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The worldview espoused in Apocalyptic AI pop science plays a role in massively multiplayer online games, as shown by the presence of transhumanist religious groups (such as the Order of Cosmic Engineers) in Second Life but also by the interest shown by that world’s inhabitants who frequently desire a permanent shift to life online even when they are not explicitly transhumanists. Virtual reality has become sacred space for many online gamers, who acquire powerful communities, meaning and purpose through their online activities. Such religiosity inclines many toward transhumanist goals of transcending the human condition, especially through the possibility of uploading consciousness into virtual reality.

A distinction can be made between virtual worlds for gaming and for socializing. This chapter focuses on virtual worlds for socializing, beginning with a history of how these emerged. It provides a framework for analyzing these worlds, beginning with individual roles and moving all the way to the structures of larger groups and their economies and forms of governance. It discusses several such worlds in detail, including Second Life and Activeworlds. It also describes a study which gauged the level of trust among long-term users of these worlds. The chapter asks why people describe virtual interpersonal relationships as less authentic or real than face-to-face interactions, as well as the relation between online and offline relationships and how virtual worlds make for relations that are different but no less powerful than offline ones.

This chapter examines the ownership patterns, market structure, and financing of the Korean online game industry. It maps out the forces driving its development by examining government policies and competition among online game companies. In particular, it addresses the major role that the government has played in the development of IT, which includes the online game sector. Finally, the chapter provides a historical account of how the online game industry contributed to the diffusion of online games in the socioeconomic milieu specific to Korea. It also sheds light on current debates of neoliberal transformation in the global video game industry and its culture.

This chapter examines the differences between the categories of online games and virtual worlds. It discusses the importance of this distinction, given the need to recognize that this area has its own distinct terminology. It presents a few examples to illustrate the demand for understanding and acceptance of gaming terminology, and the role that this terminology will play in the legal system in due course. These terms include farming, griefing, kill stealing, and wizards. Whilst online gaming is a mainstream form of entertainment, the legal system has yet to accept that this is so. Equally, the legal system has yet to accept that there can be disputes arising out of such interaction. It must do so, because once there has been recognition of the activity, there can be recognition of everything associated with it.

This chapter examines the structural transnationalization of the online game industry, recent trends of transnational corporations (TNCs), and their engagement in the online game industry to determine whether these trends confirm that TNCs play pivotal roles in the cultural market. To understand fully the nature of transnationalization, the focus is on capital flow, people and financing, and the ways in which the online game industry has developed its transnationalization process. The chapter also explores whether emerging online game firms, as part of the new cultural industry in non-Western countries, in particular Korea and China, have changed the traditional form of the global flow of cultural products and capital—from Western countries to non-Western countries—by blurring the dichotomy of the West and the East. In other words, it discusses whether the transnationalization of the online game industry has promoted a shift of traditional interpretations of cultural dominance by Western countries in the global market in the midst of globalization.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to examine the multiple causes of growth of the online game industry in Korea. First, it explains why and how the Korean government adopted new economic and cultural policies to develop the online game sector as a cutting-edge business and cultural icon. Second, it considers the role of Korean and foreign-based transnational corporations in the online game industry. Third, it explicates the nature of the relationship between online game systems and the broader structure of Korean society, examining the pattern of ownership and production in the game industries, and analyzing these patterns within the overall context of social and economic power relations. Finally, it articulates whether the apparently flourishing online game corporations in Korea will continue to thrive. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the development of eSports (electronic sport and the leagues that compete through networked games and related activities). It documents the history of eSports and discusses the ways in which eSports became a cultural phenomenon in the Korean context. Second, it investigates the role of eSports in the growth of the online game industry and professional game players. Finally, it discusses the reasons that cable and network broadcasters are invested in eSports by focusing on the convergence of telecommunications and broadcasting, which is one of the major issues of the digital economy and culture.

Using the Lineage games of NCsoft in conjunction with Korean online games as a case study, this chapter examines the globalization process of the local online game industry. It traces production dynamics to identify the conditions that have rendered a contra-flow in culture (i.e., cultural flow from non-Western countries to Western countries). It discusses the process by which a local culture is appropriated for the global audience in terms of hybridization in both content and marketing. The goal of the chapter is to understand the critical dialogue played by the global-local paradigm in “glocalizing” local culture for the global cultural market.

This chapter maps out the growth of locally based digital games. In the twenty-first century, the New Korean Wave has been expanding with the rapid growth of digital culture, in particular with online gaming. The rapid growth of the Korean digital game industry, including online gaming, and its export into the Western market have raised a fundamental question of whether digital culture has changed the nature of the Korean Wave, from a regionally focused intracultural flow to include a Western-focused contraflow. The chapter attempts to discuss the ways in which local online games, in particular massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), have advanced contraflow. In addition, it discusses a changing trend in the digital game sector, which has been occurring due to both the increasing role of China's game industries and the emergence of mobile gaming in the smartphone era. It also maps out the process by which Korean online games are appropriated for Western game users in a form of “glocalization”in both content and structure. Finally, the chapter articulates whether this new trend can diminish an asymmetrical cultural flow between the West and the East.

This chapter employs a political economy approach, particularly a Marxian analysis, on the issue of commodification in order to examine the working conditions of pro gamers as labor workers and their professional identities. The discussions cover several key issues: who these pro gamers are, how they became pro gamers, and what types of games they play. Exploring these characteristics provides a better understanding of pro gamers in Korea, particularly as a legitimate labor force in the realm of the new media. The chapter determines if the pro gamers’ world is full of existing labor issues, such as whether they experience exploitation as commodities or gendered environments. It maps out the commodification process of pro gamers as part of professional game teams owned by media, telecommunications, and other big corporations. The investigation leads to a discussion of whether professional gaming is a viable future for the youth in the digital economy.

This chapter considers several dimensions of China's Internet. It begins by examining other national models of Internet development. It then assesses the Chinese government's role in building and managing the network, introducing Internet service companies, and overseeing the growth of mainly private content providers. While the chapter considers issues of censorship and control in a way similar to earlier studies noted above, it also highlights the dilemma the government faces of larger economic benefit in the face of potential political challenges. It details major developments in e-commerce from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. The chapter also notes the evolving demographics of network users, and assesses how ‘netizen’ profiles shaped usage patterns. It concludes that despite a desire to control Internet content, the government was firm in its intent to see the network expand and become an important part of the Chinese economy and society.

This chapter considers online gaming from a perspective that deliberately avoids the more conventional perspectives established in game studies—perspectives that focus on the potential for new forms of sociality and community represented by online gaming. It develops an account from a phenomenological position on the technological dependence of all forms of community and continuities between online gaming sociality and real-world communities in their contradictory struggle to produce themselves. The conflict-centered gaming worlds are the best place to look for the characteristics and the possibilities of community given in the virtual spaces of online spatial simulations.

This chapter applies the ethical framework developed in Chapter 4 to a close reading of the ethics of three games: Bioshock, DEFCON, and World of Warcraft. These games are also used as illustrations of more general reflections on the ethics of single-player, multiplayer, and online game worlds. The analyses are not exhaustive, but serve as an illustration of how to analyze computer games from an ethical perspective.

This chapter discusses the concept of rules in video game spaces. It considers instances when players make or exploit the rules of a game. It also discusses how some game designers have embraced rule bending and offer what might appear to be a bug as a conscious playable feature of the game space. In massively multiplayer online titles, the clearly marked boundaries become negotiable within the game design. The surprises are still implemented via a rule system, but one that seems to have multiple layers at odds with each other.

This chapter discusses the popular genre of online computer games rooted in the “fantasy” genre (Tolkien in particular) and exemplified by World of Warcraft. His analysis, as we have seen, leads to a critique of Weber's theory of the “disenchantment of the world,” according to which religious belief increasingly evaporates as a viable option, so that enchantment is progressively relegated to the realm of fiction (the worlds of poetry, literature, television, and, more recently, computer games). Now that a massive epistemological shift has taken place from “religious belief” to “spiritual experience,” it is argued, this theory no longer holds: these computer games open up opportunities for spiritual engagement with fantasy fiction that go well beyond Coleridge's notion of a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Faunasphere was a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG)—a genre dominated by games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Unlike these games, however, Faunasphere did not have hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, of players. Whereas World of Warcraft has been running (at the time of this writing) for about ten years, and EverQuest for fourteen, Faunasphere was open to the public for less than two years. The game was ultimately closed because its developer, Big Fish Games, considered it to be “economically unsustainable.” This book tells the story of Faunasphere and its players and along the way shows how outliers like Faunasphere offer challenges to prior work that relies too heavily on narrow conceptions of just what the domain of “videogames” entails.

This chapter examines the different functions of the voice in contemporary video and computer games, paying special attention to multiple-player games, and looks at the prevalence of non-linguistic sounds such as screams and sighs when playing such games. It shows that the voice is part of the game audio or narrative system, as a function for character generation, and as a key element of the gameplay, and coexists with the voices of the players themselves. Hence, the informational and affective qualities of the voice affect individual players. The chapter also considers specific games that use the player’s voice as a means of interaction and its role in multiplayer online games.

This chapter discusses Korea’s shifting political economy in the post-International Monetary Fund era and its move toward an IT-driven economy. It examines the roles of the government and competition among telecommunications companies in developing broadband services, which served as a foundation for the growth of the online game industry, and determines the causes of the rapid growth of broadband services in the context of broader sociocultural factors. The chapter recognizes technology as a sociocultural product and explores elements contributing to the diffusion of broadband services in the context of the cultural environment in Korea. Furthermore, it discusses the significant role of the Korean people, as users, in the process of the rapid diffusion and growth of broadband services.