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SEOUL, South Korea — Top video game players in South Korea are household
names. Millions of people tune in to watch game competitions on television.
The largest Internet portal, Naver, has its own section covering the results.
Competitive video gaming is now taking off in places like the United States,
attracting thousands of people to major events. But in South Korea, more than
anywhere else, it has already oozed into mainstream culture. Couples going to
game clubs is about as common as couples going to the movies.
Time and again, South Korea has provided glimpses of technology-related
transformations before they expand globally, including widespread broadband
availability and smartphone adoption. The country has also led in
professional video game competitions, often called e-sports, creating
organized leagues, training well-financed professional teams and filling
giant stadiums with frenzied fans to cheer on their favorite players.
Such excitement was on display in Seoul on Sunday, when more than 40,000 fans
filled the outdoor soccer stadium used for the 2002 World Cup semifinal to
watch the world championship for League of Legends, one of the world’s most
popular games. On stage, two teams of five players sat in front of computers
wielding mouse and keyboard to control fantastical characters in a campaign
to destroy the opposing team’s base. Three huge screens displayed the action.
The clear favorite of the raucous crowd was Samsung White, a team of Koreans
that tore through the playoffs. The throng of fans erupted early on, when a
Samsung White player wielded a spear to kill a player from the Star Horn
Royal Club, a team of three Chinese players and two Koreans. Samsung White
went on to win the championship and $1 million in prize money.
“Pro gaming exists in its current form and size in large part thanks to the
people who made it possible in South Korea,” said Manuel Schenkhuizen, a
Dutch pro gamer. “Other countries took years to catch up and are to this
date trying to mimic some of their successes.”
The prowess of the country’s e-sports players is a point of national pride.
Recently there has even been hand-wringing about Samsung White’s not winning
dominantly enough in an earlier round of the championship tournament, when it
lost one of four games to Team SoloMid, a North American team.
Last week, people at one of the many Internet cafes here, known as a PC bang,
debated how the League of Legends tournament would conclude. One ninth
grader, Han Song-wook, said he had followed the rise of Samsung White for two
years, in part because of the team’s aggressive play and creative, bold
moves.
“Even back then I saw they had potential,” he said. “Their moves were
great.”
Though gamers and industry insiders have different theories about how
e-sports became so popular in South Korea, nearly all versions start in the
late 1990s.
At the time, in response to the Asian financial crisis, the South Korean
government focused on telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. By
2000, a vibrant community of gamers emerged, largely thanks to PC bangs that
used the new connections. The clubs acted as a sort of neighborhood
basketball court where gamers could test their skills.
The government also became involved, creating the Korean E-Sports Association
to manage e-sports. Cheap television stations took off as well, a result of
the new infrastructure, and it was only natural that one, then more, would
focus on e-sports.
“Fourteen years ago, you had a government that gave a thumbs-up to e-sports
— it was professionally organized, and it was on television, so it became a
mainstream thing,” said Jonathan Beales, an e-sports commentator. “The way
soccer is around the world.”
StarCraft, a game released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998, quickly became
a mainstay of South Korea’s professional gaming leagues. With investment and
organizational help from Blizzard itself, professional tournaments quickly
outgrew the cramped PC bangs, first moving to hotel ballrooms and eventually
stadiums. In 2004, the final of the StarCraft pro league attracted 100,000
fans to Gwangalli Beach in the southern beach city of Busan.
“That was the big dog — that really was when we knew, ‘Oh, my goodness,
this has gone to an entirely different level,’ ” said Paul Sams, Blizzard’
s chief operating officer.
The game clubs remain an important arena for gamers, though. On a recent
Thursday night in a residential area of Kangdong in southeastern Seoul, a PC
bang was filled with high-school students. They sat in plush chairs in front
of large-screen PCs, barking strategies or crying out in joy or frustration.
After gunning down a friend with an assault rifle in the game Sudden Attack,
Kang Mi-kyung, 15, said she was at the PC bang about five times a week.
“I love this game, though I think it’s too violent,” she said, adding that
she comes mostly to see friends, including some male friends she does not see
at her new high school.
Bae Ye-seong, 18, who stood at a computer bank watching his friends play out
a match of League of Legends, struggled to say why he played games.
“Playing League of Legends isn’t necessarily important for friendship,” he
said, “but it’s just a big part of our world.”
About a decade ago, companies began to see the promise in sponsoring e-sports
stars. Before long the companies, like Samsung, the giant technology company,
and CJ Games, one of Korea’s most successful game developers, were
sponsoring teams that lived in communal houses and trained 12 hours a day.
That professionalism has spread outside Korea, with sponsors putting together
training houses for gamers in recent years in the West. Still, few players
take the games as seriously as those in South Korea.
In part that may be because of the perks of stardom that surround top players
here. One of the players on CJ Entus, a team sponsored by CJ Games that came
in second in the League of Legends world championship in 2012, recalled how a
female fan followed him to competitions for two years taking photos. She
ultimately sent him an album of all the shots she had taken.
“That was nice,” said the blushing player, who goes by the on-screen handle
Shy.
Still, the life of an e-sports star is not all glamour. Players must practice
relentlessly, spending their days in front of a screen. While the coach of CJ
Entus, Kang Hyun-jong, said he tried to encourage players to enjoy
themselves, the real goal was clear.
“The best way for players to enjoy themselves is to know how to win,” he
said.
One of the most famous members of CJ Entus, Hong Min-gi, said he still
enjoyed playing the game, despite the commitment. In part, he said, it was
because he usually won.
“I still get motivated when I beat someone,” he said.
The cutthroat attitude no doubt helps South Korean teams in major
competitions. The country’s success at League of Legends has led several
Western teams, including the North American team Cloud9 and the European team
Fnatic, to visit to see how teams practice. Many foreign teams have also
tried to emulate the group living and training approach used in South Korea,
often without the desired results.
But the monomania of gamers here has also led to concerns about addiction and
the potential harm caused by spending too much time playing games.
Occasionally, news articles report on a gamer’s dying of exhaustion in a PC
bang after playing for days without rest. A law requires the clubs to force
children under 18 to leave after 10 p.m.
Jun Byung-hun, a South Korean National Assembly member and the head of the
country’s e-sports governance body, KeSPA, said there was still a lot of
ignorance from older generations about video gaming. He had pushed for
moderation in the drive to regulate gaming.
“In Korea, games are the barometer of the generation gap,” he said in an
interview. Parents view games as distractions from studying, he said, while
children see them as an important part of their social existence. Mr. Jun is
promoting new educational guidelines that encourage schools to warn students
about addiction, while also helping parents better understand gaming.
“The best way to avoid addiction is for families to play games together,”
he said.
Mr. Jun has also helped push through a number of initiatives to encourage
South Korean institutions to treat e-sports like real sports. Most recently
he helped convince Chung-Ang University, a top Korean college, to admit two
students based on their successes in e-sports.
Days before the League of Legends championship, in the hotel near the stadium
where Samsung White trained, Cho Se-hyoung, the team’s leader, said the
pressure he felt from the country’s rabid fan base was immense. He hinted
that at 20 years old, he was contemplating retirement.
Even after winning the championship on Sunday, Mr. Cho apologized for not
showing more creativity during the day’s event.
But talk of changing careers seemed more distant. He said the team had to get
back to work to prepare for future competitions.
Asked how he viewed himself, he said, “I’m a sports player.”
Correction: October 22, 2014
An article on Monday about competitive video gaming in South Korea misstated
the name of a top Korean college that recently admitted two students based on
their successes in e-sports. It is Chung-Ang University, not Chungnam
National University.