South Korea’s e-athletes
January 3rd, 2008 by Roo Reynolds
I got a tip off from Andy Piper via Twitter this morning, telling me to check out a Radio 4 documentary about South Korean gamers. (MP3)
I’ve long been fascinated by Seoul. There are worse places to turn your attention for a glimpse of tech future. 42% of the population maintain a blog and 40% inhabit virtual worlds of some sort of other. Games like Starcraft enjoy the status of ‘e-sports’ and the best gamers are not (just) geeks, they’re e-athletes.
From the discussion between two Starcraft e-sports commentators, in response to a question about whether Korean gamers are ‘nerds’.
I’m not going to say it’s cool, but there no stigma attached with succeeding. There’s no stigma attached to being intelligent.
Welcome, repressed Western geeks, to nirvana.
If you like foreign affairs documentaries you’ll be pleased to hear that there’s a Crossing Continents podcast, for which you can sign up here.
Photo credit: ‘Starcraft Gamer’ by one-11
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:20 pm
A most interesting and useful programme. Thanks for bringing my attention to this episode. I can use it in my teaching
January 6th, 2008 at 11:59 am
[...] can be dangerous (I would strongly advise you to listen to this BBC Radio 4 podcast on gaming in South Korea - brought to us by the fantastic speechification [...]
January 9th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
To be briefly (sort of) self-promotional *and* link to a bit of video (horrors!), Monocle sourced some footage from Korean TV about this kind of thing a while ago:
http://www.monocle.com/sections/culture/Web-Articles/E-sports-in-Korea/
Check the title sequences! And now a return to your usual programming …