The Development of the South Korean Esports Empire an Jiang

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The Development of the South Korean eSports Empire An Jiang

In 2018, Incheon Munhak Stadium—the prestigious venue for the 2002 FIFA World Cup and the 2014 Asian Games—was once again glammed up and flled to maximum capacity for a very different event: the League of Legends World Championship Finals. As star-studded Korean pop acts roamed the stage alongside augmented reality video game characters, the 70-pound Summoner’s Cup was revealed to the cheers of tens of thousands of attendees. Meanwhile, online, the livestream of the event at its peak garnered 200 million concurrent viewers—more than the Super Bowl.1 The players took to the arena in their team jerseys; however, for fans of ‘traditional’ sporting events, this is perhaps where the similarities end. The players then sat down in front of their top-of-the-line gaming computers, put on their headsets, and warmed up their hands in prepa- ration for the match ahead.

In recent years, electronic sports or ‘eSports’ for short, has been increasingly popular worldwide. Best defned as professional video game competitions, eSports became a billion-dollar revenue industry this year, with an astonishing viewership of 453.8 million people worldwide.2 eSports has begun to expand into other platforms such as mobile gaming and console gaming, but ‘traditional’ eSports in- volves two teams playing a co-operative PC game against each other in front of a live audience. While there are no athletics involved, eSports has the same high stakes and competitive edge that traditional sports have. Currently, South Korea dominates this PC gaming scene, winning many prestigious championships across a range of game titles. ‘Nerf South Korea(ns)’ is an oft-quoted mantra on West- ern eSports discussion boards for popular titles such as League of Legends (Riot Games 2009) and Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016); ‘nerf’ refers to making a particular element of a game (generally a character or ability) weaker or less effective in order to balance it. Such video game jargon is deployed to accentuate the systematic manner in which Korean teams repeatedly beat other teams. Here, I examine the socio-political reasons behind South Korean success in the realm of computer games by tracing a history of eSports in the nation. South Korean

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eSports domination is an intersection of several strands of ideologies, nationalisms and identities. It is at once a reclamation of sportive masculinity—a challenge to the Orientalist conception of the effeminate or desexualised, physically inferior Asian male; as well as a unique blend of technological and economic nationalism shaped by experiences of Japanese invasion and US cultural imperialism.

Recognising eSports as Sport

There is ongoing debate as to whether eSports should be considered a ‘real sport’ and have the same access to resources and funding. To those who wish to preserve the sanctity of traditional sports, gaming appears to lack the physical exertion of dunking a basketball or tackling an opponent. But to play games at a professional level requires many physical skills—players must have good hand-eye coordination and quick refexes as well as superb dexterity and agility in order to react to the fast pace of the game and perform many strategic ac- tions per minute in response. A sportive ‘spirit’ is also central to the professional competitive setting, as pro-gamers must engender a dedication to skill-training and improvement, display leadership and communication skills when playing on a team, and treat their rivals with respect and dignity.

In terms of the professionalisation of gaming, eSports also shares many of the same components of traditional sports—that is, of ‘players, teams, managers, leagues, competitions, marquee events, endorsement deals, player transfer fees, college scholarships, and a dark side with match fxing, doping, and gender-re- lated disputes’.3 Recently, eSports was introduced as a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia, and will be a medalled sport in the 2022 Games—this could possibly pave the way for entry into the Olympics by 2024, which would be a major step towards the recognition of its status as a real sport.4 eSports operates with a fexibility and permeability that differs from traditional sports. In many ways, it is much more participatory—eSports fans often play the game themselves as well as watching professionals play. In playing the game, they also give feedback to its makers about elements they think should be changed, such as nerfs and buffs (buffs being the opposite of nerfs, making an element of the game stronger for balance) as well as suggestions for new things to be added. As such, eSports is unique in that ‘consumers can concurrently play, watch and participate in institutional governance’.5 While basketball fans cannot change the rules of basketball, eSports fans play a huge role in the development of the game as well as the professional gaming scene.

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The way that the internet has changed the nature of communication and inter- action is particularly demonstrated by the eSports industry. In an increasingly networked online world, eSports audiences can interact directly with their favou- rite players via chat messages when they livestream gameplay, as well as other fans from around the globe instantaneously on video sharing platforms such as Twitch and YouTube. Twitch, the forerunner for video game streaming, was the fourth largest internet traffc producer in 2014, behind only household conglomer- ate names like Netfix, Google and Apple.6 While the average age of an American TV viewer is 54 years, the average age of a Twitch viewer is 21 years—it is clear that game spectatorship is an emergent market with a young consumer base very much in touch with cutting-edge technologies.7 Indeed, the video game industry has already surpassed the flm and music industries in gross revenue, becoming the number one consumer-entertainment industry globally.8 In South Korea, the game industry generates more export revenue than every other cultural media industry combined—as early as 2006, online games alone accounted for 89 percent of the total volume of exports.9 The exponential growth of this industry is an immensely fertile ground for research, as statistics have proven there to be an unceasing interest in and market base for gaming and game spectatorship.

Behind South Korea’s eSports Success

South Korea boasts the fastest average internet connection speed in the world, as well as the longest history of pro-gaming infrastructures, which have developed over the last two decades—long before ‘eSports’ as a term was even coined in the West.10 There is also a rich culture of homosocial gaming, with an estimated 25,000 PC bangs (internet gaming cafés) in major cities, a popular past time for young men who gather together after school to game on high-end PCs for a small hourly fee.11 While women also play eSports titles, their participation—even at the casual level of gaming in PC bangs—is held back by gatekeeping structures that have construed gaming and by exten- sion the game industry, game content and the culture of gaming as masculine. ‘eSports player’ as a future profession is seen as both desirable and viable, ranking eighth in an education ministry survey for primary school students in 2017, above even ‘scientist’.12 League of Legends, currently the most popular PC game in the world, broke records at the 2018 World Championships with 78.5 million unique viewers. In the professional League scene South Korean players are highly sought after, with every team (regardless of geographical ba- sis) having had at least one Korean player on their roster. The only teams that have maintained complete ethnic homogeneity are the South Korean teams

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themselves, who have never recruited players from outside of their home- land.13 Yet, South Korea’s internet gaming culture did not arise organically—it was the product of many institutional factors.

Firstly, the specifc privileging of computer gaming is due largely to the ban on Japanese products in South Korea up until late 1998, meaning popular gaming consoles produced by Japanese companies such as Nintendo and Sony were not able to penetrate the Korean market despite fnding huge success elsewhere in the world, especially in the US.14 The ban was instated as a ‘balancing act’ to rejuvenate a sense of Korean identity by eliminating Japanese infuence, which had stifed the country from 1910–45 under its colonial rule. It was within this context of national resistance to imperialism and Japanese soft power that PC gaming took off in Korea with no competitors.

The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 inadvertently helped the development of the game industry. Of three countries to receive stand-by credit from the Interna- tional Monetary Fund, South Korea received the largest amount—$US 21 billion. On top of this were added funds from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other countries, totalling another $US 24 billion. This set the country at a signifcant advantage compared to other developing nations and boosted economic development.15

Being a new democracy under provisional international funding, it was almost inevitable that Korea underwent further (neo)liberalisation. Supervised by its international sponsors and driven by a desire to differentiate itself from communist North Korea, South Korea quickly delved into American-style free market capitalism. Innovations in the IT sector, in particular, have been heralded as the saviour of the economy.16 Meanwhile, the implementation of a nationwide broadband policy provided the technological infrastructure for further developments and catalysed more innovations in technology.

As Florence Chee recounts, ‘economic catastrophe in the established realm of big business gave rise to a slough of new entrepreneurial activity by some business savvy individuals’, leading to start-up projects like game development, as well as PC bangs that took advantage of the computer boom.17 An unstable job market led to daring ventures by an entrepreneurial class that experimented with new technologies, as well as producing a consumer base for these technologies. PC gaming became a popular means of stress relief in a climate of social, economic, and political uncertainty.

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The Importance of StarCraft in eSports Development

The development of gaming and eSports in South Korea owes a great debt to Blizzard Entertainment’s 1998 hit StarCraft: Brood War. StarCraft is a real-time strategy game in which the player controls one of three distinct alien races to fortify a base and control militaries to conquer opponents. In 2007, 4.5 of the 9.5 million total copies of the game were sold in Korea alone.18 There are several theses for why this game was so popular in Korea. The frst and most obvious factor is the above-mentioned infrastructural conditions for its success: StarCraft arrived at a time just before the end of the Japanese product ban, and just after the development of a rapid national broadband network, in the midst of a cre- ative IT boom.

The game has also been seen as culturally tasteful by Koreans. Daniel Lee, for- mer coach of a famous StarCraft eSports team, eSTRO, believes that the game itself is ‘near perfect’, ‘imbued with a profound, complex logic, like chess’. He points out that the game’s three races are perfectly balanced so that no one race has an advantage over the others, which he believes ‘speaks to the Korean idea of taegeuk, also known as yin-yang, which is symbolized in the blue and red swirl on the South Korean fag’.19 In interviews with young Korean gamers, Jin Dal Yong fnds a similar sentiment—StarCraft is considered ‘Korean online gaming’ even though it is not Korean but American in origin.20 Blizzard itself was surprised at the large Korean market for the game, and released StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty in 2010, with a localised version incorporating new elements meant to appeal to Korean gamers.21 Recently, other Blizzard games have also been met with commercial success in South Korea, notably World of Warcraft (2004), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and Heroes of the Storm (2015). Blizzard’s 2016 team-based, frst-person shooter (FPS) game Overwatch features a nineteen-year-old Korean StarCraft eSports celebrity, code name D.Va, who also pilots a robot for the Korean Army in its main cast of play- able characters. In 2018, Blizzard released a new map for the game set in future Busan, paying homage to its Buddhist temples and PC bangs—Korean culture both old and new. Overwatch has become one of the most-played games in Korea, despite the traditional preference for MMORPG over FPS games.

StarCraft, according to some, also teaches one how to be a good capitalist in an increasingly neoliberal society. The University of Florida offered a class called ‘21st Century Skills in StarCraft’ in 2010, and New York University still currently offers an ‘Intro to StarCraft’ class which not only aims to teach students how to

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think strategically in the game, but in the real world too. Starcnomics, published in 2000, is a Korean academic business book linking StarCraft gameplay to the real-life mechanisms of the business world.22 As Park Sang-u of Yonsei University writes in his 2005 study When Games Talk to You: ‘the principle of “maximum profts from minimum capital and labor” is perfectly realized in StarCraft. Just as capitalism turns out to be the most suitable regime in history so far, real-time strategy games like StarCraft dominate the game market’.23

Most surprisingly, StarCraft also has direct links to the Korean military. This is alluded to in the Overwatch character D.Va, but in real life too eSports celebrities have been recruited by the military. When a top player of the Pro League, Lim Yo-hwan, better known as his gamer tag SlayerS_BoxeR, had to serve his mandatory military service in 2006, he was drafted into the Korean Air Force. Following from that, a special team was created in the Pro League, sponsored by the military as a means to recruit young, computer-savvy and strategically- inclined (male) minds.24 Video games, especially of the FPS and strategy genres, have traditionally been a part of what scholars have described as ‘militainment’— entertainment which feeds into the casualisation of war by recruiting audiences (in this case gamers) and making them active participants who experience war vicariously.25 In a highly militarised nation like South Korea, where men are literally conscripted in a systematic and mandatory fashion, the seemingly innocuous activity of playing competitive video games becomes deeply embedded in discourses of nationalism, masculinity and militarism.

As South Korean StarCraft players dominated the international professional gaming scene at the turn of the century, the increased presence of Koreans on the world stage garnered much attention and nationalist pride. The Korean eSports Associa- tion was founded in 1999, and further legitimised professional gaming by certifying players, providing rankings and arranging events.26 The birth of a regulatory body began a cycle whereby the more competitions and tournaments Koreans won, the more investors became interested in eSports and sought to legitimise gaming as a profession. The more sponsors and viewers there were, the more lucrative eSports became as an industry. The World Cyber Games, an eSports equivalent of the Olympics, was established in Korea in 2000 with the sponsorship of the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Information and Communications and the Samsung Group.27 StarCraft was not only instrumental for the development of eSports infrastructure in South Korea but also helped to champion a certain neoliberal masculinity within the culture of professional gaming—a highly competitive environment home to nationalist sentiments, capitalist endeavours and militant values.

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eSports Nationalism and Neoliberal Masculinity

Considering eSports as sport places it in an even longer history of nationalism. Many studies have analysed the link between nation-building in South Korea and the development of sports, fnding that modern sporting culture in the country arises from a ‘social Darwinian belief in the need to ensure national survival in the future after the humiliations of colonization and the traumas of civil war’.28 29

Nationalism in South Korea developed as a set of resistances to outside interference, from both the Western capitalist intrusion and the Japanese political interference, and as such has a ‘resistant, defensive and exclusive position’.30 Threatened with the extinction of its national identity under 35 years of Jap- anese occupation, sports became vital in the Korean imaginary as a means by which the nation could ‘build up physical prowess and public morale[…] in order to remedy the damage and fght back’.31 Thus, physical education (PE) in schools (compulsory even in university) after the Korean War was similar to military training—the replacement of PE terms with military terms and the fact that the PE instructors in schools were also military personnel is especially telling: sport was construed as a way to strengthen defences against North Korean attacks.32 This is also why South Korea has held many major sporting events in its modern history. Park suggests that hosting and participating in high-profle international sports competitions derives from the desire to offer national communities a sense of identity or character, as such events are ‘pri- marily concerned with the production and, often emotional, consumption of national differences’.33 South Korea has hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, the 2018 Winter Olympics, the 2002 FIFA World Cup—reluctantly co-hosted with Japan—and the Asian Games in 1986, 2002 and 2014. Analysing the nationalist fervour that accompanied the soccer match that determined the bronze medal winner in the London 2012 Olympics between Korea and Japan, Ok and Park write that the match ‘was an outlet for the nationalist resentment that still exists’.34 They argue that ‘[w]rath and the feeling of being victimised […] were sublimated and strengthened performances on football felds’, which ultimately led to a Korean victory.35

The development of a competitive, sportive, and indeed militant national identity also ties into global constructions of masculinity. Winning high-stakes competitions does not only bolster nationalist sentiments; it also illuminates Korean men’s participation in dominant discourses of masculinity, proving false the popular colonial, Orientalist mindset of the West that describes the supposed physical

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inferiority of Asian men. The legitimation of eSports as sport, then, can also be interpreted as the national desire to not only take part in, but contribute to the construction of a kind of elite masculinity generally only afforded to gold medal world athletes. eSports players inhabit a space which gaming scholar Gerald Voorhees has termed ‘neoliberal masculinity’, characterised by ‘technological mastery, economic rationality, and the ennobling of violence’.36 He argues that:

‘Approached with a sporting mentality, digital gaming exemplifes the constant and ubiquitous cost-beneft analysis demanded by neoliberal rationality. Play for the sake of play is displaced by the calculative economization of action. E-sports also stage the spectacle of serious and consequential competition through games, bringing together often antagonistic notions of masculinity centred on technological mastery and intel- ligence, on the one hand, and physical mastery and violence, on the other hand, with childish play.’37

Even though 46 percent of gamers are women, they comprise hardly 5 percent of the professional scene—eSports falls short of the hopes of a level playing feld for both men and women.38 Although masculinity in gaming is ‘stripped of its traditional connection to the body, [it] has been redefned according to intellectual patterns of dominance and toxicity that continue to intersect with a player’s physical form’.39 Exceptional female gamers who have managed to break through the systemic constraints that bar women from gaming (both casually and professionally) in the frst place are still subject to criticisms about their appearance and personality—something that male gamers experience far less often.40 When it was revealed that a top-ranked Korean Overwatch player with the username Geguri was a seventeen-year-old girl, she immedi- ately became the target of toxic comments, and was asked to prove that she wasn’t cheating with an aimbot. Geguri had to stream herself with her hands visible in order to prove that it was indeed her playing the game. She later became the frst woman to join an Overwatch League (OWL) team, recruited by the Shanghai Dragons, the only Chinese team in the 2018 League, who made eSports history by losing 42 games in a row. Originally an all-Chinese team, the Dragons currently only has one Chinese player on their roster, having been rebuilt in late October 2018 when six Korean members were recruited to replace the underperforming Chinese team amidst scandals involving bribery, corruption and overworked players. Many see this as another case of Kore- an ‘takeover’ in eSports, which had previously predominantly been limited to Western teams—the teams London Spitfre and New York Excelsior, for exam- ple, are both all-Korean in composition.

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Western Responses to Asian Gaming Domination: Debunking techno-Orientalist myths

Koreans currently dominate the professional gaming scene for every Blizzard Entertainment game (the StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo and Overwatch franchis- es) as well as Riot Games’ League of Legends. Although ostensibly meant as a joke, the idea of ‘nerfng South Korea(ns)’, or deliberately handicapping them for balancing purposes, coincides with a techno-Orientalist agenda. This agenda eliminates the humanity of the Asian gamer, making them out to be something like a mechanism of the game, a part that can and should be tweaked and altered—and necessarily made weaker—by a Western company (both Riot and Blizzard are US-based). Analysing Western responses to Asian dominance in the fghting game genre, professor of philosophy Chris Goto-Jones traces an amusing argument about ‘Asian hands’:

‘the frst is a racialist position—Asian hands are allegedly more dextrous and agile than the hands of others; the second is a cultural and ideological position—because of the culture of training and play in Asia (especially in Japan and Korea), players from those countries allegedly develop superior skills. […] this pervasive idea of “Asian hands” reveals the “mystique” of “the inscrutable Orient”’.41

This concept of superior ‘Asian hands’ is, of course, a scientifcally baseless, racist trope used to diminish Asian success. When Asian players are ‘too’ good—as in, when they outplay Western gamers—there are always explanations that trace their success back to an essentialist myth of the ‘inscrutable’ Orient. Perhaps what is even more relevant to the eSports scene is how this myth has transformed with globalisation, new technologies and capitalism. Geopolitically, Asian nations, particularly more developed East Asian nations like South Korea and Japan, are of rising importance in the world economy. The myth of the exotic Orient has been reconfgured in light of the increased mainstreaming of Asian cultural products being consumed (Korean pop music, Japanese anime and games, Chinese art-house cinema, etc.), as well as the rising political and economic signifcance of these nations in global capitalism. The painting of the East as sensual, feminine and backwards has morphed into depictions of futuristic cyborg cities in Western science fction based on Tokyo and Shanghai, without losing the essential dehu- manising core of traditional Orientalism.

Overwatch players were surprised when Blizzard nerfed the character Zenyat- ta (some would argue unnecessarily). Zenyatta himself can be analysed along

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techno-Orientalist lines: not only is he a healer, a traditionally feminised role in games, he is also a Nepalese monk who is meant to be a spiritual guide of sorts—a classic Orientalist trope. Beyond this, he is also a robot, ftting into a neoliberal Orientalist agenda which attempts to mechanise and therefore inher- ently dehumanise Asian people. Usually nerfs only occur when there is a widely perceived and discussed imbalance in the game, but in this case, many saw the nerf as a direct response to a single Overwatch League player. This player is Bang Sung-hyeon, better known by his gamer tag JJoNaK, the 2018 MVP from New York Excelsior. On Blizzard’s offcial online discussion boards many threads openly complained about the nerf, with comments attributing it to JJoNaK’s skill at the character:

‘Nere: It’s because Jjonak has 80% winrate on Zen at top 500 level and they wanted to nerf him. Not even joking[…] A pretty sad scenario, but they just wanna shuffe the deck on OWL it seems. (“Why in god’s name did Blizzard touch Zen”)

CowsGoMoo: No. Because jjonak. They fnally nerfed him.

Val: Pro players tired of Jjonak getting secondary fre headshots every 5 seconds (“Who was asking for a Zenyatta nerf?”)

Kaawumba: It is mainly a nerf for JJonak and other pro Zenyattas (“I think Zen’s Nerf is unjustifed”)’.

That a nerf which applies to everyone was made necessary by a single professional player does not seem to be any exaggeration to many on the thread. Often the language in these online comments make no differentiation between JJoNaK himself and the character he plays, turning him into an element of the game in need of control and management.

On one hand, there is anxiety and frustration in the West about Korean eSports dominance, with many genuinely believing that South Koreans should be ‘nerfed’ to make the playing ground ‘fair’; on the other hand, South Korean (and now increasingly, Chinese) eSports players are also looked down upon precisely because they are so good. In an article entitled ‘Western Pro-Gamers Shouldn’t Want to be Like Koreans’, eSports reporter Duncan Shields insinuates that eSports practices in Korea are undesirable, even backwards, and that trying to emulate them would make ‘the lives of every pro player in the West a misery, by burning them out with too much practice, too much pressure and too little reward[…] I admire the

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dedication of Korean pros who will give up everything to win, but I don’t envy it or demand Western pros do likewise’.42

Korean gamers are characterised in Western media as deeply obsessive and practice-oriented, with a natural aptitude towards fast strategic thinking, their fast commands apparently expertly executed by ‘Asian hands’. In another online article about the success of Korean eSports teams, a commentator writes that Korean eSports players tend to livestream to mainly a Korean audience, ‘where they are just streaming to display their skill and not personality’, whereas popular North American and European streamers are ‘more known for their personality and entertainment, rather than pure skill alone’.43 Korean-American media studies professors Steve Choe and Se Young Kim also notice this trend of skewed representation in their analyses of Western coverage of Asian gamer deaths— extremely rare cases whereby young gamers die, generally in PC bangs or internet gaming cafes, from malnutrition or other health complications because they refuse to stop gaming for days on end:

‘the characterization of the Taiwanese player [who died gaming] overlaps with already existing Orientalist stereotypes of Asians males circulating in the West: immature, dis- affected, asexual, physically weak, socially inept, and defnitely not hip. Compared to the healthy body of the white gamer, the Asian player plays ostensibly in order to compensate for his physical impotence’.44

Video gaming, while portrayed as a fun pastime for the white gamer (even an eSports player, whose job is to game) becomes soulless labour when performed by an Asian person. Korean eSports dominance is made less impressive because the achievements of Korean players are dismissively attributed to their natural aptitude and work ethic, and even criticised as masochistic, obsessive labour. This refects the Orientalist ‘sick man of East Asia’ trope, as Korean men’s work is simultaneously pathologised and made out to be mechanical and unfeel- ing, thus undeserving of praise. Where in actual fact, Korean players only excel because there is a long history of support and infrastructure for professional gaming, built under the various forces of nationalism, neoliberal capitalism and sportive masculinity.

Conclusion: Nerfng South Korea? eSports is a source of national pride in South Korea, a booming industry drawing on both sportive and technological nationalisms, and backed by infrastructures

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and social conditions which continue to promote its growth. Western discomfort with such an Asian-dominated competitive global scene is often expressed in techno-Orientalist constructions of the Asian gamer as something more machine than human, more skill than personality. Take note, however: the dominance of South Korea in the eSports arena is due to a complex interplay of social, political and economic factors with the right historical conditions, such as the Asian Financial Crisis and the popularity of StarCraft. These circumstances have led to a highly developed professional infrastructure that offers support for and incen- tivises young eSports players. As such, it is not ‘nerf South Korea’ that we should be chanting, but ‘buff the rest of the world’—starting with the recognition of PC gaming as a legitimate sport and potential career path.

1 Aaron Mickunas, ‘How Does League’s World Cup Compare to the Superbowl?’, Dot Esports, 2019, accessed 5 July 2019, https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/news/league-of-legends-vs-superbowl-viewer-numbers. 2 https://newzoo.com/insights/trend-reports/newzoo-global-esports-market-report-2019-light-version/ ‘Newzoo | Games, Esports, And Mobile Market Research And Data’, Newzoo, 2019, accessed 10 November 2018, https://newzoo.com/. 3 Anthony D. Pizzo et al., ‘ESport vs. Sport: A Comparison of Spectator Motives’, Sport Marketing Quarterly 27, no. 2 (June 2018), 108. 4 Haiwing Yu, ‘Game On: The Rise of the eSports Middle Kingdom’, Media Industries 5, no. 1 (2018): 89. 5 Yuri Seo and Sang-Uk Jung, ‘Beyond Solitary Play in Computer Games: The Social Practices of ESports’, Journal of Consumer Culture 16, no. 3 (Nov. 2016), 637. 6 Katherine E. Hollist, ‘Time to Be Grown-Ups about Video Gaming: The Rising Esports Industry and the Need for Regulation’, Arizona Law Review 57, no. 3 (Sept. 2015), 840. 7 Andy Miah, Sport 2.0: Transforming Sports for a Digital World (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2017), 98. 8 Jason A. Engerman and Robert J. Hein, ‘ESports Gaming and You’, Educational Technology 57, no. 2 (2017), 62. 9 Dal Yong Jin, New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2016): 137; Peichi Chung and Toru Iwatani, ‘South Korea’, in Video Games Around the World, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2015), 506. 10 Cyrus Farivar and Vinton G. Cerf, The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 20. 11 Larissa Hjorth, Games and Gaming: An Introduction to New Media (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 12 Agence France-Presse, ‘From High School Drop-Out to Korean Gaming Superstar’, The Nation | Thai land, 2018, accessed 10 November 2018, http://www.nationthailand.com/sports/30350451. 13 Simone Ho, Nationalism in a Virtual World: A League of Legends Case Study. MA Thesis: Leiden University. (2017), 43.

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14 Farivar and Cerf, The Internet of Elsewhere, 18. 15 David Richardson, ‘Asian Financial Crisis – Parliament Of Australia’, Aph.Gov.Au, 1998, accessed 10 November, 2018, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamen tary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/CIB9798/98cib23#Korea 16 Chung and Iwatani, ‘South Korea’, 505. 17 Florence M. Chee, ‘A Game Industry Beyond Diversity: Systemic Barriers to Participation in South Korea’, Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming, Loyola University Chicago, Faculty Publications (2016), 163. 18 Sang-Bin Lee, ‘ (小) - 2 · .’ , no. 1, 2012 [Trans. Interpretation and translation of ‘A brief article regarding the localization of video games—centred around the fandom’s debate on the localization/ Korean adoption of Starcraft 2’, no. 1, 2012] 109. 19 Lee, quoted in Farivar and Cerf, The Internet of Elsewhere, 19. 20 Jin, Digital Hallyu 2.0, 136. 21 Chung and Iwatani, ‘South Korea’, 469. 22 Steve Choe and Se Young Kim, ‘Never Stop Playing: StarCraft and Asian Gamer Death’, Techno- Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, eds David S Roh et al., (Rutgers University Press, 2015), 120. 23 Cited in Farivar and Cerf, The Internet of Elsewhere, 19. 24 Ibid. 25 Roger Stahl, Militainment Inc: War, Media, and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 209. 26 Pizzo, Esport vs. Sport, 110. 27 Choe and Kim, ‘Never stop playing’, 117. 28 Ok 2007; Ha and Mangan 2010; Hong 2011; Chung, Hwang and Wong 2015; Tosa 2015. 29 Nam-Gil Ha and J. A. Mangan. ‘Ideology, Politics, Power: Korean Sport - Transformation, 1945-92’, International Journal of the History of Sport 19, no. 2/3 (2002), 223. 30 Gwang Ok and Kyongho Park, ‘Cultural Evolution and Ideology in Korean Soccer: Sport and National ism’, International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 3 (2007), 368. 31 Eunah Hong, ‘Elite Sport and Nation-Building in South Korea: South Korea as the Dark Horse in Global Elite Sport’, International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 7 (2011), 985. 32 Ibid., 981. 33 Kyoungho Park et al., ‘Hosting International Events and Promoting South Korean Identity Discourses: Continuities and Discontinuities’, International Journal of the History of Sport 33, no. 18 (2016), 2308. 34 Ok and Park, ‘Cultural Evolution and Ideology in Korean Soccer’, 367. 35 Ibid., 368. 36 Gerald Voorhees, ‘Neoliberal Masculinity: The Government of Play and Masculinity in E-Sports’, in Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play, edited by Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates, Indiana University Press (2015), 64. 37 Ibid.

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38 Sander Bosman, ‘Women Account for 46% of All Game Enthusiasts: Watching Game Video Content and Esports Has Changed How Women and Men Alike Engage with Games’, Newzoo, 2019, accessed 7 July 2019, https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/women-account-for-46-of-all-game-enthusiasts- watching-game-video-content-and-esports-has-changed-how-women-and-men-alike-engage-with- games/. 39 Lily Zhu, ‘Masculinity’s New Battle Arena in International e-Sports: The Games Begin’, Masculinities in Play, (Palgrave 2018), 231. 40 Amanda L. L. Cullen, ‘“I Play to Win!”: Geguri as a (Post)Feminist Icon in Esports’, Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 5 (2018), 949. 41 Chris Goto-Jones, ‘Is “Street Fighter” a Martial Art? Virtual Ninja Theory, Ideology, and the Intentional Self-Transformation of Fighting-Gamers’, Japan Review, no. 29 (2016), 184. 42 Duncan Shields et al., ‘Western Pro-Gamers Shouldn’t Want To Be Like Koreans | Dot Esports’, Dot Esports, 2014, accessed 10 November 2018, https://dotesports.com/league-of-legends/news/west ern-progamers-shouldnt-want-to-be-like-koreans-5759. 43 Jackie Shelton, ‘The Reasons Why The Korean Esports Teams Are So Successful’, Gamblingsites.Com, 2017, accessed 10 November 2018, https://www.gamblingsites.com/blog/korean-teams-dominat ed-competitive-scene-51873/. 44 Choe and Kim, ‘Never stop playing’, 114.