Shawn says:

   August 10, 2008

   Starcraft II is in the works.

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2. gordsellar says:

   August 10, 2008

   That scares me. I guess we can expect more PC-bang deaths.

   Okay, only one guy actually died from gaming for days on end… but gaming addiction seems much more common among adults here than in the West. To the point where, just across the pond, the Chinese government decided intervention was necessary… China’s not Korea, but in some areas, there’s relative overlap. It’s like with gambling: relatively sane friends I’ve had here just somehow can’t control themselves when it comes to computer games or betting their whole winnings on a single hand.

   (Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if President Lee considered instituting daily time-limits on gaming as well, under rhetoric of national productivity and improving education.)

   For the record, I think it’s invasive. Gaming is probably time-wasting and bad for you if you do it too much. So is drinking soju and smoking cigarettes and hitting the red light district, all not-uncommon pastimes among older men of means (to the degree that a couple of years ago the Ministry of Gender Equality actually started a cash-prize program for individuals and companies to remove the cathouse from the list of acceptable entertainments for mens’ night out).

   I don’t imagine Lee would be very strong in prusuing a program completely banning soju, cigarettes, or prostitution — in fact, from jokes and even apparent bribe offers he made to reporters during the campaign (you write something nice about me, I’ll buy you a lay, essentially) — one imagines that Lee’s understanding of prostitution is that it’s an important and ingrained part of Korean business culture.

   But Starcraft? That’s young’uns obsession, and bans are easy to enact. Ah, Lawrence Lessig was right: why make laws when you can just adjust code?

   The companies, though, ought to be able to sue for infringement of their business operations.

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3. shawn scarber says:

   August 10, 2008

   I’ve played World of Warcraft and I wouldn’t call it addicting. It’s more like a relationship with a friend who rewards you for doing tasks. The tasks aren’t too hard, but they’re challenging enough to keep you coming back. There’s also something that’s very enticing about going up against real players in the virtual world. I haven’t played in a few months, but there was a time there for a while where I was probably playing 80 hours a week. Sounds like a lot of time now, but at the time it didn’t seem like that much.

   I remember playing Koreans in Star Craft on Battlenet. Honestly, most of them cheated. It was just known that if you were going up against a Korean that they were probably using an automated keystroke script. I’m not sure why anyone would continue to play at that point.

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4. gordsellar says:

   August 11, 2008

   Shawn,

   Well, I think the addictiveness of things like videogames depends on the person. But I do know what you mean! I played — what was it? ah, yeah, Eve Online: Trinity for a while, and there was something very compelling about the idea of coming back to that world and doing things, building something up. Not that I got very far with it, but I did play for a while, and after a few months, I decided to stop for the sake of, you know, productivity in any and all other areas of my life.

   (Also, switching to Linux at a time when it couldn’t be run on Linux helped be walk away.)

   I’ve heard about the scripts thing, and also that some Korean gamers were badly-behaved. I can’t remember where, but I even recall hearing in some machinima thing some guy complaining about the Korean players who just helped one another and ganged up on everyone else, or something.

   The weird thing is that I find myself wondering how many of the keystroke script guys were salarymen with rage to work off and no other way to vent it. You’d see a lot of those guys in the PC rooms in our part of Jeonju, anyway. from 8pm-12am-ish, according to a friend of mine who was playing a lot of group games at such places: feverish, smoking, red-eyed, and looking strung out on PC games.

   But yeah — addiction? I think it’s a very easy thing for a government to just declare something addictive, especially when it’s an interest that older or more political people are unlikely to defend a right to access. If a government were worried about time-wastage and efficiency and addiction, then booze would probably be the first thing to look at… by raising the taxes, of course.

   Then again, in South Korea, the government (relatively) recently included soju on the list of necessities and proposed price controls for them. Like, to maintain their affordability. (Too bad so little is being done to make housing more affordable for regular folks here. It’s insane.) So anyway, if soju’s a necessity, then I suppose the addictiveness of computer games shouldn’t matter much.

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