Why are all the stories about exhausted gamers from Asia?
Skip to content
My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
I’ve been wondering about that myself! I don’t understand. People seem to explaining it with numbers on how many people are connected, but aren’t we facing the same numbers here? I do, however, remember reading a piece that said that Southern Korea was really pushing their citizens into cyberworld communities to make cyber business grow (although I cannot remember the source). Is that it? So if the Scandinavian governments would put all their resources into booming the industry and basically force us to go online and play (OMG, that would be fun), would we be facing the same problems of addiction and death as China and South Korea do? I don’t see it happening. So what happened in Asia?
Clearly because Asians are more XXXhardcoreXXX.
Seriously, though, Asia has a lot of game centres. I’ve noticed in the West that arcades seem to be dying out. I don’t see that computer/console game centres taking their place. But in Asia, I remember visiting as a kid, and paying some money to play Nintendo for a few hours. Any game you wanted. As PCs became cheaper, PC gaming centres started popping up. Not everyone can afford to buy their own PC, but you can ‘rent’ one for a few hours and kill people in Counterstrike. Some game centres function as social hubs, even.
So there is that big gaming subculture there, which I have not seen as much in the West. I suppose that all those social ties, plus the fun of gameplay, will keep people playing when they should really quit.
They are all addicted :P Checkout http://www.starcraftvanilla.com/ they are a growing sc2 community.