The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry, viewed in social, cultural, and economic contexts. In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms. Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.

In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. This BIT examines the working conditions of professional gamers in the high-pressure world of the Korean online gaming industry.

In the global game industry where the U.S. has already established its strong position in PC game and Japan in console game, Korea successfully opened new territory and began to play an important role in the global game industry with a new and emerging product — the online game. This book focuses on this interesting phenomenon and suggests that innovation, which led to the shift from the offline game to the online game, is the rationale behind this. Based on field data gathered through direct investigations with Korean game developers as well as the U.S., Southeast Asian, Chinese and Japanese companies, this book unveils diverse strategies of game companies and presents cognitive differences toward the online game business where various convergences will occur between the online game and other Internet businesses.This book focuses on the innovative factors which made the online game, born in a small Asian country, grow tremendously and successfully to gain competitiveness in the global game industry where the PC and console games had already taken their strong position. Based on authentic, accumulated research conducted over five years in the domain of the online game industry through interviews, case studies and international surveys, the data in this book has huge value since the results were derived from users' data with the cooperation of each game industry.

This ethnography explores the practical experiences and institutional entanglements of online games, gaming, and gamers in contemporary South Korean culture and society. Korean online gaming culture is encountered at numerous sites and scales of experience, from the virtual worlds of online games, to the offline spaces where gaming happens, to societal practices and discourses around the management of online gaming and gamers backed by competing institutional interests. Online gaming is contextualized within the history of building Korea's high-speed, high-tech information society, a process known in Korea as 0́−informatization.0́+ Korean online gaming culture is evaluated according to a sociocultural appreciation of speed that elevates qualities of quickness and acceleration as virtues of practice and behavior, the performance of which calibrates individuals with normative expectations that inflect approaches to IT use in Korea's information society. Since its emergence in the late 1990s, Korean online gaming culture has been the source of both celebration and controversy. While online games have proven to be lucrative for the Korean economy, the objects of a vibrant popular culture, and an area of business and leisure activity that distinguishes Korea as a leader on the world stage, they have also been the objects of political and medical interventions around problematic gaming, or online game 0́−addiction.0́+ Gamers exist in the middle of this tension, their practices and behaviors evaluated against models of normative online gaming and IT use. These evaluations differ from site to site and across scales of experience, yet they are all inflected by a preoccupation with quickness and acceleration as characteristics of a normative orientation to information practices, including online gaming. Performance of these qualities connects individuals with Korea's information society, contributing to normative gaming socialities that I argue are associated with chronotopes: participatory frameworks in which temporality, spatiality, and sociality are intrinsically interconnected. Korean online gamers must calibrate themselves and their practices with normative expectations for gaming and for being social across these chronotopic scales. Failure to calibrate 0́−correctly0́+0́4or, rather, mis-calibrating0́4can have serious consequences for gamers, prompting their enrollment in institutionally-backed disciplining techniques and strategies designed to align them with normative gaming socialities.

Global esports explores the recent surge of esports in the global scene and comprehensively discusses people's understanding of this spectacle. By historicizing and institutionalizing esports, the contributors analyze the rapid growth of esports and its implications in culture and digital economy. Dal Yong Jin curates a discussion as to why esports has become a global phenomenon. From games such as Spacewar to Starcraft to Overwatch, a key theme, distinguishing this collection from others, is a potential shift of esports from online to mobile gaming. The book addresses why many global game players and fans play and enjoy online and mobile games in professional game competitions, and therefore, they investigate the manner in which the transfer to, from and between online and mobile gaming culture is occurring in a specific subset of global youth. The remaining focus identifies the major platforms used to enjoy esports, including broadcasting and smartphones. By analyzing these unexamined or less-discussed agendas, this book sheds light on the current debates on the growth of global esports culture.

This dossier presents the useful information on the gaming market in South Korea. In detail, it contains a variety of statistics on the industry overview, mobile and PC gaming, as well as main companies"