Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Start off the New Year right...

...with some reading from Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, published by SAGE.

Dal Yong Jin
and I have an article published in the latest issue of Games and Culture (2008, Vol.3 Issue 1, pp. 38-58) titled, "Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry."

The table of contents along with access to the text can be found here at the Sage Journals Online website: http://gac.sagepub.com/content/vol3/issue1/

Alongside articles that take up games in the Asia-Pacific, our paper is a combination of political economy and ethnography from our research on Korean online games.

Abstract: In this article, the authors attempt to ascertain the factors involved in the swift growth of online games in the context of broader sociocultural elements. Through political economy and ethnographic analysis, they show that online games, like other forms of technology, are sociocultural products that have been historically constituted by certain forms of knowledge and social practice. First, they map out the forces driving their development by examining government policies and competition among online games companies in Korea. They then explore capital flow to investigate the major players in the market. Finally, they explore the sociocultural elements contributing to the diffusion of online games in the cultural milieu specific to Korea.

Key Words: ethnography • Korea • online games • policy • political economy

Happy New Year all, and happy reading! All accusations of geeking out apply.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

2 Comments:

Blogger aaron said...

Nice article, really helps to explain Korean gaming culture and its place in a wider social and economic context. Though I still can't get over how weird it is to see Starcraft matches on prime-time TV.

12:26 AM  
Blogger Florence Chee, PhD said...

Thanks Aaron!

Yeah, we just need to think of StarCraft matches in primetime, and the celebrity progamer to realize that 'gamer culture' comes in many forms that have implications for how we design, develop, market, etc games.

9:04 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home